Women Can Serve God Laura Askew Haygood 1864
Although she was nearly forty years old when asked to serve as a missionary in China, Laura Askew Haygood firmly set her sights on educating women in Asia and became the first female sent into foreign missionary work by the Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Church. With her strong commitment to equal education for women – unheard of in China at that time – Laura taught, served, and worked in China for seventeen years until her death in1900. After teaching for seven years at the Clopton School in Shanghai, Laura founded the McTyeire School as a home for missionaries and a Christian school for Chinese girls. According to the Shanghai Daily News, “Education was in English, teachers were foreign, and the outlook was decidedly Western.” Laura Haygood taught many of China’s most influential women of the early 20th century and others followed in their footsteps. Among the school’s most famous alumnae are three sisters, Ai-Ling, Ching-Ling, and Mei-Ling Soong, all of whom left China for further education at Wesleyan. They were the first Chinese women to be educated in the United States. Laura’s lifelong passion for teaching began immediately after graduating from Wesleyan. In less than one year, she began her own school for girls in Atlanta, which later merged with Girls High School where she served as a teacher. In 1877, Laura became the first principal of Girls High School and was greatly beloved by her students and faculty. With a true servant’s heart, Laura also organized home mission societies that provided food and shelter to the disadvantaged in Atlanta. Her work with the poor included establishing an industrial school to train people in the skills needed to hold decent jobs. In 1926, Haygood Memorial United Methodist Church was founded in the Morningside neighborhood of Atlanta in honor of Laura Haygood and her brother Bishop Atticus Green Haygood. Another tribute came when the Women’s Board of the Methodist Church, South, founded the Laura A. Haygood Home and School in Soochow, China. In 2000, Laura Askew Haygood was inducted into Georgia Women of Achievement.
Women Can Reform
Mary Clare de Graffenried 1865 Called a firebrand graduate by Atlanta Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley, Mary Clare de Graffenried began her long career as a community activist as a Wesleyan student. At commencement exercises in 1865, to the astonishment of the faculty, her classmates, parents, and audience, Clare set aside her faculty approved valedictory address and instead gave tribute to “the heroes in gray” and vehemently condemned the behavior of the Union soldiers encamped near the College. Angered by her scathing remarks, Colonel James Wilson, commanding officer of the federal troops in Macon, threatened to close Wesleyan Female College permanently. In 1876, Clare moved to Washington, D.C. where she taught mathematics, literature, and Latin at Georgetown Female Seminary. Ten years later, she began working for the Bureau of Labor inspecting factories and interviewing laborers and their families. In 1892, Clare was sent to Belgium to collect data on industrial education comparing the lives of working-class families in Europe and the United States. As a result of her investigations, she quickly became an outspoken advocate for the welfare of working-class women and children. In 1890, her prize-winning essay on child labor received national recognition and was published by the American Economic Association. Soon afterwards, she became a popular lecturer at women’s groups such as the National Conference of Charities and Corrections and the Women’s Christian Association. It is, however, her articles advocating radical reform for which Clare is best remembered. Her exposé, “The Georgia Cracker in the Cotton Mills” published in The Century in 1891, vividly depicted the struggling lives of Southern women and children working in textile mills, and the deplorable working conditions. Offending politicians and factory owners alike, she often stated that there was a “criminal indifference” to child labor laws. An early social reformer, Clare called for strong state and federal child labor laws and better educational opportunities. Buried in Macon’s historic Rose Hill Cemetery, Mary Clare de Graffenried’s zeal for radical social reform and justice is as relevant today as it was more than a century ago.
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