Woman of the Century/Sarah Gibson Humphreys

HUMPHREYS, Mrs. Sarah Gibson, author and woman suffragist, born in southwestern Louisiana, on a sugar plantation, 17th May, 1830. Her father, Hon. Tobias Gibson, was a man of education and advanced ideas. Her mother was Louisiana Breckenridge Hart, of Kentucky, a woman of masculine intellect, unusual culture and SARAH GIBSON HUMPHREYS. great force of character. Until she was fourteen, Mrs. Humphreys' education was supervised by her parents, although the most accomplished teachers were employed to instruct her. At fourteen she was sent to the school of Miss Margaret Mercer, of Loudoun county, Virginia. For three years she studied in the French school of Charles Picot in Philadelphia. Her mother died soon after her return from school, and she assumed the charge of her father's summer home in Lexington, Ky., as well as the winter plantation home in Louisiana, and took the place of her mother in the care and control of six brothers younger than herself, and an infant sister. Two years later she became the wife of Jos. A. Humphreys, of Kentucky, a gentleman of culture and refinement. He died during the war, leaving her with a family of little children to bring up and a large estate to manage unaided. Since her children have been grown and she has been in a measure relieved of financial responsibilities, Mrs. Humphreys has been able to follow her inclination in literary pursuits and the cause of the emancipation of woman. Her first literary work was a novel, which she wrote when only thirteen, and which w;is never published. During the last ten years she has contributed stories, essays, letters and sketches to various magazines and papers north and south, always over a pen-name. One of her contributions to "Bedford's Magazine" was the "Negro Libertines in the South." The most original of Mrs. Humphrey's literary productions is an article read before the Convention of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association on "Man and Woman in the Bible and in Nature," in which she advanced the theory of the sexual duality of God, of the Adam made in His image, and of all His creatures which were in the beginning spiritual. Through social persecution for her advanced position, the responsibilities of wifehood, motherhood and widowhood, the magical word "Liberty" has been a talisman to her. As far as can be ascertained, Mrs, Humphreys is the only woman in the United States ever put on the board of directors of a public road by the vote of the officers and stockholders, and probably the only one ever elected to the office of public lecturer to an Alliance lodge. Both of these offices she holds at present. Mrs. Humphreys, gifted as a musician, writer and a woman of affairs, is a bright star in the galaxy of noted southern women.