Eight Maids a-Milking Trivia Quiz

Answer: Jane Addams

Jane Addams (1860-1935) founded Hull House in Chicago's nineteenth ward to provide an alternative to the saloon for gatherings and the political machine for favors. It taught American values to immigrants and the working poor, and it attracted middle-class efforts and funds. Many other settlement houses arose in imitation, sometimes named after Addams.

Answer: Katharine Mary Drexel

Mother Katherine (1858-1955) used her inheritance to found her religious order, originally called the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, and to finance the various schools and missions. She was the niece of the founder of Drexel University in Philadelphia. Xavier University is the only historically Black, Catholic college in the USA. Later the order became simply the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (SBS).

Answer: Agnes Bojaxhiu

Better known as Mother Teresa (1910-1997), her Missionaries of Charity ran hospices and homes for people with AIDS, leprosy, and tuberculosis--not to mention schools, soup kitchens, and orphanages throughout the world. Mother Teresa also helped the hungry in Ethiopia and radiation victims in Chernobyl.

Answer: Emily Greene Balch

After Wellesley fired her, Emily Greene Balch (1867-1961) wrote for the magazine 'Nation', and then served as secretary of the WILPF from 1919 to 1922. During and after World War II, she gave aid to victims of Nazi persecution and worked against the Japanese-American internment camps. Across her lifetime she worked for woman suffrage, against child labor, for protections for women laborers, for racial equality, and for world peace.

Jane Addams was a good guess, as she co-founded the Woman's Peace Party in 1915, which eventually merged into the WILPF. One of the goals of the WPP was to maintain America's neutrality in the face of the Great War in Europe. The formation of the WPP and its new tactic of public marches for peace marked the beginning of the modern peace movement.

Answer: Frances Willard

Frances E. Willard (1839-1898) believed, "The whole world is my parish and to do good my religion." Willard also promoted woman suffrage so that women could vote for temperance and prohibition laws, age-of-consent laws, and a host of other reforms. Sacrificing her material comfort for her causes, Willard often skipped meals and walked long and weary miles for lack of funds for food or a bus fare.

After giving up a comfortable teaching position, she became president of the Chicago Women's Christian Temperance Union; this became the National WCTU, then finally the World's WCTU.

The WCTU was instrumental in getting nearly every state of the Union to raise its age of consent, and it established half-way houses for reforming alcoholics and prostitutes. Willard also worked against the opium drug trade among the UK, the USA, China, and other Eastern nations -- which was perfectly legal at the time.

This was all part of Willard's "Do Everything Policy".

Answer: Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), known as "The Lady with the Lamp", founded the modern nursing profession through her efforts to care for British soldiers injured in the Crimean war. Although many in the medical profession did not welcome her, the soldiers adored her, and they desired to erect a statue in her honor.

She declined that accolade, but she did accept a jewel and a letter from Queen Victoria. Nightingale's pioneering work as an army nurse was the inspiration and model for Clara Barton and other nurses during the U.S. Civil War.

Answer: Dorothy Day

Brooklyn-born Dorothy Day (1897-1980) converted to Catholicism when she decided her unborn child should have the religious foundation that Day's parents had denied her. (Also, as she began to help urban laborers and their families she discovered most of them were Catholic!) During the Great Depression, Day promoted Catholic social teaching, a body of doctrine on matters of economics, social organization, and the role of the state.

Its principles include human dignity, the common good, charity, distributism, and social justice, and it equally condemns laissez-faire capitalism and socialism.

By the 1960s many Catholics had embraced Day and the Catholic Worker movement, and many Dorothy Day Hospitality Houses were built. In the 1970s, Day worked with such diverse figures as Cesar Chavez to provide justice for migrant farm workers in California, and Mother Teresa to help the poor and sick in India.

The Catholic Worker movement continued to aid and advocate for the poor into the 21st century.

Answer: Dorothea Dix

To correct the abuse at East Cambridge, Dorothea Dix (1802-1887) was forced to bring the matter to court. Then she began to visit every jail and almshouse in the area, and persuaded the legislature of Massachusetts to improve conditions for inmates, particularly the insane, throughout the state.

Then Dix started working in other states, and eventually developed more humanitarian mental asylums. She also wrought reform in Canada and Scotland, Norway, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. During the U.S. Civil War, Dix became Superintendent of (Union) Army Nurses and was known for her kind treatment of enemy rebel soldiers, many of whom had no other treatment in the field.

Answer: Dorothy Day

The Nobel laureates are:
* Agnes Bojaxhlu, better known as Mother Teresa (1910-1997), in 1979
* Jane Addams (1860-1935) in 1931
* Emily Greene Balch (1867-1961), along with YMCA leader John Mott, in 1946

Adams was the first American woman to receive the Peace Prize. Dorothy Day never received a Nobel Peace Prize, but she did receive a Laetre Medal from the University of Notre Dame in 1972.

Answer: Katherine Drexel

Mother Katharine Drexel was canonized in the year 2000. There are many steps to the process of sainthood. Dorothy Day is a "Servant of God", which is step one. Agnes Bojaxhlu, better known as Mother Teresa, has reached the stage of beatification, which is right before canonization. If she becomes canonized, she will be known as St. Teresa of Calcutta. (Raise your hand if you picked her.)

There are many more women who became saints who could have been included in this quiz. Look for them in a future quiz about women saints.