An Extraordinary Story of an “Ordinary” Pound Ridge Woman
Guest Author: Johanna O’Keeffe, Town Historian
In honor of Women’s History Month, I went digging for an extraordinary story of an “ordinary” Pound Ridge woman. The lost details of women’s lives can be difficult to find in the historical record, especially when most early records focused on the “head of house.” I found this story hiding in a passport application from 1919, and I followed the trail to Helen Martha Price.
Helen was born in Pound Ridge in 1891. Her father was Pound Ridge’s Methodist minister at the time, and, although the family moved with his successive appointments in Brooklyn and Long Island, they did return to the area with his later appointment to a church in Stamford; the family lived on High Ridge Road, just on the Stamford side of the border in the 1910s and 20s. Even as early as the 19th century, the Methodist community was known as a socially progressive community, welcoming Black members and focusing on education for all. Helen seems to have taken this mindset to heart as she attended Brooklyn Girls’ High School, a renowned college preparatory high school, and Adelphi College. Helen graduated with about 31 other women in 1915 and began working as a kindergarten teacher in Yonkers.
At the onset of American involvement in World War I, Helen enrolled in the YWCA Training College at Columbia University. She became a YWCA Secretary and immediately began working at the YWCA Hostess Houses, which were built at military bases all over the United States to facilitate families visiting their loved ones stationed there. Hostess Houses formed part of the YWCA’s mission during WWI, which was both to train women for the jobs vacated by soldiers and to support the armed forces through administrative leadership both at home and in Europe. Approximately two months after the 1918 Armistice, Helen applied for a passport to travel to England and France “in the interest of the Young Woman’s Christian Association.” At the end of World War I, the YWCA undertook efforts to address the rising refugee and hunger crises in Europe. Likely for this purpose, Helen was in Europe for 18 months in 1919 and 1920. When she returned home, she continued to work for the YWCA at social centers focused on improving both girls’ access to education and living conditions in urban areas. In this capacity, Helen also worked with the Russell Sage Foundation, which had been established in 1907 to advance women’s education, even founding Russell Sage College for Women in 1916.
Helen married a widower with a son and six daughters in 1924 and left the area to reside near her husband’s family in Western New York. Throughout her life, she remained involved in social causes, community volunteer work, and various girls’ organizations and women’s university clubs. In her obituary in 1943, she was remembered as a loving mother, an active member of the DAR, and a fierce advocate for young girls’ and women’s access to education.