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The Blue Book of Iowa Women A History of Contemporary Women

Compiled by Winona Evans Reeves, 1914.

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Miss Nann Clark Barr

To an Iowa young woman belongs the honor of having received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the age of twenty-three, being the youngest person so far as the records show to earn that high scholastic degree.  Miss Nann Clark Barr is the daughter of Dr. and Mrs. G. Walter Barr of Keokuk, her mother a college woman and her father an author and literary man of high attainment, she has always lived in an atmosphere which fostered her ambition.  As a child she showed unusual proficiency in literature and wrote a number of poems which appeared in well known magazines.  She was graduated from the Keokuk high school in 1907, receiving the second Kilbourne prize.  She spent four years at the Western College for Women at Oxford, Ohio, the alma mater of her mother.  Here she was graduated in 1911 with the degree Bachelor of Arts.  Her work at Western College won her the scholarship in philosophy at Wellesley, where she did post-graduate work for a year and won her scholarship in philosophy at Cornell University.  At the end of one year's work at Cornell she won the degree of Master of Arts, and at the end of the second year, (1914) she had earned her doctor's degree in philosophy, beside winning the philosophy prize.  Such a record of scholastic attainment is very unusual and the honors have not come without work, but a remarkable mind and a great ambition has made the work easier than it would have been for a less gifted person.  Miss Barr, when but a child, read literature, much beyond her years and reasoned with the faculty of a mature mind.  Those who knew her as a child expected great things of her and her work has justified that expectation.

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