Born on June 3, 1853, in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, Hannah Kent grew up there and in nearby Clifton Heights. She attended private schools in Philadelphia and Waltham, Massachusetts. In October 1873 she married Frederic Schoff, an engineer with whom she lived in Newtonville, Massachusetts, for several years and thereafter in Philadelphia. In 1897, as representative of the New Century Club, she attended the first National Congress of Mothers in Washington, D.C., and the next year she was elected vice-president of the permanent National Congress of Mothers. In 1899 she organized the Pennsylvania Congress of Mothers, the second state branch of the national group to come into being. She served as president of the Pennsylvania Congress until 1902, when she was elected president of the National Congress of Mothers. She held that post until 1920, and in that time she established an endowment fund and a national headquarters in Washington, D.C., oversaw the multiplication of member state branches from 8 to 37 with 190,000 individual members, edited the organization╒s journal Child Welfare (later National Parent-Teacher) from 1906 to 1920, and approved the renaming of the organization in 1908 as the National Congress of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Associations (later the National Congress of Parents and Teachers). The national group became a major force behind proposed legislation in the areas of child labor, marriage, and education.
A Philadelphia police case in 1899, in which an eight-year-old girl, a boarding house slavey, was arrested and imprisoned for arson, moved Schoff to initiate a campaign for reform in the treatment of juvenile offenders. After securing the release and placement in a foster home of that child, she made a survey that revealed that nearly 500 children were imprisoned along with older and habitual criminals in Philadelphia. She prompted the formation of a committee of the New Century Club that compiled a summary of laws in various states affecting delinquent and dependent juveniles, and she then drew up a series of bills for the legislature. As passed in May 1901, after vigorous lobbying by Schoff and others, the legislation established a distinct juvenile court system (the nation╒s second, after Chicago╒s), separate detention homes for children, and a system of probation officers. From 1901 to 1923 she was president of the Philadelphia Juvenile Court and Probation Association, which recommended and assisted probation officers and raised funds for their salaries. In its first eight years of operation she personally observed virtually every session of the Philadelphia juvenile court. She also assisted in the establishment of such courts in several other states and in Canada, where she was the first woman ever invited to address Parliament.
In 1908 Schoff organized an international Conference on Child Welfare, sponsored by the U.S. State Department and the Congress of Mothers and held in Washington, D.C., and she subsequently organized similar conferences in 1911 and 1914. In 1909 she became chairman of the American Committee on the Causes of Crime in Normal Children, established under the aegis of the U.S. Bureau of Education. Her detailed survey of juvenile crime led to the publication of The Wayward Child, 1915. She was the U.S. delegate to the Third International Congress for Home Education held in Brussels in 1910. She was in large part responsible for the establishment within the U.S. Bureau of Education of the Home Education Division, of which she was a special collaborator from 1913 to 1919. She contributed to various magazines and in 1933 published Wisdom of the Ages in Bringing Up Children. Schoff died in Philadelphia on December 10, 1940.
