Elizabeth Phillips Hughes (12 July 1851 – 19 December 1925) was a Welsh scholar, teacher, and promoter of women's education. She used the bardic name Merch Myrddin.
Born in Carmarthenshire, she had little education as a child, but later attended a private school, eventually becoming a teacher at Cheltenham Ladies' College. She also attended Newnham College, Cambridge, becoming the first woman in the university to take first-class honours. In 1884, she was appointed Principal of the Cambridge Training College for Women, later Hughes Hall. In 1899, however, she left Cambridge for good, returning to Wales where she continued to campaign for better secondary education. She was the only woman on the committee which drafted the charter of the University of Wales, and in 1920, she received an honorary degree from that university.
Famous quotes containing the words elizabeth, phillips and/or hughes:
“...we avoid hospitals because ... they’ll kill you there. They overtreat you. And when they see how old you are, and that you still have a mind, they treat you like a curiosity: like “Exhibit A” and “Exhibit B.” Like, “Hey. nurse, come on over here and looky-here at this old woman, she’s in such good shape....” . Most of the time they don’t even treat you like a person, just an object.”
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“Happy the Man, who void of Cares and Strife,
In Silken, or in Leathern Purse retains
A Splendid Shilling: He nor hears with Pain
New Oysters cry’d, nor sighs for chearful Ale;”
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“It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.”
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