Mary Lucinda Bonney
Mary Lucinda Bonney was an influential educator and advocate for Indian rights, born in Hamilton, New York, in the early 19th century. After graduating from Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, she spent 15 years in various teaching roles across five states. In 1850, Bonney co-founded the Chestnut Street Female Seminary in Philadelphia, which later became the Ogontz School for Young Ladies, where she served as senior principal until 1888. Throughout her career, she demonstrated strong principles and compassion, actively participating in missionary work and advocating for Native American rights.
In response to the pressures faced by Indigenous communities during the late 19th century, Bonney helped form the Women's National Indian Association (WNIA). This organization sought to honor treaties with Native Americans and promote educational opportunities for Indian women, distinguishing itself from other reform groups focused on citizenship and land ownership. Although she resigned as president in 1883, Bonney remained deeply involved, providing financial support and representing the WNIA at various conferences. After retiring from active leadership, she continued her philanthropic efforts until her death in 1900, leaving a lasting impact on both education and Indian rights advocacy.
Subject Terms
Mary Lucinda Bonney
- Mary Lucinda Bonney
- Born: June 18, 1816
- Died: July 24, 1900
Educator and Indian rights worker, was born in Hamilton, New York, one of two children of Benjamin Bonney and Lucinda (Wilder) Bonney to survive infancy. Her father, a farmer, and mother, a former teacher, had moved from Massachusetts to the western New York area of religious ferment, heavily settled by New Englanders. Mary Bonney attended Hamilton Academy and was graduated from Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary in 1835. For the next fifteen years she held teaching posts in five states. In 1850 she founded the Chestnut Street Female Seminary in Philadelphia, in partnership with Harriette A. Dillaye, a former colleague at the Troy Female Seminary. In 1883 the school moved to Ogontz, Pennsylvania, and was renamed the Ogontz School for Young Ladies. Bonney remained senior principal until 1888.
In both her teaching and her philanthropic activities Bonney consistently displayed clear, principled thinking, strong devotion to duty, and deep compassion for the unfortunate. She was an officer of the Women’s Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands and was also active in a women’s home missionary circle in Philadelphia’s First Baptist church.
The missionary organization’s longstanding interest in native Americans took a new turn in 1879, at a time when public attention was being drawn to numerous sensational incidents resulting from increased pressures on Indian lands. The federal government had recently given up all attempts to halt the gold miners’ invasion of the Sioux lands in the Black Hills of the Dakotas and now eastern newspapers carried stories of a similar movement into the Indian Territory in the West and of a bill, already introduced in Congress, that would open part of the area to white settlement. Passionately convinced that the nation must honor its Indian treaties, Bonney enlisted the aid of Amelia S. Quinton, a fellow Baptist and experienced temperance organizer, in gathering thousands of signatures on petitions to Congress and forming a women’s organization originally called the Indian Treaty-Keeping and Protective Association.
In 1883 a change of name, to the National Indian Association, reflected a change in goals that brought the organization into line with a new generation of reformers who believed that the Indians must be encouraged to enter the mainstream of America instead of remaining in their tribal status. Unlike most of the other groups, however, which focused their efforts on citizenship and individual land ownership for Indians, the women’s organization early adopted a more broad-based program.
When the Indian Rights Association was founded in Philadelphia in 1883 Bonney and Quinton changed their group’s name to the Women’s National Indian Association (WNIA). Announcing their intention of abandoning the political arena to men, they inaugurated a program of domestic education for Indian women. In fact, though, the organization continued its political work by appealing to public opinion to pressure Congress into enacting the programs it espoused. By 1886 eighty-three branches in twenty-seven states were holding public meetings, circulating petititions and pamphlets, and supplying items to the press. Reflecting the Baptist background of its founders, the WNIA confined itself to coordinating the activities of its branches, some of which, like the New York City branch, generously supported by Mrs. John Jacob Astor, and the Connecticut branch, of which Harriet Beecher Stowe was a vice president, gained national attention by building houses for Indian families.
Although Bonney resigned as president of the WNIA in 1883, pleading the burden of work at the Ogontz school, she remained as honorary president and member of the executive board and almost singlehandedly provided the organization’s financial support during its first five years. She represented the WNIA at the annual Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian in 1883; and in 1888, after retiring from the Ogontz school, she went to London as a delegate from the WNIA to the Centenary Conference of the Protestant Missions of the World. While there she became reacquainted with the Rev. Thomas Rambaut, retired president of William Jewell College, who had helped convert her from the Episcopalian to the Baptist church when she was teaching in South Carolina forty years earlier. They were married in London and returned to settle in her native Hamilton. After Thomas Rambaut died, in 1890, she remained there, making her home with her brother until her own death in 1900.
Throughout her life Mary Bonney continued her generous contributions to various causes: the WNIA, Cuban and Boer relief during the Spanish-American and Boer wars, homeless Armenian children, and the education of five ministers, four of them black.
Mary Bonney’s manuscript ledgers of the late 1870s are in the American Baptist Historical Society in Rochester, New York. A recent biographical sketch appears in Notable American Women (1971). Biographical sketches are also found in F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967), under the name Rambaut, and in M. J. Fairbanks, ed.,Emma Willard and Her Pupils (1898). See also C. Bonney, The Bonney Family (1898). The work of the WNIA can be followed in its annual reports; see also M. E. Dewey, Historical Sketch of the Women’s National Indian Association (1900). Appraisals of the Indian reform movement are found in L. B. Priest, Uncle Sam’s Stepchildren (1940) and R. W. Mardock, Reformers and the Indian (1971). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times, July 26, 1900, and the WNIA publication, the Indian’s Friend, August 1900.