Ada Louise Comstock (1876-1973) was born in the prairie city of Moorhead, Minnesota, and from a young age, excelled in education. She graduated from her local high school at 15 and the next year began undergraduate studies at the University of Minnesota. After two years, she transferred to Smith College, a women’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts, graduating in 1897. After, she went to Columbia University for graduate work in English, History, and Education, and earned a master’s degree in 1899. She returned to the University of Minnesota to work as an instructor and was appointed the school’s first dean of women in 1907. In that role, she was instrumental in improving the quality of life for the women of the college, arguing persistently that a college was responsible for one’s physical and intellectual well-being, something she believed had not been offered equally to the men and women at the university. From 1921 to 1923, she served as president of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, now known as the American Association of University Women, and became known nationally as a pioneer in women’s education.
Faculty Biographical Files, Ada Comstock Papers
On October 20, 1923, Comstock was inaugurated as president of Radcliffe College. She led the school for 20 years, strengthening its academic programs and in 1943 persuading Harvard to accept classroom co-education. Prior to this, Radcliffe had been paying Harvard professors to repeat their lectures for women. President Comstock launched a nationwide admissions program for Radcliffe, improved student housing, constructed new classroom and dormitory buildings, and expanded the graduate program. She retired as president of the college in 1943 but continued to promote the Graduate Program and advocate for improvements in and expansion of women’s educational opportunities. After her retirement, Radcliffe named a new dormitory in her honor and called her “the chief architect of the greatness of this college.”
Radcliffe’s Comstock Hall was built in 1957 as the final wing of Moors Hall, at the northern edge of Radcliffe Quad. The school hired Maginnis, Walsh and Kennedy, the successor of Maginnis and Walsh who specialized in Neo-Gothic architecture and had designed many churches in Cambridge and the eastern United States. For Comstock Hall, the architect Eugene F. Kennedy Jr. employed Georgian Revival and Classical detailing to complement the Quad’s existing character. Radcliffe would soon after embrace Modernism with the Hilles Library, Currier House dormitories, and Faculty Housing on Linnaean Street, which complete Radcliffe Yard.
In addition to her roles in women’s education, Comstock served in many capacities with governmental and institutional groups. In 1929 she was the only woman named by President Herbert Hoover to the eleven-member Wickersham Commission, which was tasked with surveying the U.S. criminal justice system under Prohibition and making public policy recommendations. She also served as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and on the National Committee for Planned Parenthood.
A week after her retirement from Radcliffe in 1943, Comstock married Yale professor emeritus Wallace Notestein. The two had met in Minnesota decades before, but Comstock had focused on her academic career, as her father wished; neither had married in the intervening years. They never had children. Wallace Notestein died in 1969. Ada Comstock died four years later at her home in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age of 97.
Harris & Ewing, photographer, Library of Congress Catalog.
Ada Comstock continues to be honored for her dedication to expanding and improving women’s education. She is also remembered in numerous buildings on college and university campuses, including Comstock Hall at the University of Minnesota; Comstock House, aresidence hall at Smith College; and the featured Comstock Hall in Radcliffe Quad, which is now a part of Pforzheimer House, one of Harvard’s twelve undergraduate residential houses. Her childhood home in Moorhead, Minnesota, is maintained by the Minnesota Historical Society.
