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.
