Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon

A pioneer woman educator in the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century academia, Mary Rippon was the first female professor at the University of Colorado and is believed to have been the first woman in the United States to teach at a state university. Mary received wide acclaim for her teaching, but Victorian society forced her to lead two very separate lives. "Miss Rippon," as she was always known, was both a professional woman and a mother in an era when these two roles could not be combined. To keep her job and provide for her family, she hid her husband and child behind a Victorian veil of secrecy that spanned two continents. Separate Lives reveals the full story of the 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 was welcomed at the newly opened University of Colorado in the then-small frontier town of Boulder. The growth of her lengthy career paralleled the early growth of the university, where she worked her way up from first female faculty member to the university's first female professor, eventually chairing the Department of German Language and Literature.

The truth of Mary's separate lives was not disclosed until nearly a century later, in 1976, when her elderly grandson revealed to a university librarian that he was Mary's descendant. In 2006, Mary received a posthumous honorary degree from the University of Colorado, and in 2020 a scholarship was endowed in her name. Silvia Pettem's carefully researched biography weaves together the story of Mary's private life with her professional career--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.

Silvia Pettem is a Colorado-based historical researcher, writer, and author of more than twenty books on history, biography, missing and unidentified persons, and true crime. She has a knack for pulling intriguing women out of the past.

Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon is set in the late nineteenth century. Pettem's other nonfiction narratives on women focus on later time periods. In Search of the Blonde Tigress: The Untold Story of Eleanor Jarman exposes and expands upon a true crime story from the 1930s, while Someone's Daughter: In Search of Justice for Jane Doe, Updated Edition follows a murder investigation (and identification of the victim) from the 1950s.

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