Early Life
Ida Pruitt was the daughter of North China Southern Baptist missionaries Anna Seward Pruitt and C.W. Pruitt. Born in 1891 in the coastal town of Penglai on the Shandong peninsula, her childhood was spent in the small inland village of Sung-ch’iat’an, where for many years the Pruitts were the only Western family.
After attending Cox College in College Park, Georgia (1906–1909), Ida Pruitt received a B.S. from Columbia University Teachers' College in New York (1910). When her brother John died, Ida returned to China to be with her family and became a teacher and principal of Wai Ling School for Girls in Chefoo (1912–1918). In 1918, she came back to the United States and studied social work in Boston and Philadelphia until hired by the Rockefeller Foundation in New York as head of the Department of Social Services at the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) where she remained until 1938.
Read more about this topic: Ida Pruitt
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“O troubled forms, O early love unfortunate and hard,
Time has estranged you into a jewel cold and pure;”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)