Frances Josephine Hadley and the Shape of a Life
Some histories reveal themselves through quiet objects rather than grand ones. A commencement program printed in 1916 for the Los Angeles State Normal School is one such object. Held briefly by its graduates and then set aside, it carries the names of those who would teach a growing California. Among them appears Frances Josephine Abberley. Nothing about the paper announces its importance, yet it opens a clear window into the structure of her life, a life shaped by education, civic ritual, and the steady labor of community.
Frances was born in Nebraska in 1895, into a family whose presence appears consistently in local newspapers across the Midwest. Notices of church life, social gatherings, and professional movements trace the Abberley family through Ohio and Indiana before their eventual move west. These records are modest in tone, but together they form a portrait of mobility shaped by vocation and conviction, a pattern common to families who helped build civic life across regions rather than remain rooted to one place.
By her teenage years, Frances was living in Los Angeles and attending Manual Arts High School, one of the city’s early responses to the pressures of rapid growth. Her name appears in graduation records at a moment when Los Angeles was still defining the scale and ambition of its public education system. The city was expanding outward and upward, drawing young people into institutions designed to prepare them for a civic future not yet fully formed.
In 1916, Frances graduated from the Los Angeles State Normal School, an institution dedicated to training teachers for California’s expanding public schools and one that would later become the University of California, Los Angeles. The program she received that year now rests in the Acanthus archive. It is a restrained object, practical in its design, but it marks a formal passage into a profession defined by continuity and daily stewardship.
Her path soon led to Pasadena, where she became a teacher within a public school system undergoing rapid transformation. Records place her at McKinley School prior to the devastating fire of 1922, an event that destroyed the campus and dispersed classes into churches and private homes throughout the neighborhood. The rebuilding of McKinley was an act of civic resolve, and to teach there before and after that rupture was to inhabit the living architecture of a city rebuilding itself through education.
Newspaper references throughout the 1920s and early 1930s place Frances steadily within Pasadena’s schools. Over time, she appears more often as Josephine, the name she used in her professional and civic life. The shift is subtle but telling. It signals not reinvention, but belonging.
The 1916 commencement program offers another quiet intersection. My own great grandmother appears on the same page of graduates. The two women would have walked the same corridors, listened to the same addresses, and held identical copies of the same program now preserved in our keeping. Whether they knew one another remains unrecorded, but the proximity of their names invites reflection. Lives often begin their connection through shared spaces and shared objects long before memory assigns them a story.
As decades passed, Josephine’s civic presence deepened beyond the classroom. In 1948, she joined The Shakespeare Club of Pasadena, one of the city’s longstanding cultural institutions. Her involvement was neither brief nor ceremonial. Over nearly four decades, she served across committees devoted to education, art, public affairs, hospitality, and governance. She eventually held the presidency for two consecutive terms during the mid 1950s, guiding the organization through years of sustained engagement.
That structure of care remains visible today. The Shakespeare Club continues its philanthropic, cultural, and social work within Pasadena, extending the same civic ethic that shaped Josephine’s decades of service. The Club awards five scholarships annually to deserving Pasadena high school seniors. Its members prepare forty lunches each week for the Friends in Deed Women’s Room and support children in foster care through an annual toy drive and participation in the Sugar Plum Tree at Santa Anita Mall. In moments of crisis, the Club has also assisted families affected by the Eaton Fire with clothing and essential supplies.
Cultural life remains central to the Club’s purpose. Monthly Shakespeare readings are held at the Club’s Villa and offered freely to the public, sustaining a tradition of shared literary engagement that has defined the organization for generations. Alongside this work, the Club maintains an active social life for its members, reinforcing the bonds that allow such institutions to endure.
Seen through an anthropological lens, this pattern of service forms its own architecture. Women’s clubs in mid century America were not peripheral organizations. They were civic frameworks that educated, supported, and remembered their communities. Josephine’s influence within that structure rests not in spectacle, but in continuity and care.
At Acanthus Home, we return to objects like this program not for nostalgia, but for what they quietly contain. History often resides in unassuming forms. Memory lives not only in heirlooms, but in the steady architectures built through education, service, and civic devotion.
Frances Josephine Abberley Hadley stands within that lineage. Her influence moved without spectacle, shaped by ordinary days and sustained attention. These are the structures that endure.
To explore more stories that shape the way we understand objects, interiors, and the lives connected to them, we invite you to continue reading the Acanthus Home Journal.
With thanks to The Shakespeare Club of Pasadena for generously sharing archival and contemporary information that helped inform this journal and for the ongoing work they continue to do in service of their community.
