Elizabeth Clark Connor

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Clark Connor, wife of a prominent attorney in Wilson, Henry Groves Connor, Jr. (1876–1946), served on the ECTC board of trustees from 1926–1927, becoming the first woman to serve as a trustee. During her brief tenure, Connor was a member of the board’s newly established Committee on Salaries and Institutional Policies, serving along with Arch Turner Allen (1875–1934) of Raleigh and James L. Griffin (1874–1930) of Pittsboro. ECTC president, Robert H. Wright (1870–1934), had proposed organization of this committee to help define, at the board level, administrative criteria providing for appropriate differentials in faculty remuneration commensurate with years of graduate study, professional degrees earned, and years of service. With East Carolina’s transition to a teachers college and its new responsibilities for training public school teachers for the highest certification at all levels of public instruction, new faculty hired at ECTC in the 1920s were expected to hold doctoral degrees. Most new hires were men, resulting in a shift from a largely female faculty to one wherein, administratively, men with doctorates dominated. In Wright’s view, faculty pay scales required calibration corresponding to graduate degrees held as well as years in service. Connor’s appointment as a trustee to the Committee on Salaries and Institutional Policies no doubt was meant to make the new adjustments in faculty pay seem more equitable and less consistently masculine in administrative origin.

Connor was born Elizabeth Clark, the daughter of William T. Clark and Bettie Johnson Clark, near Chatham, Virginia in 1880. After attending the Episcopal Institute in Chatham, she moved to Wilson, N.C., and there married Henry Groves Connor, Jr., the son of a prominent Wilson attorney, Henry Groves Connor, Sr. (1852–1924) who served on the North Carolina Supreme Court as well as a federal judge. Elizabeth Connor worked with the Presbyterian Church locally and statewide and was especially active in its missionary societies. In addition to serving on the ECTC board of trustees, she served as the third president of the Wilson Woman’s Club.

Sources

• Bratton, Mary Jo Jackson. East Carolina University: The Formative Years, 1907–1982. Greenville, N.C.: East Carolina University Alumni Association, 1986.
• “Mrs. H. G. Connor, Jr. Passes in Baltimore: Wife of Prominent Wilson Lawyer Dies in Hospital; Funeral Plans Not Made.” News and Observer. May 18, 1937. P. 14.
• “Mrs. Henry G. Connor, Jr.” News and Observer. May 19, 1937. P. 5.

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