Elizabeth Russell

Elizabeth Russell (October 9, 1836 – September 6, 1928) was an American missionary and educator. She founded Kwassui Gakuin, a school for girls and women in Nagasaki. She was sent by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church to Japan in 1879 at the age of forty-three. She contributed to the women's education, social welfare and missionary during her forty years in Japan, and was decorated by the Emperor of Japan in 1919.

Early life and education Elizabeth Russell was born in Cadiz, Ohio. Her father was a millwright. In 1859 when she was 23 years old, Russell graduated from Washington Female Seminary. sailed from San Francisco for Japan, on October 25, 1879, via Yokohama, reaching Nagasaki on November 23, 1879. In 1873 when the edict prohibiting Christianity was abolished by the Meiji Government, the American Episcopal Methodist Church had already sent John Carrol Davidson to Nagasaki. Davidson built a Methodist church in Dejima in 1876 and sent a request to WFMS for two female educational missionaries. Russell founded a mission school for girls and women in the foreign settlement in Higashi-Yamate, Nagasaki on December 1, 1879. The purpose of Russell's school's curriculum was to train independent career women as well as homemakers and mothers. In addition, Russell set up a seaman's home for sailors entering the Nagasaki's port in order to keep them away from “entertainment areas” during their stay in Nagasaki. She retired from the principal at the age of sixty-two, she stayed at Kwassui Gakuin.

Awards and honors She was awarded the Japanese emperor's blue ribbon medal in 1919.

Personal life At age of eighty-two, Russell and May returned to the US. May died from tuberculosis when she was thirty-nine, and Russell died in 1928 at her sister's house in Ohio.