Biographies and Portraits of Women Serving in the era of 1844 - 1894

Sarepta Myrenda Irish Henry (1839 - 1900)

Temperance activist, personal evangelist, writer. While recuperating from an illness at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Mrs. S. M. I. Henry became a Seventh-day Adventist. She began to correspond with Ellen White, then in Australia. Mrs. White encouraged her to continue her public role with the Women's Christian Temperance Union and her interest in women. In 1898 Mrs. Henry established the first Women's Ministry at the General Conference. The General Conference voted her a ministerial license that year; she wrote a weekly column for the Review and Herald on women's ministry and duties. Unfortunately, she died two years later and her work was not continued for many years.