Early Life
Beatrice Hicks was born in 1919 in Orange, New Jersey, to William Lux Hicks, a chemical engineer, and Florence Benedict. Hicks decided at an early age that she wished to be an engineer. While her parents neither supported nor opposed Hicks' desired career path, some of her teachers and classmates tried to discourage her from becoming an engineer, viewing it as a socially unacceptable role for a woman. She graduated from Orange High School in 1935 and received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1939, one of only two women in her class. During college, Hicks worked in the treasury office of an Abercrombie & Fitch store as a telephone operator, and in the university's library. After receiving her undergraduate degree, Hicks stayed at Newark College of Engineering for three years as a research assistant, where she studied the history of Edward Weston's inventions and took additional classes at night.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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