Women of the Week  

Lucia True Ames, an author, teacher, suffragist, and pacifist from Boscawen, NH, Elizabeth Cochrane, better known as "Nellie Bly," an author, journalist, and traveler from Cochrane Mills, PA, Rev. Phebe Anne Hanaford, an author and Universalist minister from Nantucket, MA, and Eliza Trask Hill, a woman suffragist and journalist from Warren, Massachusetts,had birthdays this week.  

• To learn about them by viewing their items, please click on their images.  

• To read their biographical sketches in A Woman of the Century, please click on the highlighted page number(s) to the left of their images.

Lucia True Ames, from Boscawen, New Hampshire, was born on May 5, 1856.  She was an author, teacher, suffragist, and pacifist who lived in Boston during her adult years.

Lucia's "The Home in the Tenement-House," published in The New England Magazine in 1893, her books, and her public lectures attest to her talent in finding a variety of ways for spreading the word about causes she believed in.  In addition, Lucia taught classes to adults on Ralph Waldo Emerson and other authors. 

She was a member of several organizations, including the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, and the American Peace Society.

Lucia's personal network included Jane Addams, Anna Garlin Spencer, and Edwin Doak Mead, the editor of The New England Magazine who became her husband.

Author, journalist, and traveler Elizabeth Cochrane, better known as "Nellie Bly," was born in Cochrane Mills, Pennsylvania, on May 5, 1867. She later lived in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and New York, New York.

She began her career as a writer for The Pittsburgh Sunday Dispatch, later serving as society editor, and she also penned many articles for The New York World.  As Elizabeth worked on her articles, she traveled to Mexico and many other places.

Elizabeth's social network included  Elizabeth Bisland, George A. Madden, Joseph J. Pulitzer, and John A. Cockerill.

She passed away on January 27, 1922.

Phebe Anne Hanaford, a Nantucket, Massachusetts, native who was born on May 6, 1829, contributed to A Woman of the Century after having written her own collective biography of women, Women of the Century (1877).

In addition to writing many books and editing two periodicals, Phebe was a well-known Universalist minister.  Rev. Hanaford was ordained in Hingham, Massachusetts, she served there and in several other communities, and she was chaplain for the Connecticut House and Senate.

Phebe also was a poet, an editor, a teacher, and a temperance reformer.  She was involved with the women's groups Sorosis and the Association for the Advancement of Women, as well as the Grand Templars.  Her personal network included Rev. Olympia Brown, Sophia Curtiss Hoffman, and three other women from Nantucket: Maria Mitchell,  Mary A. Brayton Woodbridge, and her relative Lucretia Mott.

Eliza Trask Hill, a native of Warren, Massachusetts, was born on May 10, 1840.  Her profile lists her as a woman suffragist and journalist, but she also was a wife, a mother, a teacher, and a supporter of several different causes.

With a father and grandfather who were ministers and parents who were both active in reform efforts, Eliza was raised in an atmosphere with people who gave back to their communities.  She followed their lead early in her life, presenting a flag to the Fifteenth Regiment of Massachusetts and speaking at that event.  She also taught for ten years, including time teaching in Pittsburgh, beginning a career of passionate engagement with education.  Eliza married John Lange Hill in 1866 and became a mother to three children.  

Despite her domestic responsibilities, Eliza found time to toil for the many causes she believed in.  As her A Woman of the Century profile explains, Eliza "labored earnestly for the redemption of abandoned women, but, believing that preventive is more effectual than reformatory work, she has identified herself with the societies that care for and help the working girls" (380).  An 1887 article in the St. Johnsbury Caledonian discussed how she and Ellen M. H. Richards led the New England Helping-Hand Society's efforts to establish a home for working women in Boston.

Eliza also contributed as a public speaker, an early member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (especially its committee on prison reform), a political activist, and a member of the Prohibition Party.

An ardent advocate of public education, Eliza was the founder and editor of Woman's Voice and Public School Champion.  She was elected to membership in the New England Woman's Press Association in 1890.   The next September, Eliza joined Julia Ward Howe, Mary A. Livermore, and Susan S. Fessenden on the speaking platform at Tremont Temple for a rally related to the upcoming school committee election.

Eliza also continued to advocate for reforms.  In late November of 1898, The Indianapolis Journal announced her upcoming talk, "Glimpses of Prison Life."  Two days later, the newspaper published a lengthy review of her speech, an article that reveals Eliza's style of combining logos and pathos, sharing statistics while also touching audiences with emotional stories of individuals whose lives led them to crime.

She passed away at her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 29, 1908, and was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.