Pruitt, Ida

Writer, educator, and social worker Ida Pruitt was born in China on December 2, 1888, the daughter of Southern Baptist missionaries Cicero Washington and Anna Seward Pruitt. She spent the first twelve years of her life in Hwanghsien, a village in Shantung province. She attended Cox College in College Park, Georgia (1906-1909), received a B.S. from Columbia University Teachers' College (1910) and studied social work in Boston and Philadelphia. Pruitt returned to China as teacher and principal of Wai Ling School for girls in Chefoo (1912-1918); the Rockefeller Foundation later appointed her chief of the Department of Social Services, Peking Union Medical College (1921-1939). During the Japanese occupation she and Rewi Alley organized Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, an international committee that set up cooperatives with the aim of making the Chinese self-sufficient; she served as executive secretary (1939-1952) of Indusco, the American fundraising arm for the CIC. She was the author and translator of a number of books, including Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman (1945), Yellow Storm (1951), and China Childhood (1978). Pruitt died in Philadelphia on July 24, 1985; she was survived by two adopted daughters, Kuei-ching Ho and Tania (Cosman) Wahl.

American missionary in China; member, American Committee in Aid of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, 1940-1951.

Biographical/Historical Note

American missionary in China; member, American Committee in Aid of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, 1940-1951.

Writer, educator, and social worker Ida Pruitt was born in China on December 2, 1888, the daughter of American, Southern Baptist missionaries, Cicero Washington and Anna Seward Pruitt. She lived in Hwanghsien, a village in Shantung Province, until she was twelve and then went on to be educated in the United States. She attended Cox College in College Park, Georgia (1906-1909); received a B.S. from Columbia University Teachers' College (1910); and studied social work in Boston and Philadelphia. In 1912, Pruitt returned to China as an adult to become a teacher and principal of Wai Ling School for girls in Chefoo (1912-1918). The Rockefeller Foundation later appointed her chief of the Department of Social Services, Peking Union Medical College (1921-1939). During the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s, Pruitt and social reformer, Rewi Alley, organized Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (CIC), an international committee that worked to promote Chinese self-sufficiency. She also served as executive secretary (1939-1952) of Indusco, the American fundraising arm for the CIC, and was an author and translator of several books including A China Childhood (1978) and Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Working Woman (1945). Pruitt died in Philadelphia on July 24, 1985; she was survived by two adopted daughters, Kuei-ching Ho and Tania (Cosman) Wahl.

Marjorie King is a historian and Ida Pruitt's biographer. The two women met in the 1980s while King was working on her dissertation about Pruitt at Temple University (Ph.D., 1985). That project was entitled "Missionary Mother and Radical Daughter: Anna and Ida Pruitt in China, 1887-1939." King continued her research about Pruitt as a visiting scholar in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. She later published a biography of Ida Pruitt entitled China's American Daughter: Ida Pruitt, 1888-1985 .

Writer, educator, social worker, and fundraiser, Ida Pruitt was born in Tengchow, Shantung Province, China, on December 2, 1888, the daughter of Cicero Washington and Anna (Seward) Pruitt. Her father, C. W. Pruitt (CWP), was born in Barrettsville, Georgia, on January 31, 1857, the son of John Wesley and Hannah (Rodgers) Pruitt . He was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister at the age of 14 and began his evangelical work by preaching to Native Americans in Georgia. Later he attended the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. In January 1882, he traveled to China as a missionary and was stationed in Hwanghsien where he met his first wife, Ida Tiffany; she died two years later.

Her mother, Anna (Seward) Pruitt (ASP), was born in Tallmadge, Ohio, on May 16, 1862, the daughter of John Woodhouse and Urania (Ashley) Seward. She traveled west in the early 1880s to teach school in Ojai, California; her letters about the trip were later published in the California Historical Quarterly (1937-1938). At the end of the decade, ASP decided to travel to China as a Presbyterian missionary and settled in Hwanghsien where she met CWP. They married on February 16, 1888, and had six children: Ida (1888-1985), John (1890-1912), Ashley (1892-1898), Virginia (died in infancy, 1894), Robert (1897-1961), and Dudley McConnell "Mac" (1902-1967). While stationed in Hwanghsien, the children attended school at the China Inland Mission in Chefoo. ASP began a missionary school, and by 1904 CWP had organized the Baptist Theological Seminary for Central China. ASP wrote two books about missionary life in China: The Day of Small Things (Foreign Mission Board, Southern Baptist Convention, 1929) and Up from Zero: In North China (Broadman Press, 1939). After CWP retired in 1936, they returned to the United States and settled in Atlanta where he became the dean of the Baptist Foreign Missions of North America. CWP died on December 27, 1946; ASP, on June 20, 1948.

After attending Cox College in College Park, Georgia (1906-1909), Ida Pruitt (IP) received a B.S. from Columbia University Teachers' College in New York (1910). When her brother John died, IP returned to China to be with her family and became a teacher and principal of Wai Ling School for Girls in Chefoo (1912-1918). In 1918, she came back to the United States and studied social work in Boston and Philadelphia until hired by the Rockefeller Foundation in New York as head of the Department of Social Services at the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) where she remained until 1938.

