Several factors accelerated Radcliffe College’s full integration into Harvard University, but among them “the women’s liberation movement was very important,’’ said Amey Amory DeFriez, whose leadership of Radcliffe’s board of trustees helped prepare the schools for their historic merger.
“Those words even have an odd ring to me now, and it wasn’t that long ago,’’ she mused in 2000, a few months after the two schools became one.
A Radcliffe alumna, she had joined her college’s board in 1978, a year after the schools signed an agreement that marked a significant step toward merging, and she chaired the board from 1980 to 1990.
“I think the big societal push to bring women to an equal status with men affected our thinking more than we knew, even though Radcliffe had always felt themselves, certainly as students, to be co-equals, if not a little bit more intelligent than their Harvard counterparts,’’ she recalled in a Radcliffe oral history interview.
Mrs. DeFriez, who was 90 when she died in her Boston home Jan. 7, had also played a role in Radcliffe’s $100 million capital campaign, which was launched in 1993, after she left the board. At one point, as trustees and others involved in the campaign met to discuss “what we were aspiring to do and how we were going to do it, Amey interrupted,’’ recalled Linda S. Wilson, who was Radcliffe’s president when the fund-raising began.
“She looked around and said, ‘Ladies, I think the bottom line is we have to open our pocketbooks a little wider.’ It was that kind of statement that made everybody sit up a little straighter and say, ‘Yes we can,’’’ said Wilson, who added that Mrs. DeFriez “was also a fantastic fund-raiser.’’
In 1996, Mrs. DeFriez received the Harvard Medal, awarded by the Harvard Alumni Association for outstanding service to the Harvard community. The following year, she received the Helen Homans Gilbert Award for Distinguished Volunteer Service, Radcliffe’s highest honor for volunteering.
During more than a decade chairing Radcliffe’s board, Mrs. DeFriez played key roles in expanding the Schlesinger Library and in renovating the former Radcliffe Gymnasium to house both the Murray Research Center and what was then the Radcliffe Dance Center. She did so in an era when Harvard and Radcliffe sometimes competed in fund-raising and other realms.
“The chairman of the board has to be a very special kind of person, and Amey had that kind of leadership acumen for collaborating across a kind of boundary between the two institutions,’’ Wilson said. “I think the groundwork laid at that time by Amey and others she drew to work with her established a fine foundation for what could be done.’’
Mrs. DeFriez “understood the complexity of organizations. She was personally vivacious and warm and interesting and intellectually very lively, so people liked to be with her. She had good ideas and a good sense of the practical,’’ Wilson added.
“I have been fascinated by the way groups work and how they can accomplish more than the individual,’’ Mrs. DeFriez told The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, in 1997, when she received the Helen Homans Gilbert Award.
“My goal was to see Harvard and Radcliffe working together for women in the educational community,’’ she added.
The second of five children, and the only daughter, Amey Amory was born in Boston. Her mother was the former Amey Peters, and her father, Harold Amory, was a cotton merchant who died when Mrs. DeFriez was 11.
Mrs. DeFriez grew up in Dover in a Boston Brahmin family. Her brothers attended Harvard, she noted in the Radcliffe interview, as did her father and both grandfathers. She graduated from the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Conn., whose board she later led. At the urging of a guidance counselor there, she initially attended Bryn Mawr College before switching to Radcliffe.
Two of her brothers were at Harvard, and she attended Radcliffe when some advanced classes had become coed. At times, however, the class material was different for courses segregated by gender. Mrs. DeFriez and one of her brothers each took a Chaucer class from the same professor. “At 10 a.m. I attended the expurgated version. My brother at 9 had heard the original with the salacious details,’’ she noted. “Our 11 a.m. coffee gave us the chance to compare.’’
Through mutual friends she met Dr. Albert Ivins Croll DeFriez, whom she married in 1948, at the outset of her senior year in the class of 1949. “He was home from the war and smitten,’’ said their son, Nick of Chelsea, Vt.
At Radcliffe, she concentrated on Romance languages and had planned “to end up as a UN translator, but that got sidetracked by marriage and children,’’ she said in the Radcliffe interview. “I’ve always been interested in language, and also in the different windows that this gives us to other cultures.’’
She completed her coursework during the fall semester and moved to New York City, where her husband was finishing his residency. They subsequently returned to Boston and lived for many years in Needham and Wellesley.
Dr. DeFriez, who died in 2003, had a family practice for decades, and had been chief of medical services for the Chelsea Soldiers’ Home, president of Boston Tuberculosis Association, and chairman of the general staff at New England Deaconess Hospital.
As her children grew up, Mrs. DeFriez worked as a secretary to the producers of the WGBH-TV shows “The French Chef’’ and “Joyce Chen Cooks.’’ In later years, she cofounded and led the Conference of Board Chairmen, an organization of leaders of small, independent liberal arts colleges, and was a trustee for the Huntington Theatre Company and New England Deaconess Hospital’s Mind/Body Medical Institute.
“She was a powerful and creative person who started doing these wonderful things with her life,’’ her son said.
“Her first passion after we grew up was education,’’ he said, adding that “some people get on boards for the name recognition. She actually made everybody work.’’
In addition to her son, Mrs. DeFriez leaves two daughters, Pauline of Portland, Ore., and Elizabeth Gibson of Pawlet, Vt.; two brothers, Bill Amory of Natick and Jim Amory of Endicott, N.Y.; four grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
A memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. Monday in the Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts.
After her husband died, Mrs. DeFriez moved to the South End, where she began volunteering in the neighborhood, while remaining involved in the lives of her family and extended family.
“She was an artist at conversation. She just loved great conversations,’’ her son said.
Peter Amory of Boxborough, Mrs. DeFriez’s nephew and godson, recalled that “she was just the best lunch companion ever. She was so quick to learn and connect with people of all ages. She was so curious it was infectious.’’
In the South End well into her 80s, when her own grandchildren were grown, Mrs. DeFriez “wanted to make herself useful in the elementary schools, so she became one of the grandmothers who volunteered to help the children,’’ Wilson said. “There she was, in the little chairs, helping them learn to read. That’s just the kind of person Amey was.’’
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
