When Nel de Mûelenaere, historian and Flora Rose expert extraordinaire, mentioned that she’d first gotten acquainted with our building’s namesake while procrastinating in Brussels, my thought was, ‘Wow. This Flora Rose really got around.’

I’ve been living in Rose House for a couple months now, so I’ve gotten pretty used to throwing around Flora Rose’s name. I’d assumed that she was a Cornell graduate or faculty member with a history of academic and philanthropic achievements. But I’d hardly expected her name to turn up in a record in Brussels.

It turns out that’s not the only place she turned up. She was born on what was at the time the Western frontier– Denver Colorado– and moved all by herself to go to school at Columbia. She also was a frequent guest of Eleanor Roosevelt’s at the White House. The amount of things she did in her life was also mind-blowing. She was a pioneer of home economics, a nutrition expert who provided aid in a decimated post-World War I Belgium, and the first person to officially issue a mixed quantitative-qualitative survey, which comprehensively summed up the health lives of Belgian children.

It seems like history can’t quite keep up with her. Despite all her achievements, she’s not very well known. The “first” qualitative-quantitative survey on record occurs fifteen years after Ms. Rose was issuing hers. And it’s quite easy to forget, looking back, exactly how progressive she was. As a pioneer of “home economics,” which in the modern mind is associated with the consuming and conservative housewife mold of the 50s, she may not get all the respect she deserves. At the time of its debut in colleges, home economics was about listening to the voices of mothers and wives and making their lives easier. Flora Rose legitimately valued these homemakers while recognizing through her own actions that a homemaker wasn’t the only thing a woman had to be. She never married, preferring to live with her educational and life partner, Martha Van Rensselaer.

Despite her achievements and character, all I knew Flora Rose for was a name on a building. I found tonight’s Rose Cafe to be incredibly valuable. It’s an honor and a great commemorative gesture to name a building after someone. But that can only go so far in preserving the memory of a great woman. Nel de Mûelenaere’s heartfelt discussion of Flora Rose’s life opened my eyes both to how worthy this woman was of a building, but also how time can cause people’s stories to slowly fade away. The study of history is a guard against this erasure, which is why I really appreciate Nel de Mûelenaere’s dedication to studying– and remembering– this wonderful woman.