Description
Jessie Harris Stewart was a dedicated member of YWCA and president of Associated Women Students at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in 1892 in San Francisco, she grew up next to the California Street Cable Car line, as her father, James T. Harris, worked in the carpentry shop of the California Street Cable Car Company for several years. At UC Berkeley, which she attended from 1910 to 1914, she studied bacteriology and was a member of Tri Delta and the Prytanean Honor Society. After graduating, she got married and moved with her husband to the East Coast, eventually retiring in Saratoga, California. In this interview, Stewart discusses her childhood in San Francisco, the effect of the 1906 earthquake and fire on the California Street line, and her experiences at UC Berkeley, including her studies, her associations with Benjamin Ide Wheeler and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, and the campus’s organizations and female leaders at the time. This interview also contains an appended interview with Stewart by the Prytanean Society, as well as excerpts from “Cable Car Days in San Francisco” by Edgar M. Kahn.