JESSICA GARRETSON was born on August 19, 1871 to Congregational minister Rev. Ferdinand VanDevere

Garretson and Helen Philbrick Garretson. When she was 12, the family moved from New York where her father

was rector of Grace Chapel on West 22nd Street, to Franconia, New Hampshire where she attended Dow Acade-

my and the Cambridge Latin School before entering Barnard College, from which she received her A.B. in 1893,

as a member of the first graduating class of the new women’s college. After she applied to law school at Columbia

University - and was formally refused on the grounds that the Law School did not admit women - she earned her

LL.B from New York University School of Law in 1898.

A well-known suffragette and President of the New York Equal Franchise Society which advocated women’s

suffrage, she became an advocate of careers for women. Although in 1912 she described herself as an “orthodox

Socialist”, her views shifted and she was later known as a political “liberal”.

 

In 1916 she founded the Lennox School, a primary school to prepare girls to enter The Finch School, a secondary

school for girls, later known as Finch Junior College. It was only after 1953 that it became Finch College. Having

enacted her conviction that women should be prepared for careers, she envisioned a world in which women would

work until they married, at about age 25, bear and rear children for about fifteen years - before resuming paid

employment at about age 40 - and working for another thirty years.

Cosgrave was a founding member of the Colony Club and the author of such books as Mothers and Daughters,

Psychology of Youth, and Flower and Kitchen Gardens. She was married to - and divorced from - James Wells

Finch with whom she had a daughter, Elsie Finch McKeogh, a New York literary agent. In 1913 she married John

O’Hara Cosgrave, an editor of the New York World, who died in 1947.

 

Jessica Garretson Finch Cosgrave was awarded a Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa, by New York Uni-

versity in June 1949. She died at her home in Manhattan on October 31, 1949, at age 78.