Lesley Aileen Hales Clyde, an educator and long-time member of the Utah Board of Regents and an advocate for gender equality, died on Christmas Eve. She was 93 years old and had suffered from metastatic breast cancer.
A native of Springfield, Utah, Clyde graduate from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, in 1944 with a bachelor’s degree in English. After raising three sons, she taught English at Brigham Young University for a decade.
In 1986 she was appointed to chair the Utah Task Force on Gender and Justice, which examined gender bias in the Utah court system. She also chaired the Utah Commission on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and was a founding member of the Utah Women’s Forum.
Clyde was a member of the Utah State Board of Regents from 1989 to 2001. She served as vice chair of the board for six of those years. She also served on the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education and sat of the board of trustees of the University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics.
The University of Utah honored Clyde’s service to the university by establishing the Aileen H. Clyde 20th Century Women’s Legacy Archive. The archive was established to preserve the history of women whose lives and work helped create social and cultural change in the state of Utah.