Gillespie, Mother Angela (1824–1887)

American educator. Name variations: Eliza Gillespie. Born Eliza Maria Gillespie near Brownsville, Pennsylvania, on February 21, 1824; died at Saint Mary's Convent in South Bend, Indiana, on March 4, 1887; attendedprivate school and a girls' school run by the Dominican Sisters in Somerset, Ohio; graduated from the Visitation Academy in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., 1842.

Mother Angela Gillespie was born Eliza Maria Gillespie near Brownsville, Pennsylvania, on February 21, 1824. In 1853, after years of charitable work and teaching positions in Lancaster, Ohio, and at Saint Mary's Seminary in Maryland, she felt called to the religious life and devoted the remainder of her days to the Sisters of the Holy Cross. Taking her final vows that year, she became director of studies at Saint Mary's Academy in Bertrand, Michigan, and was made superior of the convent in 1855. At the academy (which later became St. Mary's College and was moved to a new site near Notre Dame), Mother Angela, who strongly believed in full educational rights for women, instituted courses in advanced mathematics, science, foreign languages, philosophy, theology, art, and music. In addition to preparing the sisters to teach in Chicago's parochial schools, the order established Saint Angela's Academy in Morris, Illinois. In 1860, Mother Angela began publishing Metropolitan Readers, a graded textbook series used in elementary through college courses.

During the Civil War, she supervised some 80 nuns who provided nursing services in army hospitals across the country, as well as aboard hospital ships on the Mississippi. The nuns also converted a riverfront warehouse in Mound City, Illinois, into a 1,500-bed military hospital that became the finest facility of its kind in the country.

Under Mother Angela's direction, the order of the Holy Cross and its educational work was greatly expanded, with 45 institutions founded between 1855 and 1882. In 1866, Mother Angela also began editing Ave Maria, a Catholic periodical started by Father Edward Sorin, founder of the University of Notre Dame. When difficulties between American and French branches erupted in 1869, the order helped facilitate an independent American branch with Mother Angela as provincial superior (under authority of Father Sorin as superior), thus establishing her as founder of her order in America.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts