Mary Traffarn Whitney
American minister, editor, social reformer, philanthropist, lecturer
Mary Traffarn Whitney (February 28, 1852 – March 8, 1942) was an American minister and editor, as well as a social reformer, philanthropist and lecturer. She was one of the early Universalist women ministers, later changing her association to that of the Unitarian church. Whitney was the author of Honor between men and women (1896), FamilyCulture, the Science of Human Life (1897), Present Tendencies in Racial Improvement (1897), Hymns of Peace (1915), and Problems for seniors by a senior (1932).
Early years and education
Mary Louise Traffarn was born at Alder Creek, New York, a hamlet of Boonville, February 28, 1852. Her father, Job Traffarn, was a descendant of an old Huguenot family, and from that ancestry, she inherited their love of truth and force of moral conviction. Her mother was named Sally.
Her early religious training was a combination of Universalist and Evangelical teaching, the former being received from her parents and the latter from the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian preaching in the Union church of the hamlet and in the Evangelical Sunday-school.
She received the rudiments of her education in the Whitestown Seminary, the Utica Free Academy, and the Clinton Industrial Institute, at Clinton, New York. She graduated from the St. Lawrence University in 1872, obtained the degree of B. S. There, she was fond of mathematical, scientific and logical branches of study.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Traffarn Whitney” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.