Her Name Was Mary

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Mary, the founder

and feminist too

 without her around

what would we do

..... MARY SUMNER began the Mothers Union in 1876. Its aim was to arouse parents to a sense of responsibility for the religious upbringing of their children. In fourteen years its journal grew in circulation from a single parish to over 13,000 subscribers. In 1912 a count revealed that the membership of the Mothers Union was almost 279,000, almost all the mothers being working class

..... MARY ELIZABETH LEASE was an intemperate American temperance agitator and Populist campaigner who became famous as a reformer and demagogue. Called to the Kansas Bar in the late 1870s she declared in a speech in 1890 " The farmers of Kansas must raise less corn and more hell"

..... MARY BAKER EDDY was the discoverer and founder of Christian Science. Due to the spiritual enlightenment she received with recovery from a serious injury in 1866 she attributed her discovery of Christian Science and began to work out her own system. In 1876 the Christian Science Association was formed and by 1879 the various associations were merged in the Church of Christ Scientist. Mary also founded and edited the Journal of Christian Science and until her death in 1910 never ceased to be the actual leader of the movement and the chief author of its writings

..... MARY CARPENTER - English reformer born in Exeter in 1807. In 1846 she opened a ragged school in Bristol and in 1852 a reformatory. Her book Juvenile Delinquents which was published in 1853 resulted in a law being passed which allowed magistrates to send children to reformatories instead of prison. She died in 1877

..... MARY RITTER BEARD was born in Indianapolis in 1876, the daughter of a reformist lawyer and schoolteacher mother. She was a keen suffragist and trade unionist and was involved in the founding of the working men's college Ruskin Hall in England with her husband. She became an organizer for the National Women's Trade Union and from 1910-1912 edited ' The Woman Voter'. From 1913 to 1919 she was a member of the militant faction of the suffragettes led by Alice Paul but resigned in 1920. She then went on to make a considerable reputation as a lecturer and writer

..... MARY McCLEOD BETHUNE, one of 17 children of former slaves, was born in South Carolina in 1875. In 1904 she opened a school in Florida which merged with a boys school in 1923 and became the Cookman-Bethune College. She was its President and by the time of her retirement in 1942 the college had 1000

students. Her real advancements were made in the cause of the black people and in 1932 she founded the National Council for Negro Workers and three years later the National Association of Coloured People gave her the Springham Medal. In 1936 she was appointed Director of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration by President Roosevelt and she served in this post for eight years working for better educational, recreational and employment opportunities

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