Ida Pruitt

Ida Pruitt sitting with woman and two dogs, by an unknown photographer, 1935-1938. Judging by photographs in that book, the woman is evidently Ning Lao T'ai T'ai, whose as-told-to-Pruitt autobiography "A Daughter of Han" shows Ning sitting with Pruitt in similar clothing.

Ida C. Pruitt (1888–1985) was a China-born American social worker, author, speaker, interpreter and activist in Sino-American understanding. Her biographer called her "China's American Daughter." In the 1920s and 1930s she supervised social work in the Peking Union Medical College, then after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War was a major actor in the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives. After the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949, she retired to the United States but continued to advocate warmer relations with China.

Early life Ida Pruitt was the daughter of North China Southern Baptist missionaries Anna Seward Pruitt and C.W. Pruitt. Born in 1888 in the coastal town of Penglai on the Shandong peninsula, her childhood was spent in the small inland village of Songjia, Shandong, where for many years the Pruitts were the only Western family. Ida Pruitt received a B.S. from Columbia University Teachers' College in New York City (1910). 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 Pruitt served as its executive secretary from 1939 to 1951.

Author Pruitt wrote books, stories, and articles, including several autobiographies and biographies including;

A China Childhood (1978), The Years Between, and Days in Old Peking: May 1921 - October 1938. Her "as told to" autobiography - Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman Unreferenced text mostly taken from the Radcliff Finding Aid. See link below.''