Hall of Fame Member Biographies

Jessie Thatcher Bost

A pioneer in every sense of the word, Jessie Thatcher Bost was born in Stillwater in 1875, and became the first woman graduate from Oklahoma A&M College - today's Oklahoma State University - and indeed the first woman graduate in Oklahoma. During her undergraduate days she took the same agricultural and chemistry courses as the young men, and after graduation became a public school teacher in Stillwater. Marriage to classmate Henry Bost in 1902 led to a period of homesteading in western Oklahoma. In 1908 she moved to Alva and taught school in Cleveland for twenty years. Bost was a pioneer for women's suffrage until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. She died in 1963, and Oklahoma State University President Henry G. Bennett called her "Oklahoma's first woman of education."