Born on November 28, 1853, in Providence, Rhode Island, Helen Magill grew up in a Quaker family that valued education for women as well as men. In 1859 the family moved to Boston, where Helen was enrolled as the only female student in the Boston Public Latin School, of which her father was a sub-master. In 1873 she was a member of the first class to graduate from Swarthmore College, of which her father was then president. She continued studies in the classics at Swarthmore and then at Boston University, where her dissertation on Greek drama won her a Ph.D. in 1877, the first to be awarded to a woman in the United States. From 1877 to 1881 she studied at Cambridge University, placing third in her tripos (honors examinations) at Newnham College in the latter year.
After a year as principal of a private school in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, she was selected in 1883 to organize Howard Collegiate Institute in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts. She remained director of Howard until 1887, when she resigned in a dispute with the trustees. She then taught briefly at Evelyn College, a short-lived women╒s annex to Princeton University. Illness clouded the next few years, during which she taught for a time in the high school in Brooklyn, New York. In September 1890 she married Andrew D. White, the retired president of Cornell University and a college classmate of her father╒s, whom she had first met at a meeting of the American Social Science Association in 1887. She accompanied him to his diplomatic posts in St. Petersburg in 1892╨1894 and Berlin in 1897╨1903. She took no part in public or educational affairs thereafter except, in 1913, to publicly oppose woman suffrage. She died in Kittery Point, Maine, on October 28, 1944.
