Ruth Belcher Dyk

Dyk, Wellesley yearbook photo (1923).png

Dublin Core

Title

Ruth Belcher Dyk

Description

Ruth Belcher, pictured here in the 1923 edition of the Wellesley College Legenda, was born in 1901 in Portland, Maine to Arthur Belcher and Annie Manson Belcher, a fellow suffragist. Ruth and her mother marched together in the Boston suffrage parade of 1915, carrying a “Votes for Women” banner. In November of 1920, after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the two women went to the polls together to vote in their first election.

Ruth Belcher grew up in Newton, Massachusetts and attended Wellesley College, graduating in 1923. She later earned a master’s degree in Economics from Simmons, and pursued further graduate work at the University of Wisconsin and the University of California at Berkeley. As a psychiatric social worker, Belcher worked with delinquent girls in upstate New York and later as a researcher at the Downstate Medical Center of the State University of New York in Brooklyn. She wrote two books, Anxiety in Pregnancy and Childbirth (1950) and Psychological Differentiation (1962), and co-authored a third, Left Handed (1980), with her husband, anthropologist Walter Dyk, publishing it after his death.

Belcher and her husband had two children, Timothy Dyk and Penelope Carter. Carter admired her mother’s activist spirit, recalling that Belcher always told her that education and independence were more important than marriage. Ruth Belcher Dyk remained involved in politics throughout her life, voting in every election and spending her final year campaigning for Hillary Clinton’s senatorial bid. Dyk died in November of 2000 at her home in Rochester, New York.

Creator

The Wellesley College Legenda

Source

The Wellesley College Legenda

Date

1923

Citation

The Wellesley College Legenda, “Ruth Belcher Dyk,” Suffrage at Simmons, accessed March 28, 2024, https://beatleyweb.simmons.edu/suffrage/items/show/72.

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