Lunch & Learn with Author Kathleen Sander at St. Michaels Library

Kathleen Sander

Lunch & Learn with author Kathleen Sander about Mary Elizabeth Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age on March 4, noon.

A century ago, Mary Elizabeth Garrett of Baltimore was hailed as one of the nation’s great philanthropists and businesswomen.  She had “the business capabilities ranking among the great financiers of America,” the New York Times wrote of her.  She did not keep her wealth for herself.  Rather, she generously used it to change society in ways that continue to affect us.  Like her father and brothers, who built Baltimore and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, she, too, had a bold vision. Through her philanthropies, she turned her dreams of women’s equal status as well educated leaders, as professionals, and as skilled physicians into reality.  She forever changed American medicine and the way physicians were educated in the United States by starting the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1893, the nation’s first coeducational, graduate-level medical school.  She elevated women through better opportunities in preparatory and higher education by founding the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and financially supporting Bryn Mawr College. In her later years, she worked tirelessly in the suffrage movement.  How she became a leading activist and philanthropist is a remarkable story of persistence, sacrifice, and dedication.

Dr. Sander worked for 25 years in higher education advancement and communications at the University System of Maryland, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She received her undergraduate degree from the Ohio State University and her master’s and Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland College Park. Since 1995 she has taught United States history and women’s history at the University of Maryland University College and in 2003 was awarded the university’s Stanley J. Drazek Teaching Excellence award. In 2005 she received a Fulbright award to teach at St. Petersburg State University in Russia.The Lunch and Learn series is sponsored by the Friends of the Library, coffee and dessert will be provided. For more information you can call 410 745-5877 or check the Events Calendar on the website at www.tcfl.org.