BEVERLY COLEMAN

COLEMAN--Beverly S.

Attorney, wife and mother Beverly S. Coleman died recently at age 91 after a long illness. Born to a family in Utica, NY, active in community and Jewish affairs, Beverly graduated from Wellesley College Phi Beta Kappa in 1948. In 1950 she was one of 13 women admitted to the first co-ed class at Harvard Law School. In 1951, at the end of her first year at HLS, she gave birth to her first child, Charles Theodore Coleman. Taking a year off to care for him, she then returned to the school and graduated two years later. In 1955 she was admitted to the Massachusetts bar--the same year she gave birth to her second child, Jacqueline Sue Coleman. Her groundbreaking experience at HLS was rewarding--she revered the law and the excellence of a Harvard Law education--but it was trying. "An ordeal," she termed it many years later in a letter to The Wall Street Journal. "I believe that the atmosphere of hostility toward women was described by Dean Griswold himself in his welcome to my entire class in September 1950. I can still hear as clearly today as I did then his concluding remark: 'As to the women among you--I did not approve of your admission, believing that you were each taking the place of a good man, but now that you are here--welcome." Beverly never quite forgot that she was "taking the place of a good man," but built a satisfying career as Staff Counsel at the American Jewish Congress in New York City and then Senior Executive Editor at Matthew Bender & Co., Inc., a legal publisher in New York City, where she specialized in health care law. She also served for 10 years on the board of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, now part of the UJA. In July 2018, during her long illness, the Harvard Law School Association selected her with her living female classmates of '53 to receive the HLSA Award, the Law School's highest alumni award, for her pioneering role "in forging a path that led to greater gender parity in admission to Harvard Law School, where recent entering classes have been half female." Yet Beverly was so much more than a career or a feminist. Gentle and cultured, she derived a quiet joy from art, ballet, literature, classical music and her garden. She was loyal to her close friends, many of whom she kept through her adult life. She could not do enough for her family, who enjoyed her unflagging support. On how she mixed family and career so successfully, she often said, "One refreshes the other." In addition to all that, she was also a beauty: svelte, square-jawed, with lavender- blue eyes and chestnut brown hair, Beverly cut an attractive figure from her teen years well into old age. Beverly is survived by her husband, Dr. M. Donald Coleman; son, Charles; daughter, Jacqueline; grandchildren, Rachel, Daniel and Robert; and great-grandchildren, Ella and Elijah, all of whom live in greater New York.