Born on May 10, 1837, probably in Boston, Lucy Coues grew up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and attended local schools. After a year at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York, in 1856╨1857 she worked for two years as a draftsman in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington. In 1860 she moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and became a teacher in the public schools, and in 1862╨1863, when the city╒s public schools were closed, she operated a private school. She married James M. Flower, a Madison lawyer, in September 1862. After their move to Chicago in 1873 she devoted herself to a variety of philanthropic activities, especially those dealing with children.
Lucy Flower became a member of the board of the Half-Orphan Asylum in 1875 and later of that of the Chicago Home for the Friendless. In 1880, with Dr. Sarah Stevenson and others, she helped found the Illinois Training School for Nurses, the first such school in Chicago, of which she was president for 11 years and a director until 1908. She led in agitation for the establishment of a state industrial school for dependent boys and in 1886 drafted legislation to that end. The bill was defeated in the Illinois legislature, but the public interest in the idea she had aroused eventuated in the opening of such a school under private auspices in Glenwood, Illinois, in 1889. In 1887 she joined in organizing the Protective Agency for Women and Children, and in 1888 she helped form the Lake Geneva Fresh Air Association to provide vacations for poor urban children. In 1890╨1891 she served as president of the influential Chicago Woman╒s Club. She was appointed to the Chicago Board of Education in 1891, a post she held for three years and in which she was effective in seeing to the introduction of kindergartens and of manual and domestic training classes for the lower grades. In 1894 she was elected by a large majority to the post of trustee of the University of Illinois; she was the first woman to hold a statewide elective office in Illinois. In the same year she took part in the organization of the Chicago Bureau of Charities and was chosen its vice-president.
In the later 1890s Flower lent her influence to the faltering campaign for the establishment of a juvenile court system in Chicago. With assistance particularly from Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop, she organized support for the plan among other welfare and social service leaders and the city╒s legal establishment, helped draft enabling legislation, and saw her work come to fruition in July 1899 with the creation of the Cook County Juvenile Court, the first of its kind anywhere in the world. She founded the Juvenile Court Committee to raise money for probation officers╒ salaries, and she served frequently as a court adviser. In 1902 Lucy Flower moved with her husband to Coronado, California, where, after several years as an invalid, she died on April 27, 1921.
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