“THE FEMALE HUMANE SOCIETY

Your committee has asked me to give a short account of a very old Cambridge society, a hundred years old this year. …

You will agree with me, I think, that this is a very interesting document. It has no signature. All the ladies of Cambridge rose with wonderful alacrity to this appeal, and I should like to impose on your patience and read in the old book the list of the original subscribers, I think about sixty in all, where you may find the names of grandmothers and great-aunts and other relatives. I have been told that Mrs. Abiel Holmes, the mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes, was first President, but I do not find in this book any record of meetings or officers; only names of subscribers on one page and, on the other, donations and expenses. I will read now this first list of ladies. You will observe that they never put “Miss” or “Mrs.” before the names, so we cannot tell which were the married or the unmarried ones.

…Lucy C. Ware, …Elizabeth Ware, …

The subscription was then and has been for one hundred years one dollar a year and never more, and there were never more than two or three hundred dollars gathered in a year, and yet they were able, in this small way, to help a great many people. There were some larger sums of money left to the Society by different people, and one fund, the Moring Fund, left by Mrs. Moring, the daughter of Doctor Beck, did a great deal of good work and still goes on. This fund, when the Society broke up last spring, was handed over to Mrs. Chesley, who has charge of the Paine Fund. …”

Reference Data:

Publications, Issues 8-10, by Cambridge Historical Society (Mass.), 1914, pages 62,65 and 66