American Quaker advocate for women's education, temperance and suffrage
Mary Mendenhall Hobbs
Born
Mary Mendenhall
(1852-08-30)August 30, 1852
Guilford County, North Carolina
Died
July 20, 1930(1930-07-20) (aged 77)
Guilford County, North Carolina
Nationality
American
Occupation
Educator
Spouse
Lewis Lyndon Hobbs
(m. 1880)
Mary Mendenhall Hobbs (August 30, 1852 – July 20, 1930), was an American Quaker advocate for women's education, temperance, and suffrage, based in North Carolina. Her campaigning to improve women's education supported the founding of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1891.
Mary Mendenhall taught for a few years between school and marriage. She married a childhood friend, Quaker educator Lewis Lyndon Hobbs (1849–1932), in 1880. They had five children together. While raising her children, she remained active in the Quaker community, raising money and advocating for girls' education.[5] Her husband became president of Guilford College in 1888, and she was busy as the president's wife and hostess of campus events, until his retirement from that position in 1915.[3]
Mary Mendenhall Hobbs was active in the Women's Christian Temperance Union.[6] She assisted in editing the state chapter's newsletter, The Anchor,[7] and was state superintendent of the organization's "Department of Hygiene and Heredity."[8] She also lectured and wrote in favor of women's suffrage.[9]
She died in 1930, aged 77 years. Her papers are archived as part of the Friends Historical Collection at Guilford College,[11] with further family papers in the Southern Historical Collection in Chapel Hill.[12] There is a Mary Mendenhall Hobbs Residence Hall at Guilford College.[13][14] Her first-hand descriptions of a girlhood in the South during and after the American Civil War, originally published in 1923 as Civil War and Reconstruction through the Eyes of Mary Mendenhall Hobbs,[15] were reissued in 2012 by the North Carolina Friends Historical Society.
^ abTreva W. Mathis, "Mary Mendenhall Hobbs" in William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography (University of North Carolina Press 1996).
