Eliza Jane Read Sunderland

• Eliza Jane Read Sunderland
• Born: April 19, 1839
• Died: March 3, 1910

Educator, author, and lecturer, was born on a farm near Huntsville, Illinois, the eldest of three surviving children (one daughter and two sons) of Amasa Read and Jane (Henderson) Read. Daniel Read, her paternal grandfather, was a commissioned officer in the revolutionary war. Her paternal grandmother, Mary Brown Read, was the aunt of John Brown, the abolitionist leader of the Harpers Ferry raid. Her Quaker father was born in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, and had emigrated to central Illinois in 1838, one of the first settlers in that region. Her mother was of Scottish descent and had been born and raised in Ohio.

Eliza Read’s childhood was spent on an Illinois farm under pioneer conditions. Her father died when she was a child, leaving the farm to be run by his widow and her young children. Educational facilities were scarce in the region, but Jane Read was a firm believer in education, and the family household contained a small library that included classics and religious books. Eliza Read became an omnivorous reader. She attended the local village school until she was ten. The family then moved to St. Mary’s and later to Abingdon, Illinois, where she entered Abingdon Seminary. At the age of fifteen she began teaching at a district school, and for the next nine years she taught part-time while continuing to attend the seminary.

In 1863, after saving sufficient funds, Read entered Mount Holyoke Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, one of the leading institutions for higher education of women in the country. She had been determined to study there since the age of ten, when she read a biography of Mary Lyon, founder of the school. She was invited to stay on as a teacher at Mount Holyoke after being graduated in 1865, but family circumstances prevented her from accepting the post. Instead she returned to Illinois and took a teaching job at Aurora High School. By 1867 she had become principal of the school—one of the first women in America to head a public secondary school. Under her leadership the high school became a model institution that helped raise educational standards throughout the Midwest.

Read resigned in December 1871, when she married Jabez Thomas Sunderland, an English emigrant who was minister of a Unitarian church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In the first few years of their marriage they lived in Northfield, Massachusetts; Chicago; and Ann Arbor, Michigan. In Chicago she resumed her teaching career and was also editor of the Illinois Social Science Journal in 1878. When the Sunderlands moved to Ann Arbor in 1878 (they remained there for twenty years), Eliza Read Sunderland enrolled at the University of Michigan, from which she received her Ph.B. degree in 1889 and a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1892; her supervisor was the noted philosopher and educator John Dewey. In later years her education was supplemented by extensive travel in Europe and the Middle East.

As the wife of a minister, Sunderland was deeply involved in parish and church work, and in her own right, although never ordained, she became one of the best-known Unitarian speakers at local and national meetings. She also preached before Universalist and Unitarian congregations. Sunderland’s philosophical and religious interests gave her a deep concern for improving the quality of life, and she took an active role in the temperance and women’s-rights movements. She was the main organizer of the Women’s Western Unitarian Conference and was its first president. A prominent member of the Association for the Advancement of Women, she served as its vice president from 1886 to 1891. In 1893 she was a principal speaker at the Congress of Women held at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

In addition to lecturing, Sunderland wrote, primarily on religious topics, for newspapers and magazines. She was a contributor to The World’s Congress of Religions (1894) and in 1905 she published James Martineau and His Greatest Book in collaboration with her husband. She also published Stories from Genesis in 1890 and Heroes and Heroines in 1905.

The Sunderlands moved to Oakland, California, in 1898. The family by that time included three children, two daughters and a son. In 1900 Jabez Sunderland accepted the pastorship of Highgate Unitarian Church in London. The family returned to the United States in 1907 and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where Jabez Sunderland took charge of Unity Church. Eliza Sunderland resumed her work in education and from 1907 to 1910 served on the Hartford school board. Occasionally she addressed the Connecticut legislature on the need for educational reforms. She died in Hartford at the age of seventy.

There is no full-length study of Eliza Read Sunderland’s life. Her career must be pieced together from scattered sources. The best sketches can be found in The Dictionary of American Biography (1936) and Biographical Dictionary of American Educators (1978). See also Eliza Read Sunderland; a Brief Memorial Sketch of Her Life: Memorial Addresses (n.d.); F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1897; reprinted 1967); and The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 10 (1909). Also of use is M. K. Eagle, The Congress of Women … World’s Columbian Exposition, vol. 1 (1894). An obituary appeared in the Hartford Courant, March 4, 1910.