Born in New Haven, Vermont, on September 9, 1849, Lucy Rider attended public schools and the New Hampton Literary Institution in Fairfax, Vermont. After three years as a teacher, one in Canada and two in a Quaker school for freedmen╒s children in North Carolina, she entered Oberlin College, from which she graduated after two years in 1872. During 1873╨1875 she attended the Woman╒s Medical College of Pennsylvania to prepare herself to share the life of the medical missionary to whom she had become engaged, but after his death in 1875 she returned to Vermont. She was lady principal of the Troy Conference Academy in Poultney in 1876╨1877, a student of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1877╨1878, and professor of chemistry at McKendree College in Illinois in 1879╨1881. From 1881 to 1884 she was field secretary for the Illinois State Sunday School Association.
In May 1885 Rider married Josiah S. Meyer, a Chicago businessman who shared her deep interest in the Methodist Church and its work. In October of that year they opened the Chicago Training School for City, Home, and Foreign Missions with four students. The time and place were opportune for such a school, and theirs grew rapidly and quickly gained the support of official Methodist bodies. Wesley Memorial Hospital, the Chicago Old People╒s Home, and the Lake Bluff Orphanage soon evolved from their work and that of their students, and over the years some 40 philanthropic institutions grew up in a like manner.
In 1887 Meyer completed her interrupted medical studies and received her M.D. from the Woman╒s Medical College of Chicago. In that year she organized a number of her women students into a program of visitation and social service among the urban poor, and within a few months a core group of these social workers had banded together into what was in effect the first house of deaconesses in America. (The deaconess idea of groups of lay women serving without pay or vows had originated in Germany and had been brought to America originally by Lutherans.) The group was headed for its first year by Isabella Thoburn, home on furlough from her missionary work in India. Meyer devoted most of her time to the deaconess movement and converted her periodical, the Message, founded in 1886, into the Deaconess Advocate, which she edited until 1914. In 1889 she published Deaconesses: Biblical, Early Church, European, American, a history of the movement. For a number of years there was friction between the Meyers╒ work and that of the Methodist Woman╒s Home Missionary Society, which sought to gain control of the various deaconess experiments around the country, and in 1908 she formed the Methodist Deaconess Association, of which she became secretary, to maintain the independent integrity of the Chicago deaconesses.
In 1903 she published Mary North, a novel. In 1917 she and her husband resigned as superintendent and principal of the Chicago Training School, whose enrollment had grown at one time to over 200 and had graduated by then over 5000 trained workers. Meyer died in Chicago on March 16, 1922.
╞styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ ! 5¬ = !I ┐ 5¬ └ !I * 5¬ + !I â !I ▐ ô !I % !I , !I H !I Z !I É !I │ !I ╡ !I ╟ !I W 5¬ X !I n !I x !I link ` HYPR â ô
