Caroline Willard Baldwin

Caroline Willard Baldwin (1869–1928) earned a bachelor’s degree from the College of Mechanics at Berkeley in 1892 and was selected to speak at commencement.  The College of Mechanics Baldwin went on to graduate study at Cornell University and became the first woman to receive a PhD in science in Physics from an American university. Her paper “A Photographic Study of Arc Spectra” was published in 1896 and is still available online: . Equipped with a doctorate, Baldwin nonetheless taught physics at the California School of Mechanical Arts, a vocational secondary school in San Francisco associated with UC Berkeley.  Baldwin’s status as a married woman with two children, similar to that of other Berkeley women graduates in STEM of her era,  would have been an obstacle to a position in higher education.