Women's Home Missionary Society

The Woman's Home Missionary Society was founded in 1880 after 50 women church members met in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Cincinnati "to confer together concerning the organization of a society having for its purpose the amelioration of the conditions of the freed-women of the South." The Society was initially was formed to aid women in the South and the West, Mormon women, and missionaries throughout the country.^[1] The Society intended to send Christian women to "destitute" and "degraded" homes and neighborhoods where they would endeavor to "impart such instruction as can enlighten the minds, reform the habits, and purify the lives of the occupants."^[2]

The women asked First Lady Lucy Hayes, a committed Methodist, to become the president of the new organization. However, when asked by women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony to send delegates from the Society to a meeting of the International Council of Women, Hayes declined.^[3]

In 1882, the Society began opening day schools in the south for black children. In 1884, the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church officially recognized the missionary society.^[2] The Society acquired Thayer Home in Atlanta, Georgia, a model home which had been established to train young black women in household management.^[2]

There was hostility between the Woman's Home Missionary Society and the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, founded in 1869, as it was feared money would be diverted from one to the other.^[2]

In Indiana, the society raised funds for the establishment of Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis from 1907-1908, and in 1912, they established an Italian Mission in the same city.^[1]

The Society joined with the Women's Missionary Society of the Pacific Coast in 1893 and by 1901, about 500 women and girls had been helped. That year they opened the "Oriental Home for Chinese Women and Girls" at 912 Washington Street in San Francisco's Chinatown, a two-story concrete building with 22 rooms.^[4] Unfortunately, this building, along with most of San Francisco Chinatown, was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire.