Esther Pritchard

Esther Pritchard (, Wood; after first marriage, Tuttle; after second marriage, Pritchard; January 26, 1840 – August 6, 1900) was a 19th-century American minister and editor. Pritchard was the daughter of a minister of the Society of Friends. She was one of the leading preachers of the Friends' Society in the United States, and was the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's Superintendent of the Department of Systematic Giving. Pritchard edited for some years the Friend's Missionary Advocate, and was a teacher in the Chicago Training School for Missions. Her husband's removal from Chicago to the pastorate of the Friends church, Kokomo, Indiana, severed her connection with the school and left her free to push the special work of her department. Seventeen State Unions subsequently adopted the department, while outside the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, ten Woman's Missionary Boards were influenced to create a similar agency.

Early life and education Esther B. Wood was born in Morrow County, Ohio, January 26, 1840. She came from Quaker ancestry, and her ministerial ability was inherited from both parents. Her parents were Daniel Wood and his wife, Elizabeth Lancaster (Benedict) Wood. Daniel was a preacher, and there were a number in her mother's family. A happy girl, strong-willed and ambitious, it was not until a time of sorrow that she yielded to her vocation.

She spent her childhood in Morrow County, and received her early education there.

Career In her young adulthood, while a student at Delaware College, she met Prof. Lucius Vincent Tuttle (1838-1881), a volunteer in the Civil War, who devoted the remainder of his life to the profession of teaching. They married August 11, 1866, at Morrow, Ohio. who died at the age of 22 months. The death of the child had a profound effect on the mother who became a duly recorded a Minister of the Gospel, and spent considerable time in evangelistic work, mainly in Ohio and on the Atlantic Coast. Prof. Tuttle died in 1881.

In 1884, Pritchard was chosen by the Woman's Foreign Missionary Union of Friends in America to edit the Friend's Missionary Advocate, the organization's official organ, and took up her headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. Shortly after her removal to that city, on February 19, 1885,