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ObituariesIn Remembrance: Joyce Mitchell Cook ’65PhD Died on June 6 2014Joyce Mitchell Cook passed away June 6, 2014, after an extended illness. She was 80. She was the first African American woman to receive a PhD in philosophy in the United States, and the first woman to be appointed to an assistant teacher position at Yale. She also taught at Wellesley College, Connecticut College, and Howard University. Visit the Sharon (Pennsylvania) Herald for a full obituary published on June 27, 2014. |
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I met Joyce Mitchell Cook in 1950 when she came for the traditional campus visit high school students make when looking for a college. We became life long friends from that day forward.
Published accounts of her life and work are incomplete. We both loved Bryn Mawr and saw it as an opportunity to give and share, learn and grow. Joyce flourished at Oxford where I visited her in 1956. She later saw Yale as a challenge. Marion Forrester, an African-American graduate student in Economics while we were at Bryn Mawr, helped "Jo" (as I called her) get her first job in the Federal Government in D.C. in the late 1950's or maybe it was the early 1960's by then!
Jo was smart, competitive and always looking for an argument. She loved music, theater, books and scrabble. She was a very good cook! I often stayed with her on my visits to D.C. (She was married briefly to Gene Cook, M.D.) I miss her.
Evie Rich' Bryn Mawr 1954 (May 25, 2020)
I was one of Jean ("Gene") Cook's nieces. When my mother was in hospital, giving birth to my youngest sister, my parents asked Auntie Joyce to take stay at our house and look after me and my little sister. I will never forget that Joyce treated me with respect and kindness. For instance, I wanted to give my dirty grey and black stuffed panda teddy bear a "bath". She didn't blink -- she helped me do this and even hung him on the line for me so that he could dry. I still have that teddy -- and, importantly, that precious memory, that I will never forget. I regret never having had the opportunity to know her.
Lisa Fagg (October, 2022)