Alice Beal Baker Hyde, 1897-1972
General International Standard for Archival Description
Sophia Smith Collection Smith College Northampton, MA
Finding aid encoded in NoteTab Pro. Encoded by Hilary Buxton. 2010-09-17
Encoded Archival Description
Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Version 2002
collection
Alice Beal Baker Hyde Papers
Creation of Alice Beal Baker Hyde Papers
Time of Creation of Alice Beal Baker Hyde Papers
Hyde, Alice Beal Baker, 1897-1972
Biographical History for: Alice Beal Baker Hyde Papers
Biographical Note Alice Beal Baker Hyde, Boston, 1953 Alice Beal Baker Hyde was born on 16 May 1897 in Chicago, Illinois. Her father was Ray Stannard Baker, a prominent McClure's magazine reporter who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Woodrow Wilson. Her mother, Jessie Irene Beal Baker, was a homemaker and mother of four children: Alice Beal, James Stannard, Roger Denio, and Rachel Moore. During Alice's early childhood, the family moved from Chicago to Bronxville, New York, where her father became an active participant in the New York City journalism scene until another move to East Lansing, Michigan, around 1908, presumably to be close to family relatives who lived in the area. Finally, in 1910, when Alice was thirteen years old, the Bakers settled down permanently in Amherst, Massachusetts. She attended Amherst High School and then transferred to Rogers Hall School for Girls in Lowell, Massachusetts, where she spent the 1913-14 school year before enrolling at Smith College in the fall of 1914. At Smith, Hyde majored in Economics and minored in Sociology. In her spare time, she was a member of the Studio [art] Club and worked as the Arts Editor of the Class of 1918 Class Book. After graduating college, she stayed on at Smith as a member of the first class of the Smith School for Social Work, completing her social work degree in 1919. Hyde got a job as a psychiatric social worker at the State Hospital in Boston in May 1919. In 1920, she left Boston to work for the American Red Cross in Detroit, Michigan, where she met her future husband, Mark Hyde, a 38-year-old World War I veteran whose travels to China and writerly aspirations intrigued her. They married on 10 September 1921, and shortly thereafter moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where she found a part time job in February of 1922 at the American Red Cross again, this time in conjunction with the U.S. Veterans Bureau's program to fund the needs of ex-servicemen. Later that year, Mark Hyde, then working in the automobile industry for Dodge Brothers, was transferred to Dallas, Texas, so the couple moved again. Sometime in the mid-1920s, the Hydes left Texas for Wellesley, Massachusetts. They had two children, Beal (1923) and Alexander "Alec" (1925). Alice stayed home with her sons while Mark attempted to begin his career as a writer, receiving substantial encouragement from Ray Stannard Baker, with whom he corresponded. In addition to his writing, Mark also became an active proponent of socialist ideas, endeavoring to start a chapter of the Socialist Party in Wellesley around this time. Unfortunately, his writing and political ideas failed to produce a steady income, and the family fell on hard times beginning in 1928. Alice's letters express her frustration at her husband's unwillingness to take a steady job so that the family could stop subsisting off of the checks her parents sent them. Finally, in the spring of 1928, Mark found a job in car sales in Canada, leaving Alice at home with the children in Wellesley. The couple remained apart through 1930, when Mark successfully sold the manuscript of his book, The Singing Sword, to the Little Brown Publishing Company. By 1931 he was back in Wellesley, but financial hardship persisted. Marital affairs reached the breaking point in the spring of 1931, when Alice had an affair with Dan Waugh, a friend from Amherst, and a Dartmouth College graduate, who had corresponded with her extensively during her Smith years. Shortly thereafter, the Hydes divorced. They continued to exchange letters about their sons and personal affairs throughout their lives. Neither remarried. Around 1932, Alice Hyde found a full time job in the social work field as an Assistant District Secretary for the Family Welfare Society of Boston. In 1935 she left that position to work as a social worker for the Judge Baker Foundation. She took on a second job in 1943 doing psychiatric investigations for the R.G. Home Service in Wellesley, although she had moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1938. Also during this period, she became an active planner and participant in the activities of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, beginning in 1939 and ending in 1950. During 1945, she gave talks on psychiatric social work with children to Parent Teacher Associations in the Boston area. By the 1947-48 school year, she was lecturing more, this time as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatric Social Work at Boston University. She rose through the ranks of the faculty, becoming an Associate Professor in the 1952-53 academic year. In the late 1950s she attained full professorship. At Boston University, she was respected as a caring, creative teacher and curriculum planning leader. She also held the position of the Chairman of the Casework Department from 1950 to 1962, when she retired. Her book manuscript on the theoretical basis for casework practice is unpublished. Her retired life included a vacation to Greece (1967) and winters in Florida to escape the cold of Massachusetts, which had always exacerbated her sufferings from a life-long case of Raynaud's disease. She and a good friend and colleague, Annie Snow, moved together to Chatham, Massachusetts, her last permanent home, in the late 1960s. In addition to traveling, her activities during this period of her life included an interest in the Audubon Society, photography, and the secretaryship of the Smith College Club of Park-Orlando, Florida. She died on 1 February 1972. Those who knew her eulogized her as a hard worker whose dedication to her field and ability to form close personal relationships made her an excellent teacher and friend throughout her long life.
