Isabella Marshall Graham
Isabella Marshall Graham was a notable Scottish-born charity worker and educator who made significant contributions to female education and charitable organizations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, she was raised in a devout Presbyterian family and pursued education from a young age. After marrying physician John Graham and moving to Canada, she faced adversity following his death, becoming a single mother to four children. Determined to support her family, she opened a girls' school in Paisley, followed by a successful boarding school in Edinburgh, which marked the beginning of her charitable endeavors.
In 1789, Graham relocated to New York City, where she established another esteemed school and co-founded the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows and Orphans, one of the earliest women's charitable organizations. Throughout her life, she dedicated herself to various charitable activities, including providing education and employment for widows and their children, and establishing the Orphans' Asylum Society. Her legacy includes pioneering efforts in female education and the promotion of women's organizations focused on social welfare, which inspired later generations of feminists. Graham's life and work are documented in biographies and sources that highlight her significant impact on her community and beyond.
Subject Terms
Isabella Marshall Graham
- Isabella Graham
- Born: July 29, 1742
- Died: July 27, 1814
Charity worker and teacher, was born in Lanarkshire, Scotland, and grew up on an estate near Paisley. Her father, John Marshall, a landowner, and her mother, Janet (Hamilton) Marshall, were pious Presbyterians. As a child Isabella requested that a legacy from her grandfather be spent for her education and at age ten she went to boarding school.
She married John Graham, a physician living in Paisley, in 1765. After a year the couple moved to Canada, where John Graham joined his regiment, the Royal Americans. In 1773 they were sent to Antigua, where John Graham died of fever the following year.
Isabella Graham was left pregnant, with very little money, and three daughters under five years of age, Jessie, Joanna, and Isabella. A friend suggested that she sell two Indian slaves who had belonged to her husband but, according to her daughter, she “refused to make merchandise of her fellow human creatures.” After the birth of her fourth child, a son named John, she returned to Cartside, Scotland, where her father lived.
Graham found her father impoverished and unable to aid her, so she soon moved to Paisley, where she opened a girls’ school. A boarding school she started in Edinburgh in 1780 was a financial success, allowing her to begin an innovative charitable career that was to last the rest of her life. She made interest-free loans to local business people, distributed alms, and organized a “Penny Society” (later the Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick), a mutual aid fund.
Graham returned to America in 1789 and opened a school in New York City that was soon successful and highly respected; distinguished guests, including George Washington, attended the school’s yearly examinations.
In 1797 Graham, her daughter Joanna, Sarah Ogden Hoffman, and Elizabeth Bayley Seton founded the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows and Orphans, one of the earliest women’s charitable organizations. Graham was appointed director, a post she held for ten years. After 1798 she gave up teaching to devote herself completely to charitable work.
The women of the relief society visited widows, distributed food to them, and tried to find work for them. After receiving a charter from the state and some aid from the legislature, they bought a house in which widows did needlework and their children went to a school, with Graham’s former pupils as volunteer teachers. Graham opened other day schools for the children of widows in various parts of the city, paying widows to run them. She also established two Sabbath Schools, supervising one herself.
Distressed that the children of widows were forced into the almshouse when their mothers died, Graham and other members of the relief society founded the Orphans’ Asylum Society in 1806, and for a time she taught in its school. She visited sick women in hospitals, mental asylums, and the state prison. In 1811 she was named “presiding lady” of the board of women supervisors of a newly founded Magdalen House. Graham achieved a long-sought goal in 1814—the founding of the Society for the Promotion of Industry Amongst the Poor, an institution to provide employment for indigent women. Graham died in her seventy-first year of cholera in New York City.
Graham was a pioneer in female education and in the development of women’s organizations for aiding members of their own sex, activities that were continued and expanded by succeeding generations of feminists. She once told an audience that “an association of ladies for the relief of destitute widows and orphans was a new thing in this country. It was feeble in origin; the jest of most, the ridicule of many, and it met the opposition of not a few. The men could not allow our sex the steadiness and perseverance necessary to establish such an undertaking.” By the time she died she had proved them wrong.
Isabella Marshall Graham’s daughter and son-in-law, Joanna Graham Bethune and Divie Bethune, published a biography, The Power of Faith (1816) and Joanna Bethune edited The Unpublished Letters and Correspondence of Mrs. Isabella Graham (1838), both indispensable sources. There are articles on Graham in Notable American Women (1971) and the Dictionary of American Biography (1931).