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Anna J. Harrison, First Female ACS President

Anna Harrison was a remarkable woman for her time.  She was the first woman to be elected president of the 150,000-member American Chemical Society in 1978 and the fourth woman elected to become president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She served in that capacity from 1983 to 1984.  In addition to her teaching and writing, Harrison served on the National Science Board from 1972 to 1978.

 

Harrison was born December 23, 1912 on a Missouri farm in Benton City, the daughter of Albert and Mary (Jones) Harrison. She attended a one-room rural school where she later taught for two years after her graduation from the University of Missouri in 1933. She went on to receive her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Missouri in 1940.  She started her career in college chemistry teaching at H. Sophie Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1940. 

  

Harrison

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo courtesy of

Mount Holyoke College

 

 

She joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke College as an assistant professor in 1945, rose to professor in 1950, and headed the Department of Chemistry from 1960 to 1966. She became the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Chemistry in 1976 and held that post until she retired in 1979.

Among her numerous awards were two awards for teaching from the American Chemical Society: the Chemical Education Award in 1982 and the James Flack Norris Award for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching of Chemistry, Northeastern Section, in 1977.  She also received 20 honorary degrees.

She was active throughout her life in public service and in scientific societies. One of her chief professional interests was the impact of science on society, and a major goal of her work was providing information that voters and legislators could use to form effective judgments on scientific and technical issues.

Her interest in science education for all caused her to attend a National Science Teachers Association conference.  There she met Alleen Johnson, a retired Summit High School chemistry teacher.  When Ms. Johnson learned that Dr. Harrison’s hotel reservation was out of town, she offered to have her room with her, this before she realized that Dr. Harrison was the ACS President. Ms. Johnson said Anna had a pleasing personality.  Dr. Harrison was also voted by the class of 1968 of Mount Holyoke as "one of the people who has had the greatest impact on my life".

Among her publications is a textbook, Chemistry: A Search to Understand (1989), written with the collaboration of Edwin Weaver, also at Mount Holyoke, that was intended to serve the needs of students whom she characterized as "intellectually curious but not professionally driven".

Dr. Harrison died of a stroke on August 8, 1998.

In the spring of 2001, the Connecticut Valley Local Section of the American Chemical Society established the Anna J. Harrison Awards to honor the memory of Dr. Anna Jane Harrison.  There are two awards that were first awarded in the spring of 2003. The first is a high school chemistry student award of $1,000 to be given to the female high school student who is the top performer in the Connecticut Valley Local Section’s Chemistry Olympiad. The second is a college-level award of $1,000 to be presented to a woman who has carried out a research project in chemistry as part of her undergraduate degree program.   It is tied to the Undergraduate Research Symposium sponsored by the ACS Connecticut Valley Local Section each spring.  These awards are funded by a generous gift from Griffith and Joan Garland to endow the award fund.  Joan was a student of Dr. Harrison when attending Mount Holyoke during the early 1950s.

-Jeannette Brown, WCC Historian

The information for this article comes from the following sources:

Mount Holyoke College. Office of Communications. (12 August 1998). Anna Jane Harrison, chemical education leader and first woman president of the American Chemical Society, dies at 85 [Press release].  Retrieved from http://www.mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/press/releases/annaharrison.shtml.

Toxipedia. http://www.toxipedia.com (accessed December 2008).

ACS Connecticut Valley Section Site. http://membership.acs.org/c/connval/default.htm (accessed December 2008).