Mary H. (Mary Helen) Fee

Born in Quincy, Illinois, in October 1864, Mary Helen Fee went on to teach English and history at the Normal School in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, now Southeast Missouri State University. In 1901, after earning a teaching credential from the University of Chicago, she joined the first group of American civilian teachers sent to the Philippines.

That experience shaped her best-known book, A Woman’s Impression of the Philippines (1910), a travel memoir and commentary on the islands as she saw them. She also wrote The Locusts' Years, a novel set in the Philippines, showing that her time there continued to influence her imagination as well as her nonfiction.

Later, during World War I, Fee served as a canteen worker in France. Her life moved between teaching, travel, public service, and writing, and her books remain of interest both as literature and as firsthand records of an American abroad in the early twentieth century.