Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)

Anna C. Brackett was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the eldest of five children of Samuel Brackett, a dry goods merchant, and his wife Caroline. Anna attended private and public schools in Boston and Somerville and Abbot Academy, a boarding school for girls in Andover. In 1856, she graduated from the State Normal School in Framingham, the first state-supported school dedicated to training teachers in the USA, now known as Framingham State University. She became a teacher in East Brookfield, and then an assistant principal in Framingham. In 1861, at the start of the Civil War, Anna was forced to leave her position as a vice principal in South Carolina, and she moved to St. Louis, where she later published the first English translation of several works by European philosophers. In 1863, she was appointed principal of the St. Louis Normal School (now Harris-Stowe State College), making her the first female principal of a secondary school in the USA. During her tenure, Anna worked to ensure that female students had access to higher education and liberal studies. In 1872, she moved to New York City with her domestic partner, Ida M. Eliot, the daughter of Rep. Thomas D. Eliot of Massachusetts, and the couple adopted two daughters. Anna founded The Brackett School for Girls and hired notable female teachers such as Mary Mitchell Birchall, the first woman to earn a bachelor's degree in New England.

In 1874, Anna published The Education of American Girls, a collection of essays in response to arguments against the co-education of males and females in the American education system.

Anna also wrote extensively on education and philosophy and published her writings in well-known periodicals such as Harper's Magazine. She also served as an editor of The New England Journal of Education. Anna retired from teaching in 1894. and a biography of her was published after her death in 1911, entitled Anna C. Brackett, In Memoriam, An Appreciation (1915). Among Anna's students at The Brackett School was Ruth Sawyer, who remembered her teacher fondly in her 1937 Newbery Award-winning semi-autobiographical novel called Roller Skates.