Biography of Alice Gordon Gulick (Boston, 1847 - London, 1903)

By Raúl Travé Molero
Translation by Raquel Boix and Dahra Mautone

Alice Winfield Gordon, known as Alice Gordon Gulick, was born in Boston on August 8, 1947. She was the first daughter of the seven children of James Munroe Gordon and Mary Elisabeth Gordon. Both of them were deeply religious and important members of the Congregational Church, as well as committed abolitionists. The religious fervor of her family and the congregation played an essential role throughout Alice Gordon Gulick’s life. Between 1863 and 1867 she attended Mount Holyoke, where she later worked as a philosophy professor from 1868 to 1870. On December 12, 1871, Alice married Protestant pastor William Hooker Gulick in her second marriage. He was the son of a prominent missionary family with business interests in Hawaii and San Francisco. A week later, on December 19, 1871, they set sail from Boston to Liverpool, with their final destination being Spain. There, Alice would play a crucial role in advancing education and emancipation for Spanish women.

The couple, already sympathizing with the liberal movement that had led the Glorious Revolution of September 1868, arrived in San Sebastián at the beginning of 1872 and traveled extensively throughout the country before deciding where to settle. They visited some of the most important cities, especially those in which protestant missions were already established , such as Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Valladolid, or Valencia, with numerous stops along the Mediterranean coast and Andalusia. Although they initially decided to settle in Bilbao, the Carlist blockade led them to choose Santander in July 1872, where they lived until 1881. In Santander, they opened an elementary school for women and, starting in 1877, a boarding school where they trained students to become teachers. In 1881, wanting to expand their teaching activities, they moved and relocated the school to San Sebastian; they reopened it in 1882 as the International Institute for Girls in Spain until 1898, when the Spanish-American War forced the Gordon Gulicks to exile in Bizarritz and move the school and all its students to this city. From Biarritz, Alice worked to secure funding that would allow them to open the International Institute in Madrid, a goal she achieved in 1903 but did not live to see, as she died in London on September 14, shortly before its opening.