Sunderland, Eliza R., 1839-1910

Lecturer, educator, author and advocate of women's rights from Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Eliza Jane Read Sunderland was a lecturer, educator, author and advocate of women's rights during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A native of Huntsville, Illinois, she graduated from Mount Holyoke Seminary in Massachusetts in 1865. After declining an offer to teach at Mount Holyoke, she returned to Illinois to become a teacher at Aurora High School. She soon became principal of this school, serving in this position for four years.

She left Aurora in 1871, upon her marriage to Unitarian clergyman Jabez T. Sunderland, but continued to teach in the various towns where he was a minister. During the 1880s, when her husband was the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Ann Arbor, Mrs. Sunderland entered the University of Michigan. Here she received her B.A. degree in 1889 and her doctorate in philosophy in 1892. Sunderland was one of the earliest women to receive a doctorate from the University of Michigan. Her thesis entitled "Man's Relation to the Absolute According to Kant and Hegel" was written under the supervision of Professor John Dewey .

Sunderland was an exceptional woman not only for the level of her education but also for the career that she made for herself. Unlike most churches in the nineteenth century, the Unitarian Church allowed women to enter the ministry. Although she never became a minister, Sunderland often took her husband's place in the pulpit as well as giving guest sermons in other Unitarian Churches. She was also an editor besides writing extensively for literary and religious papers and magazines of the day. And she was involved in different women's organizations. From 1886 to 1895, she served on the National Board of the Association for the Advancement of Women . In 1893, she served as one of the main speakers at the Women's Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, and in 1907, she was elected to the school board in Hartford, Connecticut, becoming the first women to serve on that body.

Eliza Read Sunderland died March 3, 1910 in Hartford, Connecticut where she had moved in 1906.