Jessie Taft - Personal Life

Personal Life

Jessie Taft was born Julia Jessie Taft on June 24, 1882 in Dubuque, Iowa, the oldest of three sisters. Her parents were Charles Chester Taft and Amanda May Farwell who moved from Vermont to Iowa. There is no known connection to the famous offspring of the Vermont Tafts. Her father established a prosperous wholesale fruit business in Des Moines. Her mother was a homemaker who gradually became deaf and distant from her daughters.

Taft attended and graduated from West Des Moines High School. She then went to Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa and received a B.A. degree in 1904. Also in her class of 1904 at Drake was Clara Charlotte Hastings, granddaughter of Pardee Butler and older sister of Milo Hastings. Two decades later Taft was to adopt a boy, Everett, the first-born son of Milo Hastings. There is no evidence that Taft realized she was adopting the nephew of a former college classmate.

After college at Drake, Taft went to the University of Chicago and earned a Ph.B. in 1905. She then went back to Des Moines to her former high school and taught there for four years. In 1908 she returned to the University of Chicago for graduate work. At that time she met Virginia P. Robinson. The two women became lifelong companions and colleagues. In 1909 she got a fellowship and began working with George H. Mead (who became her thesis adviser), James Hayden Tufts, and William I. Thomas. She also worked at Hull House, the social settlement of Jane Addams. Taft completed her doctoral thesis “The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness” in 1913. It was published in book form in 1916.

In 1912 Taft found work the Bedford Hills Reformatory for Women in New York City and stayed there until 1915. She then practiced psychology for four years before becoming director of the Child Study Department of the Children’s Aid Society in Pennsylvania. Taft and Robinson moved to Flourtown, Pennsylvania close by Carson Valley School, where they were close friends with the staff. Taft, the school and its staff appear in the novel Double Stitch by John Rolfe Gardiner. In about 1920 Taft and Robinson bought a house on East Mill Road in Flourtown that became known as “The Pocket”, so called because the women had to dig deeply into their pockets to purchase the property.

In 1921 the Taft and Robinson made the decision to adopt two children. Everett was adopted on his birthday July 9, 1921 at age nine. Martha Scott was adopted in 1923 at age 6. Everett went on to marry and raise a family. Martha, who never married, became Chief Dietitian for the Veterans Administration Hospital in Philadelphia.

In 1924 Taft met Otto Rank, an outcast disciple of Sigmund Freud, and became his American champion and translator. Taft was finally able to begin an academic career in 1929 at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1934 she became the director of their new school of social work. She retired in 1950 to organize Rank’s papers (he died in 1939) which were donated to Columbia University, and to write his biography which was published in 1958. E. James Lieberman wrote another biography of Rank in 1985 with many references to Taft.

Taft died on June 7, 1960 in Flourtown, Pennsylvania after suffering a stroke. Virginia Robinson lived on until 1977, writing a biography of Taft that came out in 1962.