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 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 civic roles not yet fully formed.

In 1916, she 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 commencement program from that year is a restrained object, practical in its design, marking a formal passage into a profession defined by continuity and daily stewardship.

The program also offers a 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. What endures is proximity. Lives often begin their connection through shared institutions and shared objects long before memory assigns them a story.

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. 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 her 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.

As decades passed, Josephine’s civic presence extended beyond the classroom. In 1948, she joined The Shakespeare Club of Pasadena, one of the city’s longstanding cultural institutions. Her involvement unfolded over nearly four decades, marked by committee work, leadership, and sustained responsibility. She served two consecutive terms as president in the mid-1950s, guiding the organization through years defined not by spectacle, but by continuity.

Women’s clubs of the mid-twentieth century were not peripheral organizations. They functioned as civic frameworks, sustaining cultural life, philanthropy, and education through shared labor and collective care. The Shakespeare Club remains one such structure. Its work continues quietly through scholarship, service, and public literary engagement, preserving an ethic of responsibility that has shaped Pasadena for generations.

Seen through an anthropological lens, this pattern of service forms its own architecture. Josephine’s influence rests not in individual recognition, but in participation and return. Her life moved through institutions designed to endure, leaving behind records rather than monuments.

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 structures built through education, service, and sustained civic presence.

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.

With thanks to The Shakespeare Club of Pasadena for sharing archival and contemporary material that helped inform this journal.