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May 7
Mary Eliza Mahoney, Dorothy Sunrise Lorentino, Harriet Starr Cannon, and Rose Verini
David Barnhart
May 07, 2025
Monte Sano State Park, 2025. Own photo.
Today is the birthday of Mary Eliza Mahoney, born in 1845, who was the first African-American woman to work as a professional nurse in the United States. She was also an activist who founded new professional helping organizations. An outspoken suffragist, she was one of the first women registered in Boston to vote.
Today is also the birthday, in 1909, of Dorothy Sunrise Lorentino, a Comanche teacher from Oklahoma. When she was a child, her parents sued the state for the right of indigenous children to attend public school, rather than the schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They won their case in 1918. This was an important precedent for the 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education. Dorothy went on to become a special education teacher.
Today is the birthday (in 1823) and a feast day in the Episcopal Church for Sister Harriet Starr Cannon, a founder of one of the first orders of Anglican nuns, the Community of Saint Mary. The community has operated hospitals, schools, and orphanages.
Continuing the theme of women and education today, it is also the feast day in the Roman Catholic Church of Rose Verini, who died on this day in 1728. She was active in creating public schools for the education of young women, in spite of opposition and even arson. The motto of her teachers was “Educate to save.”
Reflection:
Harriet Starr Cannon brought together two worlds that were seen as being in conflict at the time: the Protestant church, on the one hand, and the liturgical tradition and monastic orders of the Roman Catholic church on the other. Her call to lead a set-apart life devoted to prayer and service would not be denied, even though anti-Catholic rhetoric was intense while she and the other sisters established their intentional community.
In 1931, Shirley Carter Hughson wrote for the Community of Saint Mary a summary of Harriet Cannon’s principles:
The second principle which underlay Mother Harriet's life and purpose was that her Community was to live the mixed life, a life of combined prayer and work. That is to say, it was to be not solely active or solely contemplative, but both. Let us understand what this means. The mixed life is not a form of Religion that results from taking certain elements from the active life, and others from the contemplative, and by a fusion of the two producing a third kind of life which we called mixed. The mixed life engages in active ministering to our neighbors, and at the same time includes the whole of the perfection of the contemplative life, and in no way diminishes it.
Prayer: Great Teacher, intwine our prayer with our service, our service with our teaching, our teaching with our liberating, our liberating with our worship, and our worship with our prayer. Amen.