Arbuthnot, May Hill (27 August 1884–02 October 1969), educator and children's literature specialist, educator and children’s literature specialist, was born in Mason City, Iowa, the daughter of Frank Hill and Mary Elizabeth Seville. May’s childhood was reminiscent of the quality of family life she advocated throughout her professional life—hers was a family in which it was “as unnatural not to read as not to eat.” Arbuthnot later said that her mother, whose “joy in books and people never failed,” guided May and her brother to “the Alcott books and swung us into Dickens and the Waverley novels at an early age.” Her father read aloud classics such as ...
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Susan Bertram Eisner
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Barker, Roger G. (31 Mar. 1903–10 Sept. 1990), child psychologist and pioneer in the naturalistic study of human development in community settings, was born in Macksburg, Iowa, the second of five children of Guy and Cora Barker, whose homesteader families arrived in the Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century. Guy Barker held a series of jobs: he was a farmer; served as the manager of a town’s general store; and then worked as a mid-level executive for a small insurance company in Des Moines, before returning to farming in eastern Alberta, Canada. Shortly after his Roger Barker’s birth, his family moved to the small town of Plover, Iowa, where he spent the first seven years of his life. Children growing up in small towns would later become his professional focus....
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Olive Hoogenboom
Gruenberg, Sidonie Matsner (10 June 1881–11 March 1974), educator of parents, writer, and authority on children, was born near Vienna, Austria, the daughter of Idore Matzner, a failed merchant, and Augusta Olivia Besseches, who later was the U.S. partner in a rubber-importing company. In 1888 Sidonie and her family moved to Philadelphia but returned to Austria within a year, only to have her father leave again for the United States in 1893. Sidonie and her mother and siblings joined him in New York City in 1895 after spending a year and a half in Hamburg, Germany, where she attended the Höhere Töchterschule. After a few months of public school in Manhattan, Sidonie in early 1896 entered the Society for Ethical Culture’s Workingman’s School and gave the valedictory speech when she graduated from its eighth grade in 1897. Because a stroke had partially paralyzed her father, she took a secretarial job to help her family financially. In 1903 she married Benjamin Charles Gruenberg, a young chemist who the year before began teaching biology at DeWitt Clinton High School; they had four children. Their marriage was a true partnership, providing them both the stimulus for growth and the opportunity to collaborate as writers and experts in the field of child study....
