Mary Hanford Ford

Mary Hanford Ford
Mary H. Ford, circa 1898, 42 years old
Born	(1856-11-01)November 1, 1856 Meadville, Pennsylvania
Died	February 2, 1937(1937-02-02) (aged 80) Clearwater, Florida
Nationality	American
Other names	Mary H. Ford, Mary Ford, Mary Hanford Finney Ford, Minnie Finnie
Known for	Lecturer, author, art and literature critic, a leader in the women's suffrage movement
Notable work	Which Wins?, Message of the Mystics trilogy, The Oriental Rose
Spouse(s)	Moses Smith Ford
Children	3

Mary Hanford Ford (November 1, 1856 – February 2, 1937) was an American lecturer, author, art and literature critic and a leader in the women's suffrage movement. She reached early notoriety in Kansas at the age of 28 and soon left for the Chicago World's Fair. She was taken up by the society ladies of the Chicago area who, impressed with her talks on art and literature at the Fair, helped launch her on a new career, initially in Chicago and then across some States. Along the way she was already published in articles and noticed in suffrage meetings. In addition to work as an art critic and speaker she wrote a number of books, most prominently a trilogy Message of the Mystics. Circa 1900-1902 Ford found the Bahá'í Faith through Sarah Farmer, Green Acre, and Mirza Abu'l-Fadl, and helped form the first community of Bahá'ís in Boston where Louis Bourgeois, future architect of the first Bahá'í House of Worship in the West, then joined the religion. In 1907 Ford went on Bahá'í pilgrimage, in 1910 she started writing Bahá'í books such as The Oriental Rose, and traveled with `Abdu'l-Bahá during some of his journeys in various places in Europe and then America. Ford spent the years of World War I in California following the first Bahá'í International Congress at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition, and then moved back to New York where she spent almost the next 20 years. In this period she was censored off a radio broadcast, helped develop the religion's community both in meetings she supported and literary efforts, and traveled in Europe for the religion, before reducing her travels and speaking engagements in the early 1930s. She died with her daughter by her bedside in 1937.