Women of Achievement
Benjamin Brawley
Women of Achievement / Written for the Fireside Schools
THE FIRESIDE SCHOOLS
The work of the Fireside Schools was begun in 1884 by Joanna P. Moore, who was born in Clarion County, Pennsylvania, September 26, 1832, and who died in Selma, Alabama, April 15, 1916. For fifty years Miss Moore was well known as an earnest worker for the betterment of the Negro people of the South. Beginning in the course of the Civil War, at Island No. 10, in November, 1863, she gave herself untiringly to the work to which she felt called. In 1864 she ministered to a group of people at Helena, Arkansas. In 1868 she went to Lauderdale, Mississippi, to help the Friends in an orphan asylum. While she was at one time left temporarily in charge of the institution cholera broke out, and eleven children died within one week; but she remained at her post until the fury of the plague was abated. She spent nine years in the vicinity of New Orleans, reading the Bible to those who could not read, writing letters in search of lost ones, and especially caring for the helpless old women that she met. In 1877 the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society gave her its first commission.
The object of the Fireside Schools is to secure the daily prayerful study of God's word by having this read to parents and children together; to teach parents and children, husbands and wives, their respective duties one to another; to supply homes with good reading matter; and also to inculcate temperance, industry, neighborly helpfulness, and greater attention to the work of the church. The publication of Hope, the organ of the Fireside Schools, was begun in 1885. Closely associated with the Schools are the Bible Bands, a single band consisting of any two or three people in the same church or neighborhood who meet to review the lessons in Hope and to report and plan Christian work. All the activities are under the general supervision of the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society, though the special Fireside School headquarters are at 612 Gay Street, Nashville, Tennessee. The present work is dedicated to the memory of Joanna P. Moore, and to the wives and mothers and sisters, now happily numbered by the thousands, who are engaged in the work of the Fireside Schools.
I.
INTRODUCTION.
The Negro Woman in American Life
In the history of the Negro race in America no more heroic work has been done than that performed by the Negro woman. The great responsibilities of life have naturally drifted to the men; but who can measure the patience, the love, the self-sacrifice of those who in a more humble way have labored for their people and even in the midst of war striven most earnestly to keep the home-fires burning? Even before emancipation a strong character had made herself felt in more than one community; and to-day, whether in public life, social service, education, missions, business, literature, music, or even the professions and scholarship, the Negro woman is making her way and reflecting credit upon a race that for so many years now has been struggling to the light.
It was but natural that those should first become known who were interested in the uplift of the race. If we except such an unusual and specially gifted spirit as Phillis Wheatley, we shall find that those who most impressed the American public before the Civil War were the ones who best identified themselves with the general struggle for freedom. Outstanding was the famous lecturer, Sojourner Truth. This remarkable woman was born of slave parents in the state of New York about 1798. She recalled vividly in her later years the cold, damp cellar-room in which slept the slaves of the family to which she belonged, and where she was taught by her mother to repeat the Lord's Prayer and to trust God at all times. When in the course of the process of gradual emancipation in New York she became legally free in 1827, her master refused to comply with the law. She left, but was pursued and found. Rather than have her go back, however, a friend paid for her services for