Catherine Booth

Catherine Mumford read the Bible through eight times before she was twelve and married William Booth at twenty-six. When a minister attacked the American evangelist Phoebe Palmer for preaching, Catherine answered him in print with Female Ministry — a careful argument from Scripture that God had never barred a woman from the pulpit. A year later, sitting in her husband's congregation, she stood up and preached herself, and went on to become the better-known preacher of the two. Her meetings in London's wealthy West End paid for the work in the East End, where the Booths' Christian Mission became the Salvation Army in 1878. She wrote its doctrine, designed the bonnet its women wore, and made women officers equal to men from the start. Near the end of her life she took up the match girls whose jaws were being eaten away by white phosphorus. She died of cancer in 1890; tens of thousands filed past her coffin.