Biographical Sketch of Ellen H. Evans Price

By Christina Larocco, Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Price, Ellen H. Evans (Mrs. Ferris Walton Price, 1854–1937), was born into a Hicksite Quaker family in Lionville, PA. Her parents, Thomas P. and Phebe S. Evans (nee Smedley), were members of the Swarthmore Monthly Meeting and the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. She received both her A.B. and A.M. from Swarthmore College, and in 1876 she married fellow Friend Ferris Walton Price, with whom she had three children. Both Ellen and Ferris were educators, and they spent several years teaching at Friends' Central School in Philadelphia, PA, before moving to Berlin, Germany, in 1889-90 so Ferris could complete his studies. Returning to Pennsylvania, Ferris became professor of Latin language and literature at Swarthmore College, and Ellen served as secretary of the Swarthmore Public School Board and, later, superintendent of educational interests of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. She also filled a number of roles in the woman suffrage movement, including as president of the Pennsylvania Equal Suffrage League and the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association and vice president of the Pennsylvania College Equal Suffrage Association. In 1912, the Swarthmore College student newspaper, the Phoenix, praised her as one of "the most prominent names" in recent suffrage activism. The following year, she supported those who attended the march in Washington, DC, though she did not attend herself. Little is known about her life between the end of the suffrage movement and her death in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the age of eighty-three.

SOURCES:

Information about Price can be found in the Swarthmore College Digital Collections; John William Leonard, ed., Woman's Who's Who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the United States and Canada, vol. 1 [LINK] (New York: American Commonwealth Company, 1914); and Gilbert Cope, comp., Genealogy of the Baily Family . . . . (Lancaster, PA: Wickersham Printing Company, 1912); Henrietta Louise Krone, "Dauntless Women: The Story of the Woman Suffrage Movement in Pennsylvania, 1910-20" (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1949); and Ida Husted Harper, ed., "Pennsylvania," chapter XXXVII in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 6: 1900-1920 (New York, NY: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922), pp. 550-564. [LINK]