Ames, Fanny Baker

Fanny Baker Ames served as president of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association, as well as on the Boston School Committee (1896-1899) and the original Board of Trustees of Simmons College in 1899, and was the first woman to be appointed factory inspector in Massachusetts (1891-1894). She worked alongside her husband, a Unitarian minister, to support many causes, as dedicated abolitionists and members of the Anti-Imperialist League. Her involvement with social reform began when her husband and her founded the Germantown Relief Society in 1873, when industrial depression struck Philadelphia. At the 1878 National Conference of Unitarian and Other Christian Churches in Saratoga, New York, Ames proposed the formation of an auxiliary organization dedicated to women's issues and in 1880 the Women's Auxiliary Conference of the Unitarian Church was founded with Fanny as vice president. In 1877 she became the founding member and later president (1887-1888)of one of the most prestigious women's reform organizations of the nineteenth century, the New Century Club. In 1878, Fanny Ames and her husband founded the Philadelphia Society for Organizing Charity.