On the Iberian Peninsula in the late 1400s, the Inquisition was in full swing. One Jewish family set off from Portugal in 1492. Their decision would set in motion cascading migrations that would end four hundred years later in Berkeley, California with an American-born descendent, Jessica Blanche Peixotto.
Six-year-old Jessica Peixotto, her mother, and two younger brothers journeyed to California to reunite with her father via ships and, before there was a canal, by an overland train connection on the Panama Peninsula. Her father was an early employee of Levi Strauss, a merchant in his own right, and a long-time president of Temple Emanuel synagogue in San Francisco. Jessica’s father didn’t believe that girls should pursue education beyond high school, so she studied with tutors at home for eleven years after graduation. Finally, Peixotto convinced her father to let her enroll, as a special student in non-degree studies, at what is now UC Berkeley. Eventually, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in 1894 and, in April 1900, became only the second woman at Berkeley to be awarded a PhD. Supervised by the world-renowned historian and political scientist Bernard Moses, her dissertation was a comparative study of the French Revolution and modern French Socialism. Jessica spent a year in 1896-97 at the Sorbonne in Paris engaged in her dissertation research, accompanied by her artist brother Ernest. Her cousins included the poet Emma Lazarus and Anna Nathan Meyer, the founder of Barnard College.
A few years after completing her doctorate, in 1904, Peixotto was hired as a lecturer by Berkeley’s President Benjamin Ide Wheeler to teach a course in Contemporary Socialism. In 1907 she was promoted to a junior faculty position and added a course on the Control of Poverty to her teaching portfolio. By 1917, in the midst of the First World War, Peixotto helped establish the first training for social workers in California that paved the way for a new graduate credential in social welfare in 1917-18 located within the Department of Economics.
In 1918, Peixotto broke through another barrier, becoming the first woman at the University of California to be promoted to full professor. Today, her portrait hangs in a corner of the dining room of the Women’s Faculty Club—a club she helped establish when women were excluded from the existing Faculty Club.
Peixotto and her women colleagues also established new areas of study and teaching in economics. With her colleagues Lucy Ward Stebbins and Emily Nobel Plehn, she founded a field of “social economics” that they called the feminine form of political economics. She published studies on living wages for a variety of workers, including faculty, and taught courses on social welfare. While Peixotto may not have considered herself as a social worker, she was a scientist who brought the emerging methods of social sciences to bear on the well-being of workers, families, and children. She served on several statewide and national child welfare boards and spoke frequently on social well-being using data she gathered in her studies. In 1928, Peixotto was elected vice president of the American Economics Association, attesting to her national reputation. She retired from the University in 1935 and passed away after a long illness in 1941, at the age of 77.
Peixotto’s scientific approach was novel in her time. But her approach—challenging conventional wisdom to develop evidence to inform better policies and practices in social welfare—lives on. Peixotto’s priorities echo today in the halls of Haviland, as Berkeley Social Welfare’s students, faculty, and alums honor her legacy of practicing science for the common good.