Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Dorothea Frances Canfield – was an educational reformer, social activist, and best-
selling American author in the early decades of the twentieth century. She strongly supported
women's rights, racial equality, and lifelong education. Eleanor Roosevelt named her one of the
ten most influential women in the United States. [1] In addition to bringing the Montessori
method of child-rearing to the U.S., she presided over the country's first adult education program
and shaped literary tastes by serving as a member of the Book of the Month Club selection
committee from 1925 to 1951 named for Dorothea Brooke of the novel Middlemarch[2] – was
born on February 17, 1879, in Lawrence, Kansas, to James Hulme Canfield and Flavia Camp, an
artist and writer.[3][4] From 1877 to 1891 her father was a University of Kansas professor with
responsibility for various historical studies, and finally president of the National Education
Association. Later he was chancellor of the University of Nebraska, president of Ohio State
University, and librarian at Columbia University.[5] Canfield Fisher is most closely associated
with Vermont, where she and her mother made trips to the family home[5] and where she spent
her adult life. Vermont also served as the setting for many of her books. She married John
Redwood Fisher in 1907, and they had two children, a daughter, Sally, and a son, Jimmy. In
1911 Canfield Fisher visited the "children's houses" in Rome established by Maria Montessori.
Much impressed, she took up the cause of bringing the method back to America, translating
Montessori's book into English and writing five of her own: three nonfiction and two novels.