Guide to the Woman's Executive Committee of Home Missions/Woman's Board of Home Missions Records

In response to the urging of Sheldon Jackson and various prominent Presbyterian women, the 99th General Assembly (PCUSA) (1877) organized the Woman's Executive Committee of Home Missions. The initial purpose of the Committee was to provide schools and teachers for the mission fields in the western and southwestern US. The Committee supported missionaries among the Mormons in Utah and among the Native American and Spanish-speaking peoples of the southwest. Eventually, this work was extended to Alaska, Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Appalachians.

In addition to carrying out field work, the Woman's Committee published many pamphlets and leaflets, a missionary magazine entitled Home Mission Monthly, and an annual "Prayer Calendar," which eventually merged with the foreign missionary yearbook to become the Yearbook of Prayer. In 1897, the Committee's name was changed to Woman's Board of Home Missions.

In 1915 the Woman's Board incorporated; at this point it ceased to be a subsidiary of the Board of Home Missions. In 1923 the Woman's Board merged with seven other boards and agencies of the church to create one unified Board of National Missions, and its work was divided between two units of the new Board. Publications were taken over by the Unit of Education and Publicity, and work with the schools and hospitals in Alaska and the United States became the responsibility of the Unit of Educational and Medical Work.

Katharine Bennett, president of the Woman's Board at the time of the merger, became the first vice-president of the BNM. She also chaired the Woman's Committee of the BNM, which was comprised of the BNM's female members and was created to give the women continued jurisdiction over what had been their work for over fifty years. The Woman's Board continued to function as a holding corporation until the 1958 reunion of the PCUSA and the UPCNA.