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Wednesday, 17 January 2024

EVANGELICAL WOMEN IN EARLY 1800: BETSY MIX COWLES P/107

                                                      Read Part One HERE


In this story I will continue to focus on a woman named Betsy Mix Cowles. She lived from 1810 - 1876. Like many women who participated in the abolitionist cause, Betsy became interested in women's rights as well. While serving as principal and superintendent of a girls' school in Canton and Massilon, Ohio in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Betsy also served as the president of the first Womens' Rights Convention in Ohio at Salem in 1850, which reflects her prominence and the respect she had earned by this time.

Delegates learned that later in 1850, the state of Ohio was planning to convene a new constitutional convention, and the women wanted to have input into what rights women would be granted within the new Constitution of 1851. Later that year, Betsy attended the Akron Womens' Rights Convention and gave a speech about the inequalities in the wages of men and women and became a member of the executive committee of the newly formed Ohio Womens' Rights Association.

By the late 1850s, Betsy became interested in higher education for women teachers and normal schools, which specialised in educating women specifically for the teaching professsion. From 1856 through 1858, she was supervisor of practice teachers at the McNeely Normal School in Hopedale, Ohio. In 1858 she was an instructor at the Illinois State Normal School in Bloomington.

Betsy server as superintendent of public schools in Painesville, Ohio from1858 to 1860, then taught for two years in Delhi, New York.

In 1862, she retired to Austinburg, because of an eye ailment, end then completely lost sight in one eye in 1865, ending her careeer in education. 

Betsy died in 1876.

Read Part One Hundred And Eight HERE

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