Page:Women of distinction.djvu/394

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WOMEN OF DISTINCTION.

amount of valuable property in one of the rapidly growing cities of the West. Besides rearing a large family of children this woman found time to do a great variety of church, Sunday-school and benevolent work, and was one of the founders of the Colored Orphans' Home of that city.

A few years ago the husband died; the children were leaving the "parental roof to form homes of their own; and feeling that she would soon be compelled to take entire charge of her business affairs or employ an agent, at the age of fifty-two she secured private instruction and applying herself with zeal to the intricacies of arithmetic and English prose composition is, at the time of writing, ably illustrating that "Labor conquers all things."

Every community furnishes brilliant examples of what our women accomplish in church and Sunday school work, while Mrs. Harper and Mrs. Amanda Smith have gained national reputation in a combination of temperance and evangelical work. In that urgent necessity—prison reform—Mrs. Alice Dugged Cary has made a brave struggle to better the conditions of life among the colored convicts of Georgia, and in other States women are making the convict system, with all which that system implies as now conducted, the subject of careful study and attention. Thus, in their work for the prevention and cure of intemperance, poverty and crime, our women are learning to deal with the most difficult problem which sociology affords us, and the longer they grapple with these problems the more fully is it forced upon them that the home must be the