Originally founded in 1904 as the Boston School of Social Work, the Simmons College Graduate School of Social Work operated at this site for many years before moving to the college’s main campus in The Fenway. It was the first school of social work to be affiliated with an institution of higher learning. When Simmons College was established as a women’s college in 1899, Henry LeFavour, the first president, explained that the college hoped to prepare young women to earn their own livings. When the college opened, it offered training in household economics, secretarial studies, library science, and general science. The household economics course developed out of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union’s School of Housekeeping. Social work was added next, followed by salesmanship and public health nursing.
In 1907, Eva Whiting White (1885-1974), a pioneer in the field of social work, was the first woman to graduate from the Simmons College School of Social Work. She went to many leadership roles: the Headworker at the Elizabeth Peabody House, a settlement house in Boston’s West End; Dean of the Simmons College School of Social Work; a member of the Boston Board of Public Welfare; Director of the Americanization and Immigration Division of the Massachusetts Board of Education; and President of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union.
Ida Maud Cannon (1877-1960) trained as a nurse in Minnesota before moving to Boston to study at the Simmons College School of Social Work. In 1914 Cannon was named Chief of Social Service at Massachusetts General Hospital. She advocated and lectured nationally for hospital-based social work programs, and developed a standardized curriculum for social work education, based on her combined training as a nurse and a social worker. In 1918 she was one of the founders of the American Association of Hospital Social Workers, and was president of the organization for two terms.
The School of Social Work building was owned by Isabella Stewart Gardner’s father-in-law, John L. Gardner, who willed it to his son George, who gave it to Simmons. He was influenced by his mother, Eliza Endicott Peabody Gardner, whose life-long interest in social work convinced her son that this was the most appropriate use of their family home.
