Separate Lives

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About the Program:

As a pioneer woman educator, Mary Rippon received wide acclaim for her teaching, but in order to keep her position, she hid both her husband and child behind a Victorian veil of secrecy. Silvia’s presentation reveals the lifelong conflicts between this extraordinary woman's public and private lives.

In January 1878, after several years of education in Germany, France, and Switzerland, the soft-spoken-twenty-seven-year-old woman was welcomed at the newly opened University of Colorado in the small frontier town of Boulder, Colorado. The growth of her lengthy career paralleled the early growth of the university where she worked her way up from the first female faculty member to the university's first female professor, eventually chairing the department of German language and literature.

Modest and unassuming, Mary taught in the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century academia where she shielded her womanly emotions from the public. Hidden romance and familial responsibility spanned two continents. "Miss Rippon," as she always was called, was a professional woman who became a mother in an era when these two roles could not be combined.

The author's purpose is not to tarnish Mary's well-deserved reputation, but rather to uncover the human side of a woman whose circumstances clashed with the mores of her times. Her life was her own, as free as her wildflower garden –– an anomaly in an otherwise structured world.

About the Author:

Silvia Pettem is a longtime Boulder County researcher, writer, and resident. She's written more than 20 books, some on Boulder-area history and some on true crime, and she continues her monthly history column in the Daily Camera.

Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon is an updated version of Separate Lives: The Story of Mary Rippon that Silvia wrote and published in 1999. Now, 25 years later, Lyons Press decided that it was time to bring Mary's story into the 21st century. Mary was the first female professor at the University of Colorado, and the book is set in Boulder with scenes familiar to local residents.

Silvia lives with her husband and two cats in the mountains west of Boulder, where she continues her research and writing. She can be reached through her website, silviapettem.com.

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