Eveline M. Burns

Who was Eveline M. Burns?

Eveline Mabel Richardson Burns was a British-American economist, writer and instructor.

Born Eveline Mabel Richardson in London, England, she was the only child of Eveline Maud Falkner and Frederick Haig Richardson. Her mother died following her birth, so her father remarried and had three more children. Eveline attended Seatham Secondary School, then entered the London School of Economics at age 16 and graduated in 1920, earning a B.S. with first class honors. In 1922 she married the economist Arthur Robert Burns and the couple emigrated to the United States. After the award of her Ph.D. in 1926, she gained a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fellowship. She and her husband traveled the country for two years while writing The Economic World.

She became professor of Social Work at Columbia University in 1928. In 1933, during the Great Depression, she returned to England in 1933 to study unemployment programs. In 1934, as a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Committee on Economic Security, she helped design the US Social Security Act of 1935. During the following years she served with the American Association for Social Security, the Social Welfare Committee of the YWCA and the Executive Board of the Women's Club of New York. From 1939–1943 she was head of the economic security and health section of the National Resources Planning Board. In the 1940s, she was the Anna Shaw Lecturer at Bryn Mawr College and a professor at Columbia.