Beal B. Hyde donated the Alice Beal Baker Hyde Papers to the Sophia Smith Collection in 2006.
Scope and Contents of the Collection The Alice Beal Baker Hyde Papers consist of 2.5 linear ft. and are primarily comprised of extensive family correspondence, including letters home to her parents, Ray Stannard Baker and Jessie Baker, courtship letters from fiance, Mark Hyde, and letters from Dan Waugh, hometown friend and later lover. Some of her correspondence deals with her experiences as a social worker at state hospitals in Boston and Detroit, circa 1919 to 1921. The collection also includes photograph albums, loose photographs, a journal, a sketchbook, and a short story. The bulk of the papers date from 1914 to 1972 and focus on Hyde's life after graduation from the Smith College School of Social Work, her marriage to Mark Hyde, their divorce, her life as a single mother, her early career as a psychiatric social worker, and her retirement. Her later career teaching at Boston University is less well documented. Major topics found throughout these papers are courtship, family structures and relationships in the early twentieth century, social work, and travel. Her letters also reveal the close family ties between Hyde and her father, journalist Ray Stannard Baker. Correspondence comprises over half of the collection and includes exchanges between Hyde and her parents, her children, and her suitors, along with several letters home about her experiences as boarding school.
The Papers are open to research according to the regulations of the Sophia Smith Collection without any additional restrictions.
The Sophia Smith Collection owns copyright to Alice Beal Baker Hyde's unpublished works. Permission must be obtained to publish reproductions or quotations beyond "fair use." Copyright to materials authored by others may be owned by those individuals or their heirs or assigns. It is the responsibility of the researcher to identify and satisfy the holders of all copyrights. Permission to publish reproductions or quotations beyond "fair use" must also be obtained from the Sophia Smith Collection as owners of the physical property.
Additional or related materials appear in the Sophia Smith Collection in the Katherine Brand Papers. Materials pertaining to her college years can be found in the Smith College Archives. Related materials are in the Ray Stannard Baker Papers at the Jones Library in Amherst, Mass. More of Ray Stannard Baker's papers are at the Library of Congress under his pseudonym, David Grayson, in the David Grayson Papers.
Processed by Margaret Barthel, February 2010
Courtship-United States--History--20th century-Sources
lcsh
Family-United States--History--20th century
Social workers-United States-Biography-Sources
Baker, Ray Stannard, 1870-1946
lcnaf
Smith College School for Social Work-United States--History--20th century
series
SERIES I. BIOGRAPHICAL MATERIALS AND MEMORABILIA
Ray Stannard Baker [father], "Stories to His Children"
DiarySep 1914 - circa 1921
SketchbookNov 1915, n.d.
Short storycirca 1914
Smith College memorabilia
Wedding announcement in The Detroit Free PressSep 1921
Greece travel logSep 1967
Miscellaneous documents 1908-73
SERIES II. CORRESPONDENCE
Miscellaneous correspondence 1914-46, n.d.
Baker family [parents and siblings] 1919-22, n.d.
Baker siblingsMar 1933-May 1948
Baker, Jesse [mother]
Baker, Jesse and Ray Stannard [parents]
Baker, Ray
Baker, Ray to Jesse Baker 1918
Extended family and friendsDec 1966-Dec 1971
Hyde, Alec and Beal and families [sons] 1967-78
Hyde, Beal [son]
Jan 1955-Nov 1956
Hyde, Beal [son] and Peggy [daughter-in-law]
Aug 1964-Dec 1969, n.d.
Mar 1970-Jan 1972
Hyde, Beal [son] to Jesse and Ray Stannard Baker [parents] 1953-56, n.d.
Hyde, Mark [husband]
Dec 1920-Jan 1921
Feb 1921
Mar 1921
April 1921
May 1921-June 1921, n.d.
Dec 1931-Dec 1945
Hyde, Mark [husband] to Jesse and Ray Stannard Baker [parents] 1920-30, n.d.
Dan Waugh [friend and affair]
1914-June 1916
July 1916-Aug 1916
Aug 1916-Oct 1916
Oct 1916-Jan 1917
SERIES III. PHOTOGRAPHS
Hyde, Alice Beal Baker
as an infant 1897-1900
as a child 1900-08
Portrait 1919
Mid-life portraits 1918-53
Hyde, Alice Beal Baker and family
Family trip to Oracle, Arizona 1901
Photograph albums
1897-circa 1938 (black)