Marian "May" Fry Pease (3 April 1859 – 25 September 1954) was a British schoolteacher. She was one of the first women to attend

University College In a number of countries, a university college is a college institution that provides tertiary education but does not have full or independent university status. A university college is often part of a larger university. The precise usage varies ...

, Bristol where she would later lecture and become a doctor of letters. She and

Hilda Cashmore Hilda is one of several female given names derived from the name ''Hild'', formed from Old Norse , meaning 'battle'. Hild, a Nordic-German Bellona, was a Valkyrie who conveyed fallen warriors to Valhalla. Warfare was often called Hild's Game. T ...

founded the Bristol University Settlement (now the Barton Hill Settlement).

Life

Pease was born in

Westbury-on-Trym Westbury on Trym is a suburb and council ward in the north of the City of Bristol, near the suburbs of Stoke Bishop, Westbury Park, Henleaze, Southmead and Henbury, in the southwest of England. With a village atmosphere, the place is partly ...

the daughter of devoted

Quaker Quakers are people who belong to a historically Protestant Christian set of Christian denomination, denominations known formally as the Religious Society of Friends. Members of these movements ("theFriends") are generally united by a belie ...

s, Thomas Pease (1816–1884) and Susanna Ann Fry (1829–1917; sister of the judge

Edward Fry Sir Edward Fry, (4 November 1827 – 19 October 1918) was an English Court of Appeal of England and Wales, Lord Justice of Appeal (1883–1892) and an arbitrator on the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Biography Joseph Fry (1795-1879) and Mar ...

); she was one of her father's fifteen children as he had children by previous marriages. One of her brothers was the Fabian Edward R. Pease. Her father had been a wool comber and her mother came from the Fry family known for manufacturing chocolate. When

, Bristol took on its first female students in 1876, Pease was also one of the first three women (alongside Amy Bell and Emily Pakeman) to earn a scholarship. She obtained honours in all her subjects in 1880. She had been supported by the Clifton Association for the Higher Education of Women. Pease went on to Cambridge where she trained to be a teacher at the Cambridge Training College for Women. By 1892 she was back at her alma mater where she lectured supporting women who wanted to be elementary teachers. In 1911, she and

founded the Bristol University Settlement. Pease was certain that teaching was important and she supported the ideals of the

settlement movement The settlement movement was a reformist social movement that began in the 1880s and peaked around the 1920s in United Kingdom and the United States. Its goal was to bring the rich and the poor of society together in both physical proximity and s ...

. The settlement had a welfare units for infants and a school and the regional headquarters of the Works Educational Association. Students could take a two-year course in social work at the settlement which included Pease as a lecturer. Hilda Cashmore became the settlements first warden and she stayed there until 1926. The university made her a doctor of letters in 1911 and she retired in the following year, although she returned occasionally until 1928. Pease died in Street in 1954, certain that she would again see her mother. The settlement that she had co-founded in 1911 was still extant as the ''Barton Hill Settlement'' in 2020 when it merged to become part of the ''Wellspring Settlement''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pease, Marian 1859 births 1954 deaths People from Westbury-on-Trym British educators Pease family