MRS. JUDITH WALKER
ANDREWS
ANDREWS,
Mrs. Judith Walker,
philanthropist, born in Fryeburgh, Maine, 26th April, 1826. She was
educated in Fryeburgh
Academy with the intention,
so common with New England girls,
of becoming a teacher. Her brother, Dr. Clement A. Walker, one of
the first of the new school of physicians for the insane, having
been appointed to the charge of the newly established hospital of
the city of Boston, his sister joined him
there. Although never officially connected with the institution,
which had already gained a reputation as a pioneer in improved
administration of the work for the insane, Miss Walker interested
herself in the details of that administration, and by her personal
attention to the patients endeared herself to them. No better school
of training could be found for the activities to which she has given
her life. She was married while in the institution, on 15th January,
1857, to Joseph Andrews, of Salem, a man of generous public
spirit, who gave much time and labor to the improvement of the
militia system of the commonwealth, both before and during the Civil
War. He died in 1869. They had three children, all boys, to whose
early education Mrs. Andrews gave the years, only too few, of a
happy married life. Removing to Boston in 1863, she became a member
of the South Congregational Church (Unitarian), and in 1876 was
elected president of its ladies’ organization, the South Friendly
Society. Her service of
sixteen years in that office is only one of five such terms in the
history of the society.
Under the influence of its pastor, Dr. Edward Everett Hale,
the South Congregational Church has had wide relations both inside
and outside denominational lines, and these relations have brought
to Mrs. Andrews opportunities for religious and philanthropic work
to which she always has been ready to respond. While most of these, though
requiring much work and thought, are of a local character, two lines
of her work have made her name familiar to a large circle. Elected, in 1886, president
of the Women’s Auxiliary Conference, she was active in the
movement to enlarge its scope and usefulness, and in 1889, when the
National Alliance of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women was
organized, she became its first president, declining re-election in
1891. Since 1889 she
has been a member of the Council of the National Unitarian
Conference. Having become interested in the child-widows of
India, through the
eloquence, and later the personal friendship, of Pundita Ramabai,
she was largely instrumental in the formation of the Ramabai
Association, to carry out the plans of Ramabai and to systematize
the work of her friends throughout the country. To the executive committee
of that association, ,of which Mrs. Andrews has been chairman from
the beginning, is entrusted the oversight of the management of the
school for child-widows, the Sharada Sadana at Poona and the
settlement of the many delicate questions arising from a work so
opposed to the customs, though fortunately not to the best
traditions, of India.
(American
Women, Fifteen Hundred Biographies, Vol 1, Publ. 1897. Transcribed
by Marla Snow.)
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