Belle Harris Bennett (December 3, 1852 – July 20, 1922) led the struggle for and won laity rights for women in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. She was the founding president of the Woman's Missionary Council of the Southern Methodist Church. Much of her work including fundraising and organizational efforts to provide higher education for a new professional class of social workers and community organizers in the Southern Methodist Church in the U.S. and abroad. Her carefully collaborative support for African Americans and immigrants was considered radical at that time by Southerners. She was a suffragist and supporter of temperance as well.
Early life The younger daughter of the eight living children of Samuel Bennett and Elizabeth Chenault, Isabel Harris Bennett was born on December 3, 1852, at the family estate "Homelands" located in Madison County, Kentucky. Her siblings were: William (1835–1904, planter/financier), John (1837–1903, lawyer and State Senator), James (1839–1908, farmer/financier and woman suffrage activist married to suffragist Sarah "Sallie" Clay), David (1841–1909, physician and banker), Susan Ann (1843–1891, missionary and suffragist), Waller (1849–1933, banker/broker), Samuel Jr. (1858–1913, banker/broker).
Named after her paternal grandmother Isabelle Harris Bennett, the wife of a Kentucky Methodist circuit rider, she always used Harris or the initial H. whenever writing out her full name. It was through her mother's side of the family, the Chenaults, that she traced her lineage for acceptance in the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Colonial Dames of America.
As a child she walked to the local township school at Foxtown with her favorite brother Waller every day. Later in life, after graduating from Yale, Waller handled Belle's personal wealth, her philanthropic endeavors and helped with her mission society projects' finances. The whole family attended a small Southern Methodist church built on land donated by Samuel Bennett in honor of his preacher father, "Honest" John Bennett. Providence Church was the first Methodist church in Madison County, and Belle sang in the choir and taught Sunday School there.
At the age of 11, Belle was enrolled in Dr. Robert Breck's private school in Richmond, Kentucky, six miles away from "Homelands"—boarding in town during the winter months. She then attended Nazareth, near Bardstown, then a school at College Hill, Ohio. She received voice training in Cincinnati, Ohio where she also attended the theatre, opera, symphonies and art exhibits. Her schoolgirl friend Kate Helm, daughter of Gen. Benjamin Hardin Helm, described Belle at that time as being "very handsome, with tall graceful figure. She had blue eyes and ash blond hair (that unusual and very beautiful color). Her complexion was creamy white with delicate pink cheeks and lips - there was never a trace of anything artificial about it. This beauty, combined with her unusually fascinating manner of expressing herself, made her a rare personality.(quoted in MacDonell, 31)" Belle spent two seasons at Frankfort, the Kentucky state capital, with her brother John (he was a Senator at the time), and she spent a few weeks in New Orleans at Mardi Gras for the social scene there.
She spent the summer of 1888 attending assemblies at Chautauqua, New York where she met many women activists, scholars and religious leaders, including Lucy Rider Meyer, the founder of a training school in Chicago for women in the Northern Methodist Church to do missionary work.
In 1888 Samuel Bennett died, and Belle left "Homelands" with her mother, older sister and two younger brothers to live in a new house her mother built in Richmond. There, she ran the household while her sister Susan "Sue" Ann Bennett took on new initiatives with the Southern Methodist Church. One of Sue's most ardent wish was to organize a Methodist-affiliated school in south-eastern Kentucky - she had studied the region in 1886 as part of the Southern Methodist Woman's Department of Church Extension and found no churches of any denomination in many of the counties there. Her report at the Kentucky Conference helped to create a new role for women in the Southern Methodist Extension Department: the Woman's Parsonage and Home Mission Society, led by twelve women in a Central Committee. However, Sue's untimely death in 1891 temporarily put on hold those plans for a Methodist school in eastern Kentucky. The Central Committee invited Belle to come and take the place of her older sister Sue, and Belle's life as a leader in the Southern Methodist Church began.
In the mid-1890s both her brothers Waller and Samuel Jr. married and her mother died in 1897, so Belle went then to live with Waller and his wife, her schoolgirl friend Mary Burnam. However, her leadership in the Church grew so quickly that she moved out and rented rooms at a local hotel. In 1903 she went to live with her brother John when he was dying, but afterwards she returned to her hotel in Richmond as it had become an important center for her activism.
