Women of the Week

Author Lydia Huntley Sigourney, anti-slavery agitator and preacher Mary Grew, educator and author Catharine Esther Beecher, and physician and surgeon Cora Belle Brewster 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 number(s) to the left of their images.

Lydia Huntley Sigourney, one of the most famous female writers of the nineteenth century, was born in Norwich, Connecticut on September 1, 1791.  As a young woman, Lydia taught in her hometown.  In 1819, she married Charles Sigourney and became the mother of five children.  Unfortunately, she lost three children as infants and her son Andrew at age nineteen.

During her adult life, Sigourney lived in Hartford, where she wrote and engaged in philanthropic work.  "The Sweet Singer of Hartford," as she was known, contributed to Godey's Lady's Book, Graham's Magazine, and other periodicals.  Lydia also wrote many books, including Young Ladies' Offering; or, Gems of Prose and Poetry, and penned a memoir of poet Felicia Hemans.

Her friends and supporters included Nancy Maria Hyde, Daniel Wadsworth, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Sarah Josepha Hale, George R. Graham, and Rufus Wilmot Griswold.

Lydia passed away on June 10, 1865 and was buried in Hartford's Spring Grove Cemetery. Her memoir, Letters of Life, with an Appendix by her daughter Mary Huntley Sigourney Russell, was published by D. Appleton and Company in 1866.

Mary Grew, an anti-slavery agitator and preacher, was born in Hartford, Connecticut on September 1, 1813.  She later lived in Boston, Massachusetts and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Mary was devoted to abolition, speaking on the topic and collaborating with others to fight slavery through the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.  

Also interested in women's rights, Mary was a founder and leader of the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association.  

Eager to share her ideas on religion with a large audience, Mary became a Unitarian minister and preached at churches of many denominations.

Mary passed away on October 10, 1896.

Catharine Esther Beecher, a member of the famous Beecher family, was an educator and author.   She was born in East Hampton, New York on September 6, 1800, and spent much of her childhood in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Beecher began the Hartford Female Seminary and later started the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. 

In addition to Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, and several other books, she wrote for Appleton's Journal, Christian Spectator, and the Connecticut Observer.  In a September 4, 1869 piece in Appleton's Journal, "Something for Women better than the Ballot," Beecher discusses the American Woman's Educational Association's proposed endowments for a women's institution.

She passed away on May 12, 1878.

Dr. Cora Belle Brewster was born in Almond, New York on September 6, 1859.  She attended Alfred University and became a teacher in Smethport, Pennsylvania.  Next, Cora Belle attended Northwestern University, where she decided to change career paths and went into business as a purchasing agent.  A few years later, when she moved to Baltimore, Cora Belle began the study of medicine that led her to become a doctor.  After starting at the Medical College for Women in Baltimore, she decided to move to Boston to study at The College of Physicians and Surgeons. Her training also included a stint at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.

As Dr. Cora Belle began her medical career in the mid-1880s, she established a joint practice in Baltimore with her sister Dr. Flora A. Brewster, another woman in A Woman of the Century.  At the end of that decade, they published the Baltimore Family Health Journal, which later became The Homeopathic Advocate and Health Journal.  In 1890, she became a gynecological surgeon at the new Maryland Homeopathic Hospital and Free Dispensary.

When Cora Belle spoke about "Heredity" at the 1895 Congress of Professional Women in Atlanta, The Alexandria Gazette published many quotes from her address.

By 1899, her sanitarium was at 1027 Madison Avenue in Baltimore.  The next June, she was in Washington, D.C. presenting a paper about "Reflex Ovarian Pain" at the annual conference of The American Institute of Homeopathy.  Cora Belle was prominent in her field, and the 1907 New York Tribune article called her "one of the foremost women physicians in the country."