Betsy (also spelled Betsey) Mix Cowles was born on February 9, 1810 in Bristol, Connecticut, to the Reverend Giles Hooker Cowles and Sally White Cowles.  In 1811, the Cowles family moved to Austinburg, Ohio, where Betsy’s father became the pastor at the Congregational church.  Though little is known about Betsy’s primary education, we know that she herself became an educator early in her life, teaching at area schools and in southeastern New York by 1826, when she was sixteen years old.

Cowles’ particular educational interest was in “infant school,” and in the early 1830s she joined a movement to create programs to teach basic skills to the very young, such as reading, writing, and right conduct.  In 1832, Cowles founded an infant school at Kinsman, Ohio.  Then, in 1834, through her great belief that women were meant for more than marriage, she helped to establish the “Young Ladies Society for Intellectual Improvement” in her hometown of Austinburg.

In order to advance her own education, Cowles attended the “Ladies’ Course” at Oberlin College in 1838.  She was among the third group of young women to graduate from the course in 1840.  After her graduation, Cowles returned to teaching in Massillon, Ohio, as well as taking on a number of administrative positions, including serving as the superintendent of the girls’ grammar and high schools in Canton, Ohio from 1850 to 1855.  As her organizational talents began to be recognized, she was appointed to the position of superintendent of schools in Painesville, Ohio in 1858, becoming one of the first women to hold such an office.

As a result of an eye problem, Cowles retired from teaching in 1862 and returned to Austinburg.

In addition to her fervor for women’s education, Betsy Cowles was also an influential abolitionist in Ohio. In 1835, Cowles became the leader of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Ashtabula County.  Among her friends and acquaintances were such affecting personalities as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Abby Kelley Foster.  As a result of these associations, Cowles became a radical Garrisonian Abolitionist in 1845, and wrote many articles for the Anti-Slavery Bugle of Salem, Ohio, a major publication of the movement. 

Through her activist stance in abolition, Cowles became a devotee of the cause of women’s rights.  She helped to run the first Ohio Women’s Convention in 1850, and supported such ideas as equal pay for equal work, and a woman’s right to hold property. 

Betsy Mix Cowles never married.  She died in 1876 in Austinburg, Ohio.

Betsy Mix Cowles Papers (Kent State University) Inventory, prepared for the Web by Barbara Bass, June 7, 1996; updated September 2004.