Helen Tunnicliff Catterall

Helen Honor Tunnicliff was born in Macomb, Illinois, the daughter of judge Damon G. Tunnicliff and his second wife, Sarah Alice Bacon Tunnicliff.[1][2] She graduated from Vassar College in 1889,[3][4] and gave an address at commencement on "The New Astronomy."[5] After Vassar, Tunnicliff earned a law degree and pursued further studies in political science at the University of Chicago.[1]

Her younger sisters also graduated from Vassar.[6] Sarah Bacon Tunnicliff (1872–1957) was a director of the Woman's City Club of Chicago and a social reformer, and Ruth May Tunnicliff (1876–1946) became a medical researcher and president of the Chicago Society of Pathologists.[7][8]

Tunnicliff practiced law in Massachusetts and Illinois, and taught at Cornell University. She was also director of a children's home in Ithaca.[7] She is best known as main author of the five-volume Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (1926–1937),[9] written with support from the Carnegie Foundation.[10] Her work remains a useful source on the legal history of slavery in the United States,[11][12] and is still referenced in controversies on the subject, almost a century after its publication.[13]

In 1896, Helen Tunnicliff married English-born historian Ralph Charles Henry Catterall (1866–1914).[4] They had a son, Ralph Tunnicliff Catterall (1897–1978), who followed his mother into a law career. Helen Tunnicliff Catterall died in 1933, aged 63 years, in Richmond, Virginia, where her son lived. Her papers are archived at the University of Chicago Library.[3]