150th Anniversary of Methodist Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society
On March 23, 1869, eight women gathered at Tremont Street Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston and founded the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society. To commemorate the event, the School of Theology held a dedication ceremony of the stain-glass windows that came from the Tremont Street church that memorialized the women who started the society. Dana L. Robert gave a lecture about the “First Women of Theology,” and how they were intertwined with the beginning of Boston University. In fact, she explained, on the same day Massachusetts Governor William Claflin chaired the first public meeting of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society in Boston on May 26, 1869, he also went to the state house and signed the charter for state legislature to found Boston University. “It was the same people,” Robert explained. “The publicity, though, of the woman’s meeting got more press coverage.”
