Gisela Kahn Gresser

Who was Gisela Kahn Gresser?

Gisela Kahn Gresser was one of the first two female chess players in the United States, and one of the first seventeen players in the world, to be awarded the title of Woman International Master in 1950 when FIDE created official titles. She was also the first American woman to be inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame. She won the U.S. Women's Chess Championship in 1944, 1948, 1955, 1957, 1962, 1965, 1966, 1967, and 1969.

Gresser learned chess at a very late age. On a cruise from France to New York in the late 1930s, she borrowed a chess manual from a fellow passenger and taught herself how to play. By the end of the cruise, she was hooked. In 1938, she was a spectator at the first U.S. Women's Chess Championship tournament, organized by Caroline Marshall and held at the Rockefeller Center in New York City. She first played in the championship in 1940, and in 1944 she won it with a perfect score.

Gresser studied classics at Radcliffe. She won a prestigious Charles Elliott Norton fellowship, which she used to continue her studies at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. In 1927, she returned to New York, where she married William Gresser, a New York City attorney and musicologist, who died in 1982. She was a housewife, and raised their two sons, Ion and Julian. Gresser was an accomplished painter and musician, as well as a classical scholar. She went on safari many times, even in her eighties.