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PREFACE.


Among all cyclopædias and books about famous women, this is intended to be unique and to supply a vacant niche in the reference library. The nineteenth century is woman's century. Since time began, no other era has witnessed so many and so great changes in the development of her character and gifts and in the multiplication of opportunities for their application. Even to those best informed on this subject, we believe that a glance at these pages will bring astonishment at the vast array of woman's achievements here chronicled, in hundreds of new vocations and avocations. Few eminent names and faces will here be missed, while many worthy names, which can not be found elsewhere, are strung upon this rosary of nineteenth-century achievement. Every department of life and work is here represented. One branch of philanthropic work, that of the missionary, is less numerously represented than its importance deserves, only because an adequate showing would require the addition of nearly every missionary society in our country since missionary societies began to be. This book is not alone a book of record of famous names, but one which aims to show what women have done in the humbler as in the higher walks of life. It is a record of American women offered, at the close of four centuries of life in the New World, to the consideration of those who would know what the nineteenth century of Christian civilization has here brought forth, and what are the vast outlook and the marvelous promise of the twentieth century.

Christmas, 1892.