Mary McLean Hardy was born in Vernon Center, Connecticut on January 27, 1831 to Francis McLean, a businessman and Sarah Berry Childs McLean. She attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary from 1850-1852 then taught Latin and mathematics in Easton, Pennsylvania. Two years later, she went to Danville, Kentucky and taught at private academy. Soon after she returned to Vernon, Connecticut where she cared for father and gave music, drawing and English lessons to private pupils. From 1861-1862 she was an assistant at the English Classical Institute in Springfield, Massachusetts. She then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to become an associate teacher at the Young Ladies' Institute. From 1864-1866 she was Head of the Latin Department at the Western Female Seminary in Oxford, Ohio and she spent 1866-1868 as the principal of the Young Ladies Female Seminary in Des Moines, Iowa. In 1869, she married Jacob Hardy, a judge and in 1870 they had a daughter. Hardy later studied French, German, English and Chinese and Japanese history at the University of California at Berkeley (1890-1893, 1898-1900) and Old Testament history the University of Chicago (1893-1894). She was also actively involved in temperance and suffrage work. She died at the age of ninety-six on November 22, 1927 in Berkeley, California.
From the guide to the Mary McLean Hardy Papers MS 0755., 1848-ca.1924, (Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)
