Mary Conway Kohler was one of the first women to graduate from Stanford School of Law. She began her career as a lawyer and then a judge. Her passion was as a child welfare advocate.
She became an initiated member of the Stanford chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma on October 25, 1925. The May 1925 Key of Kappa Kappa Gamma includes a snippet that “Mary Conway was appointed chairman of the new social service committee which is making great headway under her leadership.” She graduated in 1926 with a Bachelor’s degree.
Mary Conway is in the top corner of this chapter composite.
Her engagement to John August Kohler was announced at the Kappa Kappa Gamma senior dinner. Her husband was a member of Sigma Nu. They married on June 16, 1926.
Hollywood Advertiser, June 28, 1925
In 1928, she graduated with a law degree. She was a member of Phi Delta Phi.
Kohler became a lawyer in 1929 and went to work as an assistant probation officer in juvenile court. A son was born in 1931 and two other children followed. A letter to the editor in the November/December 2004 Stanford Magazine from Miranda Ow, Stanford Class of 1984, includes this mention of Kohler:
My paternal grandmother, Mabel Chew, worked as a cook and nanny from 1927-28 for the first woman to graduate from Stanford Law School, Mary Conway Kohler. They became good friends; Mrs. Kohler helped my grandmother divorce her first husband, who had run off with another woman. She also later helped my grandmother and her entrepreneurial second husband, Ow Wat, obtain a laundry contract at Moffett Field.
Oakland Tribune, October 7, 1928
She became a referee (judge) in juvenile court in 1935. Kohler divorced her husband after 20 years of marriage. She began a legal and estate management practice in 1945.
In 1953, she went to New York to become a child welfare consultant. She was a special consultant on the Tweed Commission – the Family and Children’s Courts to the New York Temporary Commission on the Courts. The commission was responsible for the reorganization of the New York Court System as well as the development of the new Family Court of New York.
Kohler also served as a consultant to the Ford Foundation on Juvenile Delinquency in 1955. She established NYC’s first Neighborhood Youth Corps. In 1962, she was on the Committee on Youth Employment and a year later she was appointed to the NYC Board of Education.
Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. appointed her to his Poverty Council in 1964. That year she began as a consultant to Human Resources Administration of NYC.
In 1967, she became the executive director of the National Commission of Resources for Youth, an organization she helped found. Its mission was to “promote acceptance by the American public of the idea that youth could be integrated into the adult society at an earlier age.”
She died on May 3, 1986, of cancer at the age of 82.
