“Mrs. Rowena Morse Mann, a native of Ithaca, died at the age of 88 on March 3, 1958, in Chicago, Ill.

  She became a Unitarian minister and at the time of her death the American Unitarian Assn. sent out a letter to its ministers stating that her death ‘closed a long and distinguished life.’

  ‘She was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. degree from the University of Jena, Germany (1904), the first woman to preach from the pulpit of Harvard University and the first woman minister in the Midwest.

  ‘Her pioneering strength, her extraordinary gifts and her dedication to liberalism have left an indelible mark in the annals of Unitarian history.

  She grew up in Ithaca in the red brick house built by her father, Ben Morse, at the southeast corner of Stewart Ave. and Buffalo Sts. With its orchard extending up to Quarry St. The house still stands.

  She attended Ithaca schools and then in preparation for the ministry, she was graduated first from the University of Iowa. She later studied at Chicago University Divinity School and the University of Berlin, as well as Jena. In 1933, she was invited to return to Jena as a guest professor and was honored by a bronze memorial plaque there.

  Ben Morse owned a mill on Cascadilla gorge near the end of Eddy St.—then called Factory St. After the mill burned on a winter’s night, Morse sold the home and took the family west to Iowa.

  Carrie Chapman Catt, the pioneer for woman’s rights, was a frequent visitor in the Morse home so that Rowena became interested in the suffrage movement when a young woman.

  She later became a leader in the woman’s suffrage cause in Chicago. She created somewhat of sensation during the suffrage campaign by declaring one time that ‘since the beginning od things, woman has not developed intellectually as man has. She is the product of isolation.’

  She married the Rev. Newton M. Mann, who was said to have been the first minister to speak sympathetically of evolution. The Rev. Mann died in 1926 after a long career as a writer and Unitarian minister.

  Mrs. Mann was pastor of Unitarian churches in Geneva, Iowa and of the Third Unitarian Church in Chicago from 1910 to 1925. She remained in Chicago. An author and lecturer, she wrote and translated books on philosophy and at one time was official lecturer for the Association for the League of Nations.

  The last of her generation, she was survived by two nieces and four nephews—Mrs. Rowena Morse Langer of Cambridge, Mass.; Mrs. Dorothea Morse Coors, Ithaca; Clarence F. Morse and Robert V. Morse, Ithaca; Everett R. Mose, Baltimore, Md.; and Anthony Perry Morse, Orinda, Calif.

  ‘Throughout her life Rowena Morse Mann retained a deep feeling for the beautiful natural setting of her birthplace,’ one of her nephews said in reporting her death. ‘She loved Ithaca, where she had grown up with her brothers, Everett Fleet Morse, Virgil D. Morse and Frank Lincoln Morse.

  All of her brothers, after a few years in the West, returned to complete their lives in Ithaca.’

  Funeral services for Mrs. Mann were held in Chicago with the Rev. Leslie Pennington officiating."

“Woman Minister, Native of Ithaca, Dies at 88,” Ithaca Journal, April 15, 1958, 2.