Caroline Augusta White Soule

Caroline Augusta White Soule (1824-1903) was a Universalist writer, editor, and minister born in Albany, New York. Widowed in 1852 when her husband, the Universalist minister Henry B. Soule, died of smallpox, she supported her five children by writing; her Memoir of Rev. H. B. Soule (1852) established her literary reputation. In 1869 she became the first president of the Woman's Centenary Association, an early denominational women's organization, and in 1878 went to Scotland as a Universalist missionary, founding St. Paul's Universalist Church in Glasgow. Ordained there in 1880, she is generally regarded as the first woman ordained to the ministry in Britain. She died in Glasgow in 1903.

When the young minister Henry Birdsall Soule died of smallpox in 1852, his widow Caroline wrote his memoir to support their five children — and so began one of the denomination's remarkable careers. Caroline Soule became a leading Universalist author and editor, founder of the Woman's Centenary Association (the first national churchwomen's organization in America), and eventually, in Scotland, the first woman ordained in Britain. This memoir is where her public life started.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)