Shinn, Milicent

Basic Biographical Information

Born: 1858, Died: August 14, 1940

Milicent Washburn Shinn was born in Niles, California, a small town about 30 miles from San Francisco where her family owned a farm. The family orchard nursery business would eventually become quite prosperous; her father, James Shinn, was one of the first American agriculturalists to import plants from Asia (Burnham 1971). The Shinns valued education and sent Milicent to the 6-year-old University of California, Berkeley. In 1874, the year Shinn started at Berkeley, the school had only two buildings on a campus that was little more than a field and had only begun admitting women the year before. Shinn found she loved the academic life and though she would have liked to pursue graduate studies at the Harvard Annex after her graduation from Berkeley in 1880, her close family ties kept her in California. However, family connections also encouraged her interest in psychology: Edmund Clark Sanford, who went on to become...