| Minnie Braithwaite Jenkins | |
| Birth Name: | Minnie Galt Braithwaite |
| Birth Place: | Williamsburg, Virginia, U.S. |
| Occupation: | School teacher |
| Employer: | Bureau of Indian Affairs |
| Known For: | 1896 petition to the College of William & Mary to attend chemistry lectures |
| Notable Works: | Girl from Williamsburg (1951) |
Minnie Galt Braithwaite Jenkins (1874–1954) was a United States Indian Service (now known as the Bureau of Indian Affairs) school teacher and the first woman to attempt to take classes at The College of William & Mary.[1]
Braithwaite was born in Williamsburg, Virginia. On October 2, 1896, she petitioned the faculty at the College of William & Mary to allow her to attend chemistry lectures. Her petition was denied 4 to 3. Among the seven men who voted, President of the College Lyon Gardiner Tyler voted in favor of the petition and English professor John Lesslie Hall voted against it.[2]
Braithwaite intended to travel to China as a medical missionary after being trained at William & Mary to be a doctor, but this plan was derailed when her petition to attend was denied.[3] Instead, Braithwaite began her teaching career in 1899 at the Blue Canyon Day School near the Hopi Reservation in Arizona.[4] She later taught at the Fort Mojave School from 1902 to 1906.[5] It was at Fort Mojave that she met and married Clarence W. Jenkins in 1906. Her memoir, Girl from Williamsburg, was published in 1951.[6]
The Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department at the College of William & Mary hosts an annual lecture in commemoration of her efforts to attend classes at the College.[7]
Some of her and her family’s papers can be found in the Special Collections Research Center at Earl Gregg Swem Library. One such paper is a letter from William & Mary Board of Visitors member Thomas Barnes to Braithwaite regarding her petition to attend classes at the College.[8]
In 1996, her daughter Dorothy Jenkins Ross, a historian, published the book Jenkins Farms: Life on a Family Fruit Farm in Early California, 1910 about her family's life in Sutter County, California.