Thursday, June 7, 2012

Hannah Kent Schoff


June 3rd, 1863 in Upper Darby, PA. 

She married Frederic Schoff, an engineer from Massachusetts at the age of twenty.  They settled in Philadelphia and raised seven children. In 1897 she attended the First National Congress of Mothers serving as the organizations vice president and later as president.  Under her administration membership climbed to 190,000 with thirty seven state branches. 

One morning in May 1899 as she was sipping a  cup of coffee and read her morning paper, she was incensed to read an article titled “A Prodigy of Crime” about child, motherless since she was two, inmate of an orphanage, then a drudge in a city boarding house who was arrested and tried in criminal court and sentenced to jail for allegedly starting a fire.  She was branded a criminal at the age of eight!  Motherless, friendless and doomed to a life unimaginable, Hannah took action  saying, “the injustice in the treatment  of this poor child let me to the determination to rescue her if possible and do what I should wish someone to do for my own little girl were she in a similar position.”

She organized the International  Conference on Child Welfare in Washington D.C. in 1908. Two more conferences followed in 1911 and 1914. Her passion was juvenile court and probation worked tirelessly to educate and create juvenile court systems that were just and helped support and rehabilitate juveniles in her state and in three others. She was the first woman to address the Parliament of Canada where she trained  probation workers for their new juvenile court system.

She published two books on children and the legal system.  Hannah died in 1940.