Mary Rippon and the Life She Could Not Show

There is an open-air theater on the University of Colorado Boulder campus named Mary Rippon Theatre. It was dedicated in nineteen thirty-nine, thirty years after the woman it honored had left the faculty. By then the story of her life, the full story, had already begun to quietly circulate among those who knew where to look.

Mary Rippon joined the CU Boulder faculty in eighteen seventy-eight. She was the first woman professor at the university, and by most scholarly accounts the first female professor at any university west of the Mississippi. She taught German. She was good at it. She kept the job for more than two decades. She built a career in a field and an era that did not easily allow women to do so.

What she could not show was this: in eighteen eighty-nine she gave birth to a daughter, Miriam, by a former student named Will Housel, who was twelve years her junior. They had been secretly married. Rippon hid the pregnancy, hid the marriage, hid the child. She sent the child to live with relatives. She continued teaching. To have been known as a married woman with a child would have been, by the customs and employment rules of the time, a reason to dismiss her. So she kept it hidden for decades.

The outdoor theater on campus was dedicated to her in nineteen thirty-nine because by then she was remembered as a pioneer and a teacher of rare quality, which she was. It was named for a woman whose official biography left out the most intimate and complicated parts of her actual life.

The Boulder Reporting Lab and Colorado Public Radio investigated the full story in recent years. The University of Colorado has since acknowledged it. Miriam Housel existed. The marriage existed. The love story and the professional calculation that concealed it were both real.