Missionary and Reform activities At the age of twenty-three, Belle attended a revival led by the evangelist Dr. Lapsley McKee and took a vow of church membership. She began visiting the poor in rural Kentucky around Richmond and then with her sister Sue organized a Sunday School in a poor neighborhood. After another powerful religious experience at a revival in Richmond with Rev. George O. Barnes, she spent the winter in Bible study and prayer circles in Louisville, Kentucky with her cousin Dr. J.W. Chenault and his wife's two sisters Mette and Harriet Thompson. As she wrote later in life: "it was so quickened and applied to my own heart I knew it meant God-given leadership for me. (quoted in MacDonell, 40)"
Belle attended a missionary meeting in Carlisle, Kentucky in 1887 with her sister Sue where they discussed the poor preparation of Methodist missionary workers. She kept this in mind when, at the end of the 1888 conference of Kentucky Woman's Missionary Society, she was elected the state president. Together with her friend from Louisville, Mrs. S.C. Trueheart (formerly Thompson) who was a delegate on the Southern Methodist Woman's Board of Foreign Missions, Belle traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas for the Board's annual meeting in 1889. There she was invited to speak about her idea of a missionary training school and the Board appointed her to the Committee on the Examination of Missionary Candidates to learn more about the status of women choosing to undertake this foreign service. By the end of the conference, Belle had garnered support to start gathering funding from throughout the Southern Methodist Church to establish a training school. Within one year Belle had secured the funding and a site donated by Dr. and Mrs. Nathan Scarritt of Kansas City, Missouri. The Scarritt Bible and Missionary Training School opened in the fall of 1892 with three students. Thousands were trained there in the next thirty years.
In 1892, after the death of her sister Sue, Belle joined the Central Committee of the Woman's Home Mission Society – a club separate at that time from the Southern Methodist Woman's Foreign Missionary Society. Together with Mrs. Mary Bruce Alexander, a missionary in Brazil who traveled through Kentucky recruiting and organizing Methodist women's missionary societies, Belle created a Prayer Calendar in 1897 that was sent out by the Home Mission Society across the nation. Meanwhile, Belle continued fundraising for both the Scarritt school and her sister's plan for a school in southeastern Kentucky. She worked with Dr. Walter Russell Lambuth, Secretary of Foreign Missions, to talk with the citizens of London, Kentucky who matched the Woman's Parsonage and Home Mission Society's pledge of $20,000 for an endowment for a school. Belle recruited Rev. John J. Dickey a school principal from Jackson to come to London, Kentucky where they purchased a campus of 22 acres. The cornerstone of the new building was laid on June 25, 1896, and eight cottages to house students along with a dormitory for girls were built for what came to be named the Sue Bennett Memorial College.
Belle Bennett was elected president of the Woman's Parsonage and Home Mission Society in April 1896. This group reported to the Southern Methodist Board of Church Extension, led completely by men. Bennett lobbied to authorize the Woman's Home Mission Society to be governed by a Woman's Board with corresponding secretaries from each Conference Society. The new organization's leadership met in Texas in 1899 and Bennett was elected president. In response to the large increase in immigrants from the Pacific Rim in California, the Society started up night schools and organized Korean and Japanese Southern Methodist Churches. With the Society's headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, the local City Mission Board established a settlement house which then served as an example to other cities—12 institutions by 1903. With some negative reactions by local preachers who felt the settlement houses were imitating Northern social workers and not evidencing what they considered women's Church work, Bennett recommended to her Societies that they rename them to Community House: Wesley Community House for white neighborhoods and Bethlehem Community House for serving people of color. Cooperatives for young, small-wage-earning women also became part of the Southern Methodist women's city mission program.
To maintain a consistency and high standard of service by the church women, Bennett sought support for the training of deaconesses. Her plans for the training of missionary women evolved when she spoke at the Woman's Session of the Methodist Ecumenical Conference during the summer of 1901 in London. There she visited the sites of the founding of the Wesleyan deaconess movement and various missions of London including the Salvation Army. At the Board of Missions meeting in 1903, she spoke about what she envisioned: "We need trained women, and need them badly. We need exceptionally fine women, as the specific calls from numerous pastors, congregations, and institutions show. ... We must have women filled with the Holy Ghost and with power -- power to study and to think; power to wield the sword of the Spirit to the saving of life, as the skillful surgeon uses his knife; power to work under authority and to exercise authority, to project work and develop work. We must have women who have power with God and man ... (quoted in MacDonell, 97)
In 1906 the Southern Methodist leadership created the Woman's Missionary Council and merged the Mission Home Society with the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society despite frictions between the women leaders. At its first meeting in St. Louis, April 20, 1911, Belle Bennett served as its founding president. For the nearly twelve years she served as president, the membership more than tripled and annual collections approached $1 million. New work was inaugurated in Africa, while the kindergarten and Bible woman's work in Japan was taken over and enlarged. The Southern Methodist women missionaries now had seven foreign mission fields in which to work. Wesley Houses and Bethlehem Houses increased in number and scope of work, and new work in rural districts began.