Laura Ormiston Chant


Laura Ormiston Dibbin Chant was an English social reformer and writer.

Biography

Chant was born on 9 October 1848, in Woollaston, Gloucestershire, the daughter of Francis William Dibbin, a civil engineer and Sophia Ormiston, who managed a girls institution. Her parents were highly disciplinary and she ran away from home aged fifteen. She worked as a nursing sister in the Sophia Wards in the London Hospital. Working as a nurse, considered a rough occupation at the time, her father banned her from ever returning home. At work she met and later married Thomas Chant, M.R.C.S., L.S.A., of Bridgwater in 1877. They had Thomas, Emmeline, Olive and Ethel Chant.
Ormiston wrote and lectured on social purity, temperance, and women's rights. Her published works include pamphlets, hymns, a novel and a book of poetry and are described as reflecting "many of the tensions characterizing feminism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries". She also wrote the words and music for Action Songs for Children and several more volumes of music in the same vein, consisting of simple ditties embodying physical exercises for small children. In 1893 Chant addressed the 1893 Parliament of the World's Religions, held in Chicago in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition. Her subject was Duty of God to Man Inquired. In 1894 she started attacking music-halls as temptations to vice. She went to Bulgaria to give aid to Armenian refugees from the 1894–1896 Hamidian massacres.
Chant died in Banbury, Oxfordshire, 16 February 1923.

Selected works