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Silvia Pettem has written hundreds of columns for the Boulder Daily Camera and more than 20 books, most of which fit into either the local history or true crime or cold case categories. The 77-year-old author who lives west of Jamestown says she also gravitates toward stories about “intriguing women from the past.”
That interest is on full display in Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon, a book she first self-published in 1999. Published by Lyons Press this month, a second edition of the formerly out-of-print biography—with two new chapters included—will allow a wider audience to meet Mary Rippon, a name familiar to those who amble past the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre on University of Colorado Boulder’s campus every day.
Rippon, who lived from 1850 to 1935, became the first woman professor at the University of Colorado in 1878, when the Boulder-based university had one building and only a handful of students. She taught German and French languages and literature and ultimately became the head of the Department of Modern Languages. In those days, a woman with a job was rare; a woman professor was nearly unheard of. But because Rippon had never married and never had children, she was permitted by Victorian society to teach, even though she earned far less than her male colleagues who had families to support. She did so for more than 30 years and was not only widely respected in educational circles but also revered by her students. She was the ne plus ultra of a proper Victorian lady. Rippon, however, was leading a double life that she kept hidden from society, her students, and most of her friends.
In 1887, at the age of 37, Rippon met Will Housel, a 25-year-old student of hers at the university. They fell in love, Rippon became pregnant, and they wed in secret. To ensure she could still teach and earn a living for her and her family, Rippon left Boulder to have the baby in Europe. After giving birth, Rippon returned to Colorado while Housel and their daughter, Miriam, stayed behind. For the next four decades, Rippon lived as a single woman dedicated to spreading knowledge, all the while supporting a family that expanded in unusual and challenging ways as time marched on.
It wasn’t until a man named Wilfred Rieder made a donation to the University of Colorado Boulder in 1976 that Rippon’s secrets began to trickle out. He identified himself as an alumnus and a descendant of Mary Rippon. In the late 1980s, Rieder made a second donation, which included Rippon’s diaries, journals, and accounting books. He also made public that he was, in fact, Rippon’s grandson.
Several years later, in 1993, librarians at CU’s Norlin Library pointed Pettem to Rieder’s donations. For the next five years, Pettem immersed herself in Rippon’s life. Separate Lives was the end result of what Pettem says was “an all-consuming research project that nagged at me month after month and year after year until it pushed all other projects aside.”
This week, we spoke with Pettem about the importance of understanding history, why Rippon fascinated her, and why the professor’s story is still relevant today.
Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
5280: You’ve kinda been Boulder’s resident historian since the late 1970s when you started writing local history columns for the Daily Camera. Why should we all want to understand history?
Silvia Pettem: To prepare for the future, you have to understand the past. We live in a vacuum if we don’t have perspective on what has come before us.
Were you scouting for fodder for a Daily Camera column in CU’s library archives when someone pointed you toward Mary Rippon’s diaries and journals?
Yes, I often did that. Her separate lives were no longer a secret by that point, but when I started looking at Rippon’s diaries, I knew there was more to tell. I knew the intrigue right away. At first, I thought I wanted to write an article, but then I realized there was a lot more than an article in those materials.
Read More: A Boulder Group Is Rewriting History—One Wikipedia Article at a Time
Rippon’s diaries and journals were pretty cryptic for obvious reasons, so how did you piece things together?
I put five years of my life into researching this woman. These were the pre-internet days. Ancestry.com wasn’t a thing so I couldn’t just pull up census records in two minutes online. I had to go to the Federal Center in Denver and stand in line and ask to use the microfilm reader, which I had to hand crank. I didn’t even have a computer. I spent a lot of time on the phone with libraries and courthouses in Illinois, where Rippon was from. I spent hours reading her diaries. They were cryptic and handwritten, so I had to decipher what she was saying and how she was feeling. I became so much a part of the story that I actually wrote the first draft in first-person. I obviously changed that, but I kinda had to think first-person to get into her head and figure out what was going on in her life.
What were your feelings about Rippon? Did you identify with her?
I don’t agree with what she did with regard to her daughter. I couldn’t leave my child like she did. I feel like she was a better “mother” to her students than she was to her child. But she was the only person earning money; maybe she thought it was her duty. I can’t judge her. I didn’t write the book to tarnish her reputation. I wrote it to uncover the human side of a woman whose circumstances clashed with the mores of her times. She was a very highly respected, well-loved woman and professor.
Were some of those decisions made for her because of the time in which she lived?
Of course. She and Will fell in love and had a child when he was a student. He couldn’t earn a living, so she had to. But if she’d disclosed the situation, they would’ve taken her job away from her. Those jobs were reserved for men who had to support families. Ironically, in Rippon’s case, she was supporting a family. No one knew that, and she couldn’t tell anyone.
That’s a little hard for those of us living in 2024 to understand, isn’t it?
It is. One thing I love doing is explaining historical context. Young people who’ve read the book don’t understand. They ask things like, “Why didn’t she just get a nanny?” Well, in those days, that’s not how it worked. She couldn’t. Society wouldn’t allow her to do that.
There are some things in Separate Lives that illustrate how far women have come, but other things remain disturbingly the same.
Yes. There was a wage gap. Rippon made less than the male professors. That still exists today and there’s no reason for it. There was an expectation that women should be mothers. That’s still a thing today.
JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, has recently made public statements that maybe even Victorian men might reconsider. You heard about the childless cat lady remarks?
Well, I have children and cats. You could write a whole book just on the differences in eras and societies. But there are things that are still the same, too.
You say you like writing about intriguing women of the past—do you consider yourself a feminist?
No, I’m too old for that. I’m a historian.
After all the time and energy you put in, what’s the one thing you wished you knew about Rippon that you couldn’t learn through research?
There are years where there are no diaries or journals. Those are the missing years. A lot of those might’ve been about her relationship with Will. Rippon probably threw those in the woodstove herself. I would like to know about their romance. But that will remain unknowable.
You self-published Separate Lives in 1999, so why publish a second edition now?
The book had been out of print for a long time, and I wanted to keep it in print. More important, there was new information to include. I added two chapters at the end that talk about the posthumous honorary degree that CU bestowed upon Mary Rippon in 2006, and also about the scholarship CU set up in her name.
Silvia Pettem will be signing copies of Separate Lives at the Boulder Bookstore on October 22 at 6:30 p.m.
