Lorine Pruette
Lorine Livingston Pruette (November 3, 1896 – December 20, 1976) was an American
Early life
Lorine Pruette was born in Millersburg, Tennessee, to college-educated parents. Her mother and her maternal grandmother were among the first generation of college-educated women in the United States.[1] Pruette's mother's dreams of a career in writing were never fulfilled; she placed enormous pressure on Pruette to fulfill the life she always wanted.
Pruette was exceedingly bright, but regarded herself as a social outcast throughout her childhood and adolescence and did not date in high school. In college, she joined a sorority, acted in plays, edited the college newspaper, and played the violin in the orchestra.[2] Pruette graduated in 1918 from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry and went on to Worcester College in Massachusetts (now, Worcester State University), where she began her master's degree.
Political views and career
Mary Trigg, in her dissertation entitled Four American Feminists, 1910–1940: Inez Haynes Irwin, Mary Ritter Beard, Doris Stevens, and Lorine Pruette, explains that unlike many other twentieth century feminists, Pruette did not limit her vision to women's suffrage but worked toward a broad agenda of "reshaping marriage, the family, and society." Throughout her career, Pruette addressed issues such as "the need for married women to achieve fulfilling lives in both public and private spheres, the weakness of men and the strength of women, [and] the importance of the parent-child relationship".[3] Pruette held strong anti-men views, which were products of a childhood overshadowed by her mother's oppression and unhappiness; Pruette wrote that by the age of nine she firmly believed that "all the evils of the world came from these intolerable males".[4]
Pruette was initially determined not to wed or bear children. However, her strong anti-men viewpoint changed during her graduate work under psychologist
Pruette lived through both world wars and associated feminism with
Later years
Despite the setbacks and difficulties of old age, Pruette continued to work as long as she could, and to address the social problem of aging. But despite being mentally sound, Pruette's agnostic beliefs caused her some spiritual grief as she contemplated what was to become of her soul after her death, and within her last few years of life she is recorded as waking up in a feverish sweat numerous times yelling out, "Immortality is what I want!".[8] She died on December 20, 1976, less than seven weeks after her 80th birthday.
Feminist legacy
Lorine Pruette was childless by choice but in her later years she regretted that she had no one to "carry on her 'bit of
References
Sources
- "Pruette, Lorine, B. 1896. Papers, 1915–1974: A Finding Aid." OASIS Online Archival Search Information System; Office for Information Systems; Harvard University Library. Web. February 6, 2012. <https://web.archive.org/web/20100718115805/http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~sch00863>.
- Showalter, Elaine. "These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties." Google Books. Web. February 2, 2012. <https://books.google.com/books?id=ckHwIV8edTYC>.
- Trigg, Mary Kathleen. Four American Feminists, 1910–1940: Inez Haynes Irwin, Mary Ritter Beard, Doris Stevens, and Lorine Pruette. Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Information Service, 1989. Print.