Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Founder of the Mothers' Union
August 9 · d. 1921
also known as Mary Wigham Sumner
Mary Sumner (1828–1921) founded the Mothers’ Union, which became the largest women’s organization in the Anglican world. Remembering the difficulties she had experienced as a young mother, she gathered women from different social classes in her husband’s Hampshire parish in 1876 to support one another in raising their children in the Christian faith. What began at a country rectory grew to nearly 388,000 members by the time of her death and later became a worldwide movement of some four million members across the Anglican Communion.
Mary Sumner was born Mary Heywood in 1828, near Manchester, England into a cultured and comfortable family. She grew up clever and musical, with a fine singing voice, and as a young woman she traveled to Rome where she met George Sumner, a son of the Bishop of Winchester. They married in 1848, and George took a country parish, Old Alresford in Hampshire, in his father's diocese. Mary became a rector's wife and the mother of three children. For twenty-five years that was her life, rearing children in a small parish.
When she was nearly fifty and her babies were grown and out of the nest, she had a bit of an epiphany. Her eldest daughter, Margaret, had her first baby. Watching her, Mary remembered how frightened and how alone she had felt as a young mother herself, charged with the enormous task of rearing a child in the faith and with no one to steady her. She thought of the other mothers of the parish, the laborers' wives most of all, who carried that same task with far less support than even she had enjoyed. So she did something that for a bishop's daughter-in-law in Victorian England was quite radical: she called all the mothers across classes together, gentlewomen and working class and lower class in one room, as mothers and as equals, to help one another bring up their children for God.
That first gathering, at the rectory of Old Alresford in 1876, was the beginning of the Mothers' Union. Mary had cards printed at her own expense, setting out a few plain aims: to raise children in the faith, to make the home holy, and to pray for their homes and one another. For nine years it stayed a parish ministry, and it might have stayed that way. Mary was no public speaker and seemed to have no grand aspirations; according to her the thought of addressing a crowd frightened her.
Then, in 1885, she went with her husband to a great church gathering at Portsmouth, expecting to attend as a listener and learner. The Bishop of Newcastle, Ernest Wilberforce, turned to her and strongly urged her to speak. Frightened, she stood and told them what she had begun at Old Alresford, why, and what they had been doing for nearly a decade in their small parish. Small seeds can grow large mustard bushes; and when the women went home to their own parishes the seed sprouted and the women began to do the same in their parishes across the country. The Bishop of Winchester, Edward Browne, made the Mothers' Union a society of his whole diocese, and from there it ran out across England, and then across the seas, wherever the English church had gone all around the world.
Through all of it Mary Sumner prayed a prayer of her own, written in that first year and said every morning for the rest of her life: All this day, O Lord, let me touch as many lives as possible for thee; and every life I touch, do thou by thy spirit quicken, whether through the word I speak, the prayer I breathe, or the life I live. She asked little for herself at all. She wanted to be useful to God in the ordinary day, by the ordinary means of her words, her prayers, and her life. That was exactly the holiness she was trying to put within the reach of every mother in England, and to imbue it with the worth and dignity and support it deserved.
She lived to be ninety-three. By the time she died, on the ninth of August, 1921, the small society begun at the small country parish had grown to some four million members on every inhabited continent, the largest body of women in the Anglican world. She had set out to do one homely thing, to keep other mothers from feeling as alone or lost as she once had, and that small faithfulness had become a great river that would roar on beyond her and continues to encourage mothers around the world to this day. She is buried at Winchester, and the ministry that she began goes on praying her prayer the world over: that every life it touches, God will quicken.
Mary Sumner is a thoroughly documented modern figure. Though she left no large body of writing of her own, the record of her life is in the Mothers' Union's own archives, in the pamphlets and addresses she produced for it, and in contemporary memoirs and later histories. She was born Mary Elizabeth Heywood on 31 December 1828 near Manchester, married George Sumner, a son of Bishop Charles Sumner of Winchester. In 1848 she settled with him at the Hampshire parish of Old Alresford, of which he became rector in 1851. She founded the Mothers' Union there in 1876, after the birth of her first grandchild moved her to gather the mothers of the parish into the first iteration of her support for other mothers there in her local parish. The society stayed local until 1885, until an impromptu address at the Portsmouth Church Congress carried it to a wider hearing and the Bishop of Winchester adopted it for his diocese. From there it spread rapidly through England and across the Anglican Communion. Mary Sumner died at Winchester on August 9th, 1921.
The Mothers' Union was both a product of its times and an unusual product of its age at the same time. Characteristically, it belonged to the great Victorian flowering of voluntary religious societies and to a confident vision of the Christian home. Unusually at the time, it was founded by a woman and led predominately by women, decades before women could vote or sit in the councils of the church. In that it deliberately joined women across the deep class divisions of Victorian England in a single membership, consciously attempting to bridge class lines with the common bonds of motherhood. Historians of the movement, notably Cordelia Moyse, have traced how an organization born to support motherhood in one English parish became, through the reach of empire and the Communion, a global women's body of millions. It carried its founder's convictions about family and faith prolifically into myriad cultures over the century that followed.
Mary Sumner is commemorated on 9 August, the day of her death, in the calendars of the Church of England and of other Anglican churches; her liturgical color is white. The Mothers' Union keeps a nearby day as Mary Sumner Day, and the prayer she wrote is still said daily by members around the world.
Her monument is not a shrine but an institution. The Mothers' Union numbers some four million members in many countries, working for the support of marriage and family life, the care of mothers and children, and the relief of need, and it remains one of the largest lay organizations in the Anglican Communion. At Old Alresford, the parish where it began, and at Winchester Cathedral, where she is buried and kept with a memorial, her story is told; and across the world, in places she never saw, women who never knew her name pray the prayer she first wrote in 1876.
Some links below are Amazon affiliate links. Commontide may earn a small commission from purchases; the public-domain links beside them are always free.
A History of the Mothers' Union: Women, Anglicanism and Globalisation, 1876-2008(English, 2009)
Recommended: Cordelia Moyse (Boydell, foreword by Rowan Williams)
The standard scholarly history of the movement Mary Sumner founded, following it from a single Hampshire parish to a global body of millions; the best book for understanding both what she began and what it became.
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrow)
Further reading. The standard scholarly history is Cordelia Moyse's A History of the Mothers' Union, listed above. For the founder herself, Joyce Coombs's George and Mary Sumner: Their Life and Times (1965) remains the fullest biography, though it is out of print and best found through a library.
Online resources. The Mothers' Union tells its own founding story, keeps Mary Sumner's prayer, and records the work as it stands today.
As an Amazon Associate Commontide earns from qualifying purchases.
Readings for a Renewer of Society
Exodus 3:7–12Psalm 145:1–13vRomans 12:9–21Luke 6:20–38
Almighty and everlasting God, you kindled the flame of your love in the heart of your servant Mary Sumner to manifest your compassion and mercy to the poor and the persecuted: Grant to us, your humble servants, a like faith and power of love, that we who give thanks for his righteous zeal may profit by his example; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.