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A Woman of the Century:   A Crowdsourcing Project of the Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries

April 23 - April 29

Women of the Week

Physician Ellen Lawson Dabbs and poet, novelist, and journalist Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald are this week's Women of the 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 numbers to the left of their images.

Ellen Lawson Dabbs (3).jpg

DABBS, Mrs. Ellen Lawson

April 25, 1853

physician

Mount Enterprise, TX

p. 224

Ellen Lawson Dabbs, M.D. knew from personal experience how important it was for women to get an education and have a profession, so she accepted leadership positions in various organizations, knowing that her voice would be heard on women's rights and other key issues well beyond Texas.

Some of those organizations were the Texas Woman's Press Association, the Industrial Union, and the Texas Equal Rights Association.

During her career, she also clerked for her husband, merchant Joseph Wilkes Dabbs, presented at conferences, and wrote for the National Economist.

Ellen found time for all of these activities while also being a wife and mother.  

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WETHERALD, Miss Agnes Ethelwyn

April 26, 1857

poet, novelist, and journalist

Rockwood, Ontario, CAN

p. 762

Agnes Ethelwyn Wetherald, a Canadian poet, novelist, and journalist, was born in Rockwood, Ontario, on April 26, 1857.  A Quaker, she came to the United States to attend the Friends Boarding School in Union Springs, New York. A writer from an early age, Ethelwyn published in St. Nicholas when she was just seventeen. She returned to Canada and graduated from Pickering College in Ontario.  

In addition to using her own name, Wetherald was known as "Bel Thistlewaite."  Her publications included The House of the Trees & Other Poems and a collaboration with Graeme Mercer Adam, An Algonquin Maiden:  A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada.

She contributed to both Canadian and American periodicals, including Canadian Monthly, Wide Awake, and Youth's Companion.  Agnes and Elizabeth Cameron collaborated as publishers of Our Wives and Daughters, a Canadian periodical.

Agnes passed away on March 10, 1940, at the age of eighty-two, and was buried in Friends Brick Church Grounds in Pelham, Ontario.