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Our Lady of Grace, Dearborn Heights, Michigan

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Featured Windows, June 1998

Christ Church Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, MI

Building: Christ Church Cranbrook

City: Bloomfield Hills

State: Michigan

Detail views of the "Women's Window," showing the two lower tiers and portraits of Woman Suffrage leaders.

The great West Window or "Women's Window" at Christ Church Cranbrook depicts sixty women from biblical times to the 1920s, symbolizing women's contributions to church missions, social and humanitarian service, education, and the arts. The full-length figures are shown in sixteen panels arranged in four tiers, with each panel representing one area of women's contributions. Inscribed at the base of the window is a biblical quotation: "Her children rise up and call her blessed, and her works praise her in the gates" (Proverbs 31:28,31).

Among the twenty American women pictured are Mary S. Francis, Julia C. Emery, Bertha Sabine and Anne C. Farthing, church missionaries; Maria Mitchell, astronomer and Vassar professor; Alice Freeman Palmer, President of Wellesley College; Mary Lyon, founder of Mount Holyoke College; Dr. Mary E. Glenton, missionary nurse to Alaska, China and North Carolina; Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross; Mary Cassatt, painter; Amy Lowell and Emily Dickinson, poets; Louisa May Alcott, novelist; Lucretia Coffin Mott, abolitionist and advocate of women's rights; Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist writer; Dolly Madison, women's rights advocate; Susan B. Anthony, Anna Howard Shaw and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Woman Suffrage leaders; and Mary Anderson, actress.

Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919), who grew up in Michigan near Big Rapids, was a Methodist minister, physician, and prominent Suffrage leader. Her portrait and those of other Suffrage leaders are reminders of this year's sesquicentennial anniversary of the first Woman's Rights Convention, organized in 1848 by Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others at Seneca Falls, New York.

Christ Church Cranbrook was designed by Bertram G. Goodhue Associates of New York City and constructed in 1925-28. The "Women's Window," a gift of James Alfred Beresford and Florence Booth Beresford, was designed in England by James H. Hogan and fabricated in 1927 by the London firm of James Powell & Son, Ltd.

Christ Church Cranbrook of Bloomfield Hills was registered in the Michigan Stained Glass Census by Shirley Dow Marthey of Bloomfield Hills.

(MSGC 1994.0158)

Text by Betty MacDowell, Michigan Stained Glass Census, June , 1998.