Born Mabel Lilla Hodgkins, the woman who eventually became known as Reverend Mabel McCoy Irwin was one of the first female graduates of the Tufts Divinity School. She was also an accomplished music teacher and an expert stenographer. On January 19, 1882 in New York City, she married James S. McCoy who was a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and was to become pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Tombstone, Arizona. This marriage ended in divorce. In 1895 Mabel was installed as pastor of the First Universalist Church of Mansfield, Massachusetts. Mabel married, second, Francis Joseph Irwin of Lincoln, Nebraska on August 9, 1899 in Dexter, Maine. This marriage also ended in divorce. Reverend Irwin lived mostly in New York City but traveled extensively throughout the country and the world, writing and lecturing on religious and moral issues. She was once seen as a rival to Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement. She was an active prohibitionist, social reformer and suffragist, acting as an at-large representative to the National Convention of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and later becoming the Maine representative to the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. In 1915 she was a representative to the International Congress of Women in The Hague, Netherlands. Toward the end of her life she was speaking regularly at the Divine Science Center in Pittsburgh, Penn. An obituary appearing in the Mansfield (MA) News on December 7, 1928 reported her place of death as the Plummer Memorial Hospital in Dexter, Maine.
Born Mabel Lilla Hodgkins, the woman who eventually became known as Reverend Mabel McCoy Irwin was one of the first female graduates of the Tufts Divinity School. She was also an accomplished music teacher and an expert stenographer. On January 19, 1882 in New York City, she married James S. McCoy who was a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and was to become pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Tombstone, Arizona. This marriage ended in divorce. In 1895 Mabel was installed as pastor of the First Universalist Church of Mansfield, Massachusetts. Mabel married, second, Francis Joseph Irwin of Lincoln, Nebraska on August 9, 1899 in Dexter, Maine. This marriage also ended in divorce. Reverend Irwin lived mostly in New York City but traveled extensively throughout the country and the world, writing and lecturing on religious and moral issues. She was once seen as a rival to Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement. She was an active prohibitionist, social reformer and suffragist, acting as an at-large representative to the National Convention of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and later becoming the Maine representative to the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. In 1915 she was a representative to the International Congress of Women in The Hague, Netherlands. Toward the end of her life she was speaking regularly at the Divine Science Center in Pittsburgh, Penn. An obituary appearing in the Mansfield (MA) News on December 7, 1928 reported her place of death as the Plummer Memorial Hospital in Dexter, Maine.
