VPARA NPAR@ ` VTEXT ` HPeabody, Lucy Whitehead McGill Waterbury1861╨1949missionaryBorn on March 2, 1861, in Belmont, Kansas, Lucy McGill grew up in Pittsford, New York, and from 1873 in nearby Rochester. After graduating from Rochester Academy in 1878 she taught for three years in the Rochester State School for the Deaf. In August 1881 she married Reverend Norman W. Waterbury, a Baptist minister with whom she sailed two months later to India. They worked among the minority Telugu people of Madras under the aegis of the American Baptist Missionary Union until Waterbury╒s death in 1886. After her return to Rochester and a brief period of teaching she became an assistant secretary of the Woman╒s Baptist Foreign Missionary Society. She moved to the society╒s Boston headquarters in 1889 and the next year became corresponding secretary of the society. In 1890 she founded the Farther Lights Society, a girls╒ auxiliary to the mission society, and helped promote the establishment of an annual day of prayer for missions, an idea that became known as the World Day of Prayer. In 1902 she became chairman of the Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions, which had grown out of the New York Ecumenical Missionary Conference of 1900. She held the post until 1929, and in it she developed a series of textbooks for use by women╒s study groups and by a network of some 30 summer schools of missionary studies. In 1908 she founded and until 1920 she edited Everyland, a missionary magazine for children. She resigned as secretary of the Woman╒s Baptist Foreign Missionary Society on her marriage to Henry W. Peabody in June 1906; he died in 1908. In 1912, largely at Lucy Peabody╒s instigation, the Interdenominational Conference of Woman╒s Boards of Foreign Missions in the United States and Canada created the Committee on Christian Literature for Women and Children, of which she became an influential member. The committee collected, translated, and published magazines for distribution around the world. In 1913 she became vice-president for the foreign department of the newly unified Woman╒s American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, and she was instrumental in transforming the Interdenominational Conference into the more effective Federation of Women╒s Boards of Foreign Missions in 1916. In 1913╨1914 and 1919╨1920 she made world tours of inspection of missions, the latter as chairman of a commission studying mission schools. She led a fund-raising drive in 1920╨1923 to raise $2 million, upon which a $1 million pledge by John D. Rockefeller was contingent, to finance the establishment of seven women╒s colleges in the Orient. Traveling and lecturing indefatigably, she raised the required amount and subsequently sat on the boards of directors of three of the seven: Women╒s Christian College, Madras, and Women╒s Christian Medical College, Vellore, in India, and Shanghai Medical College. She resigned as vice-president of the WABFMS in 1921 in a dispute over ecumenism, which she supported, and in 1927 she resigned all her other denominational offices in a disagreement over missionary qualifications and modernist theology, which she opposed. She then formed the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, which undertook new missions in the Philippines. She remained president of the group until 1934, and from 1928 she published its periodical Message. During the 1920s she was also a leader of opposition to the growing movement to repeal Prohibition, serving for more than ten years as president of the Woman╒s National Committee for Law Enforcement. She died in Danvers, Massachusetts, on February 26, 1949. ╓styl `
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