Booth, Maud Elizabeth Charlesworth Ballington (13 September 1865–26 August 1948), Salvation Army leader, cofounder of the Volunteers of America, and prison reformer, was born in Limpsfield Surrey, England, the daughter of Samuel Beddome Charlesworth and Maria Beddome, Samuel’s first cousin. Her father served as the minister of an aristocratic country parish but was reassigned to a church in a poor section of London in 1868. William Booth, the itinerant Wesleyan preacher who had broken from the Methodist church three years earlier to found the Christian Mission (renamed the Salvation Army in 1878), had rented the building across the street from Maud’s father’s church, and Booth’s open-air meetings introduced Maud to the Salvation Army’s noisy style of street-corner evangelism....
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Booth, Maud Elizabeth Charlesworth Ballington (1865-1948), Salvation Army leader, cofounder of the Volunteers of America, and prison reformer
Regina G. Kunzel
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Comstock, Elizabeth Leslie Rous Wright (1815-1891), Quaker minister and reformer
Thomas D. Hamm
Comstock, Elizabeth Leslie Rous Wright (30 October 1815–03 August 1891), Quaker minister and reformer, was born in Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, the daughter of William Rous, a shopkeeper, and Mary Kekwick. Her parents were Quakers with family ties to the Society of Friends going back to the seventeenth century. They reared her in a strict Quaker atmosphere, an upbringing reinforced by education in Quaker schools at Islington and Croyden. In 1839 Elizabeth Rous returned to Croyden as a teacher; in 1842 she joined the staff of the Friends school at Ackworth. She remained there until her marriage in 1848 to Leslie Wright, a Quaker market gardener of Walthamstow in Essex. They had one child. After her husband’s death in 1851, Elizabeth Wright kept a shop for a time at Bakewell in Devonshire. In 1854 she immigrated with her daughter and an unmarried sister to Belleville, Ontario. Four years later she married John T. Comstock, a prosperous Quaker farmer of Rollin, Michigan, where Elizabeth Comstock and her daughter moved....
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Davis, Katharine Bement (1860-1935), social worker, prison reformer, and sex researcher
Sarah Stage
Davis, Katharine Bement (15 January 1860–10 December 1935), social worker, prison reformer, and sex researcher, was born in Buffalo, New York, the daughter of Frances Bement and Oscar Bill Davis, a manager for the Bradstreet Company, precursor of Dun and Bradstreet, the credit rating firm. When her father suffered business reversals following the panic of 1873, Davis had to postpone plans for college and work as a public school teacher for ten years. She continued her studies independently and in 1890 entered Vassar College at the age of thirty, graduating two years later with honors....
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Farnham, Eliza Wood Burhans (1815-1864), author, prison reformer, and proponent of the superiority of women
Lori D. Ginzberg
Farnham, Eliza Wood Burhans (17 November 1815–15 December 1864), author, prison reformer, and proponent of the superiority of women, was born in Rensselaerville, New York, the daughter of Cornelius Burhans and Mary Wood. Her father’s occupation is not known; her mother, a Quaker, died in 1820, after which her five children were scattered. Eliza eventually went to live with an aunt and uncle in Maple Springs, New York. The aunt, she later recalled, raised her through “neglect and hardship” ( ...
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Gibbons, Abigail Hopper (1801-1893), prison reformer and abolitionist
Lori D. Ginzberg
Gibbons, Abigail Hopper (07 December 1801–16 January 1893), prison reformer and abolitionist, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Isaac Tatem Hopper and Sarah Tatum, Quakers. Her father earned a moderate living as a tailor and later as a bookseller but devoted most of his time to aiding runaway slaves and free blacks. Her mother was a minister in the Society of Friends. Two years after her mother’s death in 1822, her father remarried, and in 1829 he moved with most of his family to New York City. Abigail joined them in 1830 and helped support the family by teaching at a Quaker school....
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Harris, Mary Belle (1874-1957), prison administrator
Marilyn Elizabeth Perry
Harris, Mary Belle (19 August 1874–22 February 1957), prison administrator, was born in Factoryville, Pennsylvania, the daughter of John Howard Harris, a Baptist minister, and Mary Elizabeth Mace, who died when Mary Belle was six years old. First educated at the Keystone Academy, Mary Belle graduated from Bucknell University, where her father had become president in 1889. In 1893 she received a music degree from Bucknell; she earned an A.B. in 1894 and an A.M. in Latin and classics in 1895. She next enrolled at the University of Chicago, where she obtained a Ph.D. in Sanskrit and Indo-European Comparative Philology in 1900....
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Little, Sophia Louisa Robbins (1799-1893), writer and reformer
Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven
Little, Sophia Louisa Robbins (1799–1893), writer and reformer, was born in Newport, Rhode Island, the daughter of U.S. senator Asher Robbins, an attorney, and Mary Ellery. Educated locally, she married William Little, Jr., of Boston in 1824; they had three children. Her first publication was a poem, “Thanksgiving,” included in a Boston gift book, ...
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Peter, Sarah Worthington King (10 May 1800–06 February 1877), penal reformer, women's advocate, and benefactress
Hedda Lautenschlager
Peter, Sarah Worthington King (10 May 1800–06 February 1877), penal reformer, women's advocate, and benefactress, penal reformer, women’s advocate, and benefactress, was born in Chillicothe, Ohio, the daughter of Thomas Worthington and Eleanor Van Swearingen. Her father was a wealthy landowner, politician, and a U.S. senator and later governor of Ohio....
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Tutwiler, Julia Strudwick (1841-1916), educator, reformer, and humanitarian
Elizabeth D. Schafer
Tutwiler, Julia Strudwick (15 August 1841–24 March 1916), educator, reformer, and humanitarian, was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The daughter of Henry Tutwiler and Julia Ashe, she grew up in a home devoted to education, which became her lifework. Her father had earned a master’s degree in foreign languages at the University of Virginia and had accepted a position as the first professor of ancient languages at the University of Alabama when it had opened in 1831. Resigning in 1837 because of a financial dispute, he established Greene Springs Academy in Havana, south of Tuscaloosa. His daughters studied Latin, science, and mathematics with boys, upsetting many citizens. Tutwiler and her father taught slaves and poor white children to read. This experience influenced her to devote her life to serving others. Many of her classmates gained prominent positions as adults and supported her causes....
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Wittpenn, Caroline Bayard Stevens (1859-1932), penal reformer, social worker, and philanthropist
Anna Brahm Kane
Wittpenn, Caroline Bayard Stevens (21 November 1859–04 December 1932), penal reformer, social worker, and philanthropist, was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, the daughter of Edwin Augustus Stevens, inventor, railroad manager, shipbuilder, and founder of Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, and Martha Bayard Dod, social worker and founder of Holy Innocents Church, now All Saints Parish, Hoboken. Members of the Stevens family, established in Hoboken since the 1780s, were instrumental in developing the steamship lines and railroads of nineteenth-century America. The family tradition of philanthropy and personal involvement in helping others and her parents’ example, especially that of her mother, was a major influence on the socially conscious activities and interests Wittpenn tirelessly exhibited during her adult life....
