Eartha Mary Magdalene White 

Born November 8, 1876 in Jacksonville, she was an African-American vocalist, educator, administrator and humanitarian. She was raised by Clara White and graduated from Stanton School and moved to New York City where she attended Madame Thurber’s National Conservancy of Music.  She joined the Oriental American Opera Company, the country’s first black opera company.  Eartha toured as a lyric soprano in American, Europe and Asia with the company but returned frequently for Jacksonville for visits.

On one visit she met and fell in love with James Jordan a railway worker and their wedding was set for June 1896 but while she was still working on the tour in May she received news of his death. She ended her singing career and returned to Florida where she taught at Bayard for a number of years.   In 1901 she began to buy real estate at low prices and selling at a profit.  By 1905 she had saved enough for a dry goods store and several other businesses.  She reinvested her considerable wealth in the black community, establishing Boys and Girls clubs, recreational centers and parks.  She operated the only orphanage for black children in the state of Florida. She was the most proud of the Clara White Mission, named for her adoptive mother, which offered food and shelter to the homeless and destitute.  She became an influential force in Jacksonville’s social welfare, focused in prison reform and established an orphanage for African-American children. She created a home for unwed mothers, a nursery for children of working mothers, a tuberculosis rest home and in 1902 a nursing home for elderly African-Americans.

In 1971 she was the guest of President Richard M. Nixon and was referred to as “an institution in Jacksonville” and even when confined to a wheel chair she remained active.   She received numerous honors and awards and or the last years of her life, her birthday we celebrated in the city’s civic auditorium.  She died in January 1974 at the age of ninety seven. 

Annie Smith Peck

"I decided in my teens that I would do what one woman could do to show that women had as much brains as men and could do things as well if she gave them her undivided attention."

Born October 19, 1850 in Providence RI.  She graduated from RI State Normal School and taught in Providence for a while then took a position of preceptress of the Saginaw, Michigan high school.

While traveling abroad in 1885 she became very interested in mountain climbing after seeing the Matterhorn. As a child she was often in fierce competition with her three older brothers resulting in great courage, stamina and daring all of which she employed climbing.  Her first climb was Mount Shasta in California then in 1895 she climbed the Matterhorn achieving instant acclaim, not only because she was a woman but for her climbing costume of knickerbockers, long tunic and a felt hat with a veil.  In 1897 she climbed an 18,314 foot peak in Mexico the highest peak ever climbed by a woman.  “I often wonder what Wilbur Wright would have thought had he known that I had climbed higher on my two feet than he had in his airplane!”

                                                                                 

She was petite, attractive, extremely feminine always taking audiences by surprise during lectures about her climbs which were illustrated with stereopticon slides made from her own photos.

After conquering the mountains of Europe Annie moved on to parts of South America in her quest to reach “some height where no MAN had previously stood.”  In 1904 she broke her previous record when she mastered the 21,300 foot Mount Sorata in Bolivia. 

At sixty one she was the first woman to climb Mount Coropura in Peru where as a statement for women’s suffrage she planted a “Votes for Women” pennant on its summit.  Her last climb was Mount Madison in New Hampshire at the age of eighty two.  She died in 1935.

Ellis Reynolds Shipp  “I do not wish to make too many resolutions lest I shall not be enabled to execute them, but I believe it is better to make them and break them than do nothing.”

Born January 20^th 1872 in Davis County Iowa but at the age of five traveled with her family to the new Mormon settlement in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake.  She met Brigham Young in 1864 and he invited him into his larger family and school where she resided until 1866 and her marriage to Milford Bard Young and others  disapproved of Shipp because he was eleven years her senior and twice divorced but  Ellis ignored advise of family and friends and Milford gradually took on three more wives.

In 1873 Young delivered a sermon urging women “to come forth as doctors in these Valleys.” Within two years Ellis’s sister-wife Maggie and she were sent off to the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. She worked hard and graduated with honors despite being pregnant her final year.  She returned to Salt Lake establishing a private practice with special focus on Obstetrics, diseases of women and minor surgery.  She also opened her own School of Obstetrics and nursing while training others women for service in the western Mormon Community. She practiced and taught well into her eighties and was called “Grand Old Lady of Utah.” She delivered more than 5,000 babies during this fifty year career in addition to having ten of her own!  She did much to educate women in first aid, sanitation and disease prevention.  When she died at ninety-two, a renowned doctor wrote that she was the “outstanding woman of the last one hundred years, and I believe it will be another one hundred years before Utah produces another woman whose service to mankind exceeds that which she had rendered.”

Hannah Kent Schoff

June 3^rd, 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.