Another Sort of Pioneer: Mary Shipman Penrose

The story of a remarkable woman and a fascinating slice of American history. Born in 1868 intro a prominent Hartford, Connecticut, family, Mary was raised in the sophisticated East - but with her 1896 marriage to Stephen Penrose, a Congregational minister and president of the fledging Whitman College, she committed herself to a life in what was still the western frontier. In small-town Walla Walla in the wheatlands of southeastern Washington, Mary Penrose raised six children, assisted her husband as he led Whitman College to a place of national prominence among liberal arts colleges, served as a national leaders of the YMCA movement as it worked vigorously to empower American women.