Rose R Olver

Olver grew up in Philadelphia and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1958. She met her husband John while both were in graduate school in Cambridge and they were married on September 12, 1959. She then completed work toward her Ph.D. at Radcliffe College in 1961 and during the next year was a research fellow in cognitive studies and a lecturer on general education at Harvard, where much of her own doctoral research had been done. She came to Amherst in 1962, she wrote in Gender Matters: The First Half-Century of Women Teaching at Amherst, a book she co-authored and published this year, “feeling very lucky to have a faculty position (most women in my graduate school cohort were offered research positions) and a job in the same town as my husband, who had just accepted a faculty position at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.” Her daughter Martha was born in 1969. Olver was an enormous supporter of her husband John’s political career as a member of the Massachusetts House and Senate and then the U.S. House of Representatives. She would give speeches for him and participate in events when he was unable to attend.