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In celebration of Women’s History Month, PHS is happy to announce the digitization of four collections that spotlight Presbyterian women’s experiences in the late nineteenth century.

PHS was able to digitize these stories as part of In Her Own Right: Women Asserting Their Civil Rights, 1820-1920, a pilot-project executed by the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries...

--by Julia Flynn Siler

Donaldina Cameron (1869-1968) captured the nation’s imagination at the turn of the 20^th century by running a “safe house” for vulnerable girls and young women on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. She was a tall, auburn-haired woman with a Scottish lilt who fascinated headline writers and the public alike.

Cameron wasn’t the founder of the Presbyterian Mission House in Chinatown, nor did she run it single-handedly. The home opened in 1874, more than two decades before Cameron first arrived as a sewing...