Elizabeth Ryder Wheaton

Born on May 10, 1844, in Wayne County, Ohio, Elizabeth Ryder Wheaton later became widely known as "Mother Wheaton." In the opening chapter of Prisons and Prayer; Or, a Labor of Love, she sketches a hard early life marked by family loss, faith, and perseverance. That personal voice gives her writing much of its power: it feels direct, practical, and shaped by work she actually did.

Her reputation rests mainly on Prisons and Prayer, published in 1906, a memoir-like account of nearly twenty-two years of gospel work among prisoners and other people living on the margins. In it, she describes visits to prisons, reformatories, stockades, rescue homes, saloons, and railway trains, presenting her ministry as a hands-on effort to bring comfort, moral reform, and religious hope.

Wheaton died in 1923. Today she is remembered less as a literary stylist than as a determined reform-minded Christian worker whose book preserves a first-person record of prison outreach and rescue mission work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.