Emily Hahn
| Emily Hahn | |
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| Born | January 14, 1905 St. Louis, Missouri |
| Died | February 18, 1997 (aged 92) Manhattan, New York |
| Occupation | Journalist, biographer, novelist |
| Spouse(s) | Charles Boxer (m. 1945) |
| Children | Carola Militia Boxer (b. 1941) Amanda Boxer (b. 1948) |
Emily Hahn (Chinese: 項美麗, January 14, 1905 – February 18, 1997) was an American journalist and author. Considered an early feminist and called "a forgotten American literary treasure" by The New Yorker magazine, she was the author of 54 books and more than 200 articles and short stories. Her novels in the 20th century played a significant role in opening up Asia and Africa to the west. Her extensive travels throughout her life and her love of animals influenced much of her writing. After living in Florence and London in the mid-1920s, she traveled to the Belgian Congo and hiked across Central Africa in the 1930s. In 1932 she traveled to Shanghai, where she taught English for three years and became involved with prominent figures, such as The Soong Sisters and the Chinese poet, Sinmay Zau (Chinese: ; pinyin: Shao Xunmei).
Emily Hahn was born in St. Louis, Missouri on January 14, 1905 as one of the six children of Isaac Newton Hahn, a dry goods salesman, and Hannah Hahn, a free-spirited suffragette. Affectionately nicknamed "Mickey" by her mother after a cartoon comic strip character of the day named Mickey Dooley, she was known by this nickname to close friends and family. In her second year of high school, she moved with her family to Chicago, Illinois.
With a love for reading and writing, she initially enrolled in a general arts program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but decided to change her course of study to mining engineering after being prevented from enrolling in a chemistry class predominately taken by engineering students. In her memoir, No Hurry to Get Home, she describes how the mining engineering program had never had a female enroll. After being told by a Professor in her mining engineering program that "The female mind is incapable of grasping mechanics or higher mathematics or any of the fundamentals of mining taught" in engineering, she was determined to become a mining engineer. Despite the coolness of the administration and her male classmates, in 1926 she was the first woman to receive a degree in Mining Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her academic accomplishments was a testament to her intelligence and persistence that her lab partner grudgingly admitted, "you ain't so dumb!"
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