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, and Rev. Phebe Anne Hanaford, an author and Universalist minister from Nantucket, MA,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.