Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/551

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
512
Part Taken by Women in American History


the household arts of spinning, weaving, netting and embroidery, her school advantages being the most limited, but at the age of twenty she entered Sanderson Academy, at Ashfield, as a pupil. Being imbued with a deep religious spirit, she worked among the pupils for their conversion. Her work spread among the people of Ashfield, Buckland and Derry. Ipswich was the scene of her earliest labors. Until 1700 girls were not admitted to the public schools of Boston, and from 1790 to 1792 they were allowed to attend only in the summer months. There were more than one hundred colleges for young men in the state of Massachusetts, when in 1836 she was granted the first charter for "a school for the systematic higher education of women," Mount Holyoke Seminary. She raised the thirty thousand dollars deemed requisite to obtain this charter. Her purpose was as philanthropic as her impulses were religious, and she sought to increase the usefulness of women as well as to bring them to Christ. During the first six years of her presidency of the seminary, not a graduate or a pupil left the school without a deep religious faith.

Her intense consecration to the spiritual work made her essentially a missionary, and it was her desire to spread the words of Christ through the far distant lands. She organized the first missionary society in Buckland in her early years. She never would consent to receive any salary as president of the seminary, but consecrated all the moneys received, except two hundred and fifty dollars a year, to the missionary work. Hardly a class went out of the seminary which did not have among its number one or two, or even more, missionaries ready for the field. Her monument stands to-day in the grounds of the Mount Holyoke Seminary, and her works live after her. She stands as one of the earliest pioneers for the higher education for women.

MRS. T. C. DOREMUS.

Born in New York, but her parents moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey. She spent her early childhood in that city; in 1821 married a merchant of the city of New York, and returned there to live. Though a communicant of the Reformed Dutch Church, she was a woman of broad religious ideas, and of strong and independent mind. She became an enthusiastic worker in the missionary field. Organizations were formed and had their meetings in her house. In those days there were no facilities for procuring ready-made things to be sent out to the missionary fields, so she organized societies for making garments to be sent to those in the far ends of the earth. She did a great deal of work among the Greeks and Turks, also taking an interest in the missions on the frontier in Canada. In 1859, the Woman's Union Missionary Society was formed, embracing all denominations of Christian women, and working independently of all boards, its direct object being an agency to send out teachers and missionaries to redeem the women of Persia and the East from the degradation in which our missionaries had found them. She worked with untiring energy, giving her time, money and interest to the work, but though devoting her thought and time to this work, she never for one moment neglected her family. She did not allow her work to interfere with her duty to her family of nine children, to whom she was all that a mother could