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MORGAN, EMILY MALBONE 253MORGAN, EMILY MALBONE (10 December 1862, Hartford, Conn.–27 February1937, Boston). Education: Tutored privately at home. Career: Organizerand leader, Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, 1884–1937.Emily M. Morgan, a social reform advocate and founder of the Society of theCompanions of the Holy Cross (SCHC), was born in Hartford, Connecticut, inDecember 1862. The youngest child and only daughter of a wealthy merchantfamily, she grew up with a strong desire to help working women. The Morgansattended Trinity Church in Hartford. Like her mother, Emily was a committedAnglo-Catholic, and she experienced her first monastic retreat with the Sisters ofSt. Margaret in Boston when she was 21 years old. She admired Anglo-Catholicism because of its historical inclusiveness and use of visible symbolism,which presented a far more appealing face to outsiders, especially the downtrodden,than the cold rationalism of low church worship. Committed to a life ofpersonal holiness, she poured most of her financial resources into the purchaseand maintenance of hospitality houses for female workers.Along with Harriet Hastings, Morgan formed the SCHC in 1884. The societyhad its origins in a small group of young Hartford women who regularly joinedMorgan and her invalid friend Adelyn Howard for prayer and spiritual support.As an organization of Episcopal laywomen who emphasized the importance ofintercessory prayer, the SCHC was neither a typical church-based women’s organizationnor a traditional monastic order. Morgan believed in the need for adevotional structure flexible enough to accommodate women whose vocationswere lived in the secular world. Members of the society pledged themselves tosix ideals: the Way of the Cross, the Life of Intercession, Social Justice, ChristianUnity, Simplicity of Life, and Thanksgiving. They were dedicated to spiritualcombat with the modern, secular industrial world, and they consistently alignedthemselves with movements of social change and reform. “We felt the wrongs ofthe world very keenly,” Morgan reported in 1921, “and expressed our feelingsstrongly.”The SCHC purchased property in Byfield, Massachusetts, in 1913, and byJanuary 1915 the society had constructed and dedicated a meeting place, calledAdelynrood, where members came together on retreat every summer. Althoughall of the original Companions were from New England, the society graduallyspread throughout the United States and overseas; by 1908 there were more than250 members worldwide. In the early 1930s Morgan said that when she “lookeddown the table at Adelynrood [she] saw people from some thirty dioceses in theeast, south, and west.” The SCHC, she thought, was “like a feminine fragmentof a General Convention without a House of Bishops.” Both through the commitmentthey made as individuals and through their corporate activities, Morganand other Companions such as the prominent educator Vida Scudder* significantlyincreased the social conscience of the Episcopal Church in the early twentiethcentury.Morgan died in Boston in February 1937.