Alice Van Ess Brewer is a Mount Holyoke alum from the class of 1941. She was born and raised in Iraq by her father, John Van Ess, and her mother, Dorothy Firman Van Ess, who is also a Mount Holyoke alum from the class of 1906. Her parents moved from the United States to Iraq as educational missionaries around 1915. A globe trotter from a young age, she attended a variety of schools around the world, such as in India, Switzerland, and the United States before graduating in 1937 from Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts. She joined Mount Holyoke College later that year and graduated in 1941 with a B.A in religion.
Following her education at Mount Holyoke, Alice Van Ess Brewer worked as a secretary for a couple years before joining the United States Navy in 1943. In 1947, she entered the United States Foreign Services and traveled to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and Beirut, Lebanon. While in Beirut, Alice Van Ess met William Brewer, whom she married in 1949. They had three children. She accompanied her husband on assignments to Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, Washington D.C., Afghanistan, Mauritius, and Sudan before returning to the United States after his retirement in 1978. They finally settled in Massachusetts in 1986 and she passed away in 2005 at the age of eighty-four.
