After Wilkie Hughes graduated from Alexandria High School in Alexandria, Indiana, she entered Indiana University. There she became a member of the Beta Phi Chapter of Alpha Omicron Pi. Hughes served as Chapter President and was also President of the Junior Class. In addition, she was Treasurer of the Women’s League and a member of the Skelton Club.
After graduation in 1920, she taught Physiology and Hygiene at Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis. During the summers she worked as head nurse and night supervisor at Robert W. Long Hospital and she was President of the Indiana University Nurses Alumnae Association.
Hughes was awarded the 1925-26 Alpha Omicron Pi Fellowship in memory of Ruth Capen Farmer. The To Dragma article about the fellowship quoted the Dean of Indiana University’s School of Medicine feeling that Hughes was one of the most brilliant graduates of IU’s Nursing program.
During the summer of 1925 she worked at the Yale University School of Nursing, a training school that succeeded the Connecticut Training School for Nursing. Hughes and her friend Barbara Porter left Indianapolis on June 16 via automobile. They traveled from Indianapolis to Columbus, Ohio, and onto Cleveland. There they traveled by boat to Buffalo, New York, by way of Niagara Falls. From Toronto, they drove to Montreal. Once they crossed into the United States, they took in the New England sites before heading to the nursing school in Connecticut. That was a very ambitious trip for two twenty-something women to undertake before the advent of the interstate highway system.
In the fall of 1925, she stared a master’s degree at Columbia University. Hughes attended the Alpha Omicron Pi Founders’ Day celebration held at the Hotel Martinique that December. The four founders Alpha Omicron Pi founders were in attendance.
It appears she headed to Boston after earning her graduate degree from Columbia. In the 1930 census, she was employed by the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Ball State’s Memorial Hospital seems to have been the next stop where she taught nursing and was supervisor of nurse training.
In 1938, Hughes became general secretary of the New Jersey State Nurses Association in Newark. In March of 1944, as executive secretary of the New Jersey Nursing Council for War Service, she spoke to a group of young women at a vocational conference at Ridgeway High School in New Jersey. She was attempting to get some of them to join the Cadet Nursing Corps and she touted the opportunities awaiting women who became nurses. A 1946 publication of the American Nursing Association noted that she was Chairman of its Committee on Uniforms for Nurses in War Areas.
From 1957 to 1966, she worked for the National Practical Nursing Association. In a 1958 article in the Tucson Daily Citizen, described her thusly:
Occasionally one meets a person absolutely dedicated to a particular field of endeavor. Much less frequently, one meets a person who is both dedicated and objective. The really rare soul is one who combines dedication and objectivity with a sense of humor, a ready wit and a happy sparkly outlook on the world.
Hughes died on Saturday, October 14, 1967, after spending 14 months in the Americana Nursing Home in Anderson, Indiana. She was 72 years old.
