Grace Winchester Minns (15th Dec.1858 - Sept 1, 1944), executive secretary, social worker, and women’s rights activist, was born in San Francisco, California, to George W. Minns, a lawyer and educator and his wife, Elizabeth Folsom (Woodward) Minns. Grace’s maternal grandfather, William Winchester, served in the American Revolutionary Army at the age of 15. Her father’s family descended from John Wilson (1588-1667) the first Puritan minister of the First Church of Boston. George Minns graduated Harvard College (1836) and Harvard Law School (1840) and practiced law in Boston with the noted jurist Rufus Choate.

George and Elizabeth left Boston for California around 1855, where he opened a teacher training school, the Minns Evening Normal School, in 1857. In 1862 it became the California State Normal School (now San Jose State University), the first public college on the west coast, and as principal Minns was highly influential in bringing new European methods of progressive education, including those of Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz, to the west coast.

Agassiz, like Minns, championed the idea of teacher’s institutes as a means of improving and expanding public education in the 1860s and 1870s. These included the Harvard Summer Schools for teachers that began in 1871 and would include the special Summer School for Cuban teachers in 1900. (Brodelon, 216). The Minns family returned to Massachusetts in the later 1860s, where Grace attended a grammar school in Roxbury and the Girls High School in Boston. With the family home in Concord, where her father ran a preparatory school for boys, Grace “was fortunate enough to receive private tuition from some of the scholarly men who were then residents of the famous old town.” (“Women of Mark”).

Her connection to businessman Henry L. Higginson began on or before 1884, the year she moved to Boston aged 25 and accompanied his wife, Ida Agassiz Higginson, on a transatlantic voyage between England and Massachusetts. By 1892 Grace was living at 191 Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay, next door to the “Hotel Agassiz,” a series of six-connected apartments in the French “family hotel” style occupied by Alexander Agassiz, his brother in law Henry Higginson, and their families. Minns’ physical proximity to her employers reflected her importance in the Higginsons’ financial empire, where her official title was “private secretary” to Higginson, a position equivalent to a 21st century executive assistant to a CEO.

She soon earned a reputation as a “clever business woman…with fine executive ability.” Her “vocation [for] real estate” and managing properties encouraged Minns to take a course on plumbing in the North End, perhaps at the Industrial School funded by Higginson’s sister-in-law Pauline Agassiz Shaw. Minns appreciated practical expertise—she was said to “entertain great respect for a man who can wipe out a joint”— an essential skill in soldering pipes in plumbing. But she also believed in academic study, taking classes in Sanitary Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1898. (“Women of Mark”).

That same year she served as chair of the Women’s Committee of the Massachusetts Volunteer Aid Association, which helped to raise funds for Massachusetts veterans wounded during the Spanish-American war and for which Henry L. Higginson was Treasurer. It’s not clear when she developed an expertise in the Spanish language, but those skills were in great evidence in 1900, when she joined the staff of the Cuban Summer School, serving in multiple roles. The Colonel sent her to Cuba ahead of the Summer School and entrusted her with the task of establishing relationships with the island’s teachers before they set sail for the United States. She then returned from with the superintendent of the Summer School, Alexis Frye, on the Sedgwick with 450 of the Cuban women teachers. Minns attended many events in a leadership role. These included large receptions for teachers at the homes of benefactors of the program like Mr and Mrs Arthur A. Carey, and an event at Harvard’s Sanders Hall. at which H.L. Higginson was the guest of honor attended by more than 1000 of the Cuban teachers.

While most of the Harvard Summer School staff and chaperones returned to their normal duties once the visitors returned home in August, Minns continued to focus on Cuban issues. Higginson sent her to the island to work closely with General Leonard Wood (Harvard Medical School 1884), the U.S. military governor. Wood reported to Higginson in early 1901 that “her ideas are sound and she has a lot of hard common sense and energy” and praised her for appreciating “that whatever is done in Cuba must be done in a rational sensible way and not on the hysterical lines hitherto pursued”- a reference apparently to the work of Alexis Frye, the Superintendent of the island’s schools (Wood to Higginson).