While living in Beijing IP adopted two girls, one Chinese, Kueiching [Kwei-ching], the other a Russian refugee, Tania Manooiloff. They were educated in English schools in China, then sent to the United States. Kueiching married Tommy Ho, a radiologist from Canada, in 1940; they settled in Saskatchewan, Canada, and had two children: Timmy and Nancy. Her other daughter, Tania Manooiloff , taught Russian at Swarthmore College. She married Cornelius "Cornie" Cosman, a meteorologist who worked for the US Department of Commerce and served on the Indusco Technical Committee; they had two children: Katia and Hugh. After Cosman's death, she married Mr. Wahl.

During the Japanese occupation of China (1937-1945), IP assisted Rewi Alley (RA) as he organized the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (CIC; for more information about RA see section on Rewi Alley following). The CIC was formed to organize cooperative factories throughout the countryside to support China's industry. Schools were built to train the Chinese (often crippled or orphaned) to work in and manage the factories. Indusco, the fundraising arm of the CIC in the United States, was formed, and IP served as its executive secretary from 1939 to 1951. In 1946 IP rented an apartment with Maud Russell on West 93rd Street in New York City and remained there until 1951 when she retired and moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to be closer to Alan and Adele Rickett, friends from China.

A keen observer and student of Chinese history, society, and paleo-anthropology, IP was a prolific writer and the author of a number of books, stories, and articles, including several autobiographies ( A China Childhood (1978), The Years Between, and Days in Old Peking: May 1921-October 1938 ) and several biographies ( Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman (1945, 1967), Old Madame Yin: A Memoir of Peking Life, 1926-1938 (1979), and Tales of Old China ). She also translated and edited many works, including Yellow Storm by Lao She (1951), The Flight of an Empress by Wu Yung (1936), Little Bride by Wang Yung, and Beyond China's City Walls by George A. Hogg, et al.

In addition to her writing, IP filled her retirement years with travel, talks, and political activism. She returned to China twice (1959, 1972) despite a State Department ban and remained a strong proponent for U.S.-China relations throughout her life. IP died on July 24, 1985, in Philadelphia.

Brief chronology of the life of Ida Pruitt:

OTHER PRUITT FAMILY

John Pruitt studied at Mercer College in Georgia and then worked in Ohio, where he contracted typhoid and died. Robert Pruitt, who, at age ten, was accidentally blinded, attended the University of Pennsylvania (A.B., 1920) and Harvard University (M.A., 1921). He returned to China in 1921, and his fiancée Evelina Rometsch joined him in 1922. They married and remained in Chefoo where he taught in the North China Junior College until 1927; they had two children: William Rometsch (b.1923) and John (Jack) (b.1925).

Dudley McConnell (Mac) Pruitt graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Haverford College in 1923. He taught until 1926 and then became an actuary in the insurance industry (1942-1960). He was President of the Casualty Actuarial Society (1957-58) and of the Insurance Accounting and Statistical Association (1953). A Quaker, he became the executive director of the American Friends Service Committee's, mid-Atlantic region, and head of their Japan unit in Tokyo. He married Grace Richards Garner, c.1926; they lived in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and had two boys: Dean Garner (b.1930) and John Dudley (b.1933). Dean Pruitt married France Juliard; they had three sons: Andre (b.1961), Paul (b.1962), and Charles (b.1964).

REWI ALLEY

Named for a Maori chieftain, Rewi Alley (RA), Indusco's China representative, was born December 2, 1897, in Springfield, Canterbury, New Zealand. His parents were both activists; his father in the rural cooperative movement and his mother for women's suffrage. In 1916, he enlisted and fought with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (ANZACS) in France. At the end of the war, he and a friend bought a farm together; when this failed, RA sold out and headed for China.

Arriving in Shanghai in 1927, during the Kuomintang revolution, he was hired by the Shanghai Municipal Council as factory inspector of the Shanghai Fire Brigade (1927-1933), then as chief factory inspector of the council's Industrial Department (1933-1938). In 1929, and again in 1932, he took extended vacations in the Suiyuan Province helping the China International Famine Relief Commission. Many of his later vacations were also spent in various relief works in the countryside.

A year after the Japanese invasion in 1937, Helen Snow [Nym Wales] and Edgar Snow enlisted RA's help in planning a nationwide movement to organize thousands of cooperative factories in the countryside. RA became the field secretary for the Gung Ho movement as it was known in China, with Madame Song Quingling [Soong Ching-ling] its leader.

By 1942, RA began setting up schools that were named after his friend Joseph Bailie (an American missionary) to train Chinese youth in the skills needed to manage and work in the new factories. The first one was established at Shuangshipu, Shaanxi Province. RA appointed George Aylwin Hogg as an instructor. In 1944, with the Japanese advancing closer, RA and Hogg moved the school to Shandan, Gansu Province, and renamed it the Shandan Bailie school. Hogg became the president of the school until his unexpected death in 1945; thereafter RA ran the school.

During his time in China, RA traveled extensively and was a prolific writer, capturing in poetry the events and the people. He never married but adopted two Chinese orphans, Alan and Michael, in 1929 and 1932 respectively. RA died in Beijing on December 27, 1987.

TALITHA A. GERLACH

Talitha A. Gerlach (TAG) was born in 1896. She met Ida Pruitt in China while working for PUMC. TAG worked for many years for the International Committee, which coordinated overseas fundraising for the CIC movement in China, and headed the China Welfare Appeal. She remained in China for most of her life.