Live Breaking News & Updates on Mildred Florence Stewart

Courtesy of Karen Rowe
Alison Hewitt |
March 2, 2021
Florence Howse Ridley, a barrier-breaking academic who was the first woman to chair the modern incarnation of UCLA’s Academic Senate and only the third woman to become a full professor in UCLA’s English department, died Jan. 16 of COVID-19 in her hometown of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. She was 98.
Ridley came to UCLA in 1957 immediately after earning her doctorate in medieval English literature from Harvard, driving across the country in a car without air conditioning through the summer heat, according to her hometown obituary. She became one of only two women then in the English department faculty. She was hired as an instructor, from which she could in theory advance to assistant and then associate professor before gaining tenure as a full professor, but for years, the department had largely barred women from advancing past assistant professor, according to a recent history of the department. ....

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