Serving in her capacity as Secretary of both the New York Society for Orphan Relief and the Cuban Orphan Association of Boston, she traveled throughout the island for several months, advising Major J.R. Kean, of the US military government’s Department of Charities program and inspecting a range of charitable institutions on the island. Kean recalled that she “was of especial value as an inspector because she had the courage to spend the night at the institution which she was inspecting so as to inform herself as to what went on during the evening and morning hours when institutions are rarely seen by Inspectors.” (Autobiographical Sketch of Jefferson Randolph Kean, 1928) Minns, who made a “lifestudy of charitable work” and was considered an authority on the subject was prominent in Progressive Era conferences on charities and corrections.

The following year Minns inaugurated a major Conference on Charities and Correction in Havana which attracted both local and American charity and health workers and academics, and to which she invited the African American educator Booker T. Washington, whome she had met at Colonel Higginson’s home in late 1900. Although unable to travel to the conference Washington provided an address highlighting similarities between Cuba after colonial rule and the South after the Civil War and the importance of agricultural and technical training in educational reform.

Minns hoped that Cuba would follow the practical model of African American colleges like Hampton and Washington’s own Tuskegee and in May 1901 sbe proposed a translation of Washington’s just-published and bestselling memoir, Up From Slavery, into Spanish for the Cuban market. By May 1902 she had completed the translation of De Esclavo á Catedrático (From Slave to Professor). As she wrote the Wizard of Tuskegeer, “the term catedrático in Spanish signifies a professor in a university, a professor with a chair, a place from which he speaks. It seems to me to tell the story of ‘Up from Slavery’ very well.” (Gurridy, 34.) Minns believed the original title “would not translate well and might moreover be thought to have some political significance.”

As historian Frank Guridy notes, Minns’ concern “with the political implications of the book was likely heightened by the fact that it would be disseminated precisely in the moment when Cubans were fighting U.S. interests for universal manhood suffrage in the new Cuban Constitution.” (35) Nevertheless, thanks to Minns’ connections to the military government’s Department of Charities more than 1000 copies of the book were distributed throughout the island to “be read,” Mimms wrote Washington,”by the children in the public schools, in the orphan asylums, by patients in the hospitals, by old men and women in the almshouses, by employees in the cigar factories, and by [others] interested in the administration of the schools, the charitable institutions, and in public affairs.” (34). And, despite the relative conservatism of Washington’s message, the book’s message of upward mobility inspired Afro-Cubans, who formed a Booker T. Washington Institute on the island 1902. Minns was also a patron of Escuela Reformatoria de Guanajay, a reform school south of Havana, and held gatherings and celebrations at the institution along with other elite New England and Cuban women.

After her Cuban travels, Minns remained active in a number of reform organizations, including the National Educational Association and the Women’s Educational Union, where she promoted expanded opportunities for women teachers. She also stood for political office, earning the endorsement of the Republican Party, the Public School Association, and an independent group of women voters in the 1902 race for Boston School Committee. In the era before the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in all elections, some women in Boston could vote in School Committee elections; it was estimated that just over half of the 18,487 women and 112, 101 men registered to vote cast a ballot. Minns earned 28, 880 votes, but placed 13th of 24 candidates. Of the eight candidates elected, one, Mary A. Dierkes, a Democrat, was a woman.

Minns also continued her own studies, enrolling in Boston University’s student courses for teachers in 1916-1917. When the U.S. entered World War I, Minns was active in the Red Cross. In her later years she resided with her younger sister Elizabeth—neither of them married—in Beacon Hill, where she served as the founding Vice President of the local Civic Association in 1922. Minns died on September 1, 1944, in the Boston suburb of Chestnut Hill. (Atlanta Sunny South)


Further Reading

1. Bever, Marilynn A. “The Women at MIT, 1871-1941” Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduate thesis, June 1976.

2. “Women of Mark; Miss Grace W. Minns’ Name Placed on Three Tickets.” Boston Globe, Dec. 3, 1902: 25.

3. “Loud were the Vivas; for Mr. Higginson, America, and the Cuba Libre,” Boston Globe, July 20, 1900.

4. Atlanta Sunny South, June 14, 1902