This obituary is part of a series on people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.
After serving as dean of women at Florida State University in the late 1960s, Katherine B. Hoffman said her greatest achievement had been to abolish her own position.
Bringing female students under the same administrators as men belonged to a broader agenda: creating greater gender equality at school. As dean, Ms. Hoffman also eased the dress code for women and abolished the curfew.
“They essentially had to wear what were raincoats,” recalled Norris Hoffman, the son of Ms. Hoffman. “FSU still thought that the cars the women were traveling in would turn into pumpkins at midnight.”
Ms. Hoffman, who spent 88 years connected to the university, died on July 18 at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare. She was 105 years old. Her son said the cause was Covid-19.
“A couple of people,” said Sherrill Ragans, a retired FSU administrator, “have sent an email saying, ‘I thought she was eternal.'”
Katherine Marie Blood was born on August 1, 1914 in Winter Haven, Florida. Her father, Norman Wyckoff Blood, “used to take wealthy Yankees on fishing trips,” Hoffman said, and later became a citrus grower. Her mother, Laura (McCrary) Blood, worked as a school teacher.
Katherine, known as Kitty, came to Florida State College for Women, which later became FSU, in 1932. It was the Depression, and her father paid for part of his tuition with packets of oranges.
She later became president of the student body, captain of the women’s baseball and volleyball teams, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and an exemplar of the “charm” chosen by her classmates in the 1936 yearbook when she graduated.
She hoped to earn a medical degree from Duke University, but refused to attend on principle after learning that the school ordered the female students to sign a promise not to marry during their studies. Instead, she earned a master’s degree in chemistry from Columbia University in 1938 and married her high school girlfriend, Harold Hoffman, who also became a chemist and was Florida’s assistant commissioner of agriculture.
Mrs. Hoffman returned to Florida State College for Women as a chemistry instructor in 1940. In 1947, the school changed its name and became co-op to accommodate some of the millions of veterans seeking to attend college after college. Second World War.
Although she did not have a doctorate, Mrs. Hoffman thrived in the academy, gaining notoriety for her skills as a teacher and administrator and writing textbooks for Prentice Hall and McGraw-Hill. In 1959, she was promoted to full professor.
When Mrs. Hoffman retired in 1984, it was an occasion to discover new ways to serve her university. She lectured on FSU history and helped organize her sesquicentennial celebration. After what her son described as moderate donations, the university named Ms. Hoffman after a scholarship, a series of lectures, and a teaching laboratory. When the lab was rededicated in 2018, Mrs. Hoffman attended the ceremony.
Harold Hoffman died in 1996.
When Ms. Hoffman was 102, her outspoken advocacy for women gained a national audience. The media, including Vox and People, carried comments he made to I Waited 96 Years, an initiative to collect interviews with women born before the 19th Amendment who planned in 2016 to vote for the first time on a presidential candidate.
“This choice means that women can achieve anything,” said Ms. Hoffman.
In her 90s, Mrs. Hoffman was known to be playing in a pink Cadillac driven by a non-Argentine teammate. While her son fished for the largemouth bass in the Wakulla River, Hoffman rowed her boat. She carried gallon jugs of water across the pine trees they had planted.
Norris Hoffman also became a professor of chemistry, teaching at the University of Southern Alabama at Mobile. He retired in 2013.
During Mr. Hoffman’s childhood, he and his mother planted seedlings on the family tree farm. “We would talk about the elements, their names and their properties on the periodic table,” he said. “I was brainwashing myself by chemistry.”
