Ruth-Arlene (Wood) Howe was born on November 21, 1933, in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, to Curtis Alexander and Grace-Louise Randolf Wood. She completed a Bachelor of Arts at Wellesley College in 1955 and a Master of Social Work at Simmons College in 1957. She married Theodore Holmes Howe on June 29, 1957, and they went on to have four children: Marian, Curtis, Helen, and Edgar.

Howe worked as a psychiatric social worker with the Catholic Youth Service Bureau of Cleveland, Ohio, from 1957 to 1961. She returned to Boston and joined the board of the League of Women Voters, where she worked on issues affecting low-income housing and educational services from 1963 to 1968. She taught courses in social work at Simmons College from 1970 to 1978. During this time, she also pursued her Doctor of Jurisprudence from Boston College Law School (1971-1974) and passed the Massachusetts bar (1977). She began working at Boston College Law School as a visiting assistant professor of law in 1977, and she served as the assistant director on a grant-funded Law and Child Development project, “Legal bases for child protection,” from 1977 to 1979. She became an assistant professor at Boston College Law School in 1978, tenured as an associate professor in 1981, and was promoted to full professor in 1998, becoming the first Black woman to hold that rank at Boston College Law School.

Howe’s legal scholarship and service in the 1970s included co-authoring Child Neglect Laws in America in 1976 with Sanford Katz and Melba McGrath (published by the American Bar Association Section of Family Law) and serving as Guardian Ad Litem for the Massachusetts Family and Probate Court beginning in 1979, a role she held until 1999. She was a faculty advisor to the Boston College chapter of the Black Law Students Association, a founding member and treasurer of the Boston College Law School Black Alumni Network, and the founding faculty advisor to the Third World Law Journal (now part of the Boston College Law Review) in the 1980s. She served as the reporter for the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws project committee to create the “Uniform Putative and Unknown Fathers Act” from 1986 to 1989. She was a Herman Dunlop Fellow in Law and Public Policy at the Radcliffe College Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute from 1994 to 1995, and served on the Ethics Advisory Committee of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute from 1998 to 2003.

At Boston College, Howe was a longstanding member of the Law School’s Academic Standards Committee (1981-2007), and served as its chair from 1990 to 1992. She chaired the Minority Core Subcommittee of Admissions from 1992 to 1994. She also served on the Law School’s Admissions Committee (1981-2001), the 75th anniversary Planning Committee (2002-2007), multiple dean’s search committees, and the Boston College Black Studies Program Advisory Committee (1988-1993).

Howe retired from Boston College Law School and was named professor emerita in 2009. In 2017, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Massachusetts Black Lawyers Association. She was also honored with the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. She received multiple Boston College Law School Black Law Students Association distinguished faculty awards, and they named their annual Heritage dinner in her honor beginning in 2003.

Sources:

Gale Research Inc. Who’s Who among African Americans. 14th edition, 2000, p. 627.

Resumes and curricula vitae, Box 8, Folders 22-25, Ruth-Arlene Howe papers, BC.2025.135, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

“Ruth Wood affianced: Wellesley Alumna Will Be Wed to Theodore Holmes Howe.” New York Times, December 18, 1955.