Mary Collson
Mary Edith Collson was an American Unitarian Universalist minister and Christian Science practitioner.
Born near Humboldt, Iowa, into a poor family of rationalists, Collson spent four years as a teacher prior to earning her degree in economics from the University of Iowa. She went on to the Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, where she was supported in her studies by Marian Murdock, Eleanor Gordon, and Mary Safford. Upon graduation she was encouraged to take a position with the Unitarian church in Ida Grove, Iowa. For a time she worked as a juvenile court parole officer at Hull House. She later went to Boston, working for the National Women's Trade Union League as a union organizer and studying to practice Christian Science, becoming a practitioner in 1904. Moving to Evansville, Indiana, where she was the first reader, she thrived in the position before leaving the faith in 1914. Returning to organization, she moved to New York City to work for the Women's Political Union and the Socialist Party's women's committee marches. Reinstated into Christian Science, she once again served as a practitioner until 1928; she left the faith again in 1932. At her death she left an unpublished autobiography detailing her troubled relationship with Christian Science; this was later used as the basis for a biography by Cynthia Grant Tucker, Healer in Harm's Way, released in 1995; Tucker had previously published a monograph on her life in 1984.
