Fidelia Fiske was the founder and first principal of a female seminary at Orumiyeh in Persia (Urmia in present-day Iran).
Background
Fidelia Fiske was born on a hill-top farm in Shelburne, Massachusetts, where in 1761 her great-grandfather, Ebenezer Fiske, Jr. , had established himself. Her parents were plain, New England country folk, hard-working, intelligent, and religious. From childhood her own religious tendencies were pronounced, and her eagerness to read whatever she could lay her hand on was so keen that by the time she was eight years old she had perused with interest, if not with full understanding, Cotton Mather’s Magnolia, and had twice read through Timothy Dwight’s Theology.
Education
She attended district school, and at seventeen became a district school teacher, in which occupation she continued for a period of six years, broken by brief terms of study at Franklin Academy, Shelburne Falls, and at a select school in Conway. In 1839 she entered Mount Holyoke Seminary, graduating in 1842, and immediately becoming an instructor in that institution.
Career
The intense religious and missionary zeal of the principal, Mary Lyon, strengthened in Fidelia Fiske an early predilection for Christian service abroad, so that when in 1843 Rev. Justin Perkins, who had founded a mission among the Nestorians a few years before, came to Mount Holyoke in search of teachers, she promptly volunteered and was accepted. Under authorization of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions she sailed from Boston March 1, 1843, and arrived in Oroomiah (Urumiah) in June of that year. Here she commenced a work which is credited with having been a potent factor in improving the condition of women in Persia, and displayed a spirit which has given her a place among those who in missionary annals arc held up as ensam- ples.
The story of her service is the story of the first fifteen years of the notable Oroomiah Seminary, a boarding school for girls, of which she was practically the founder.
While successful in establishing this institution in the face of much native opposition and endless difficulties, she did much by personal ministrations and evangelistic labors to instruct and uplift women and children wherever she could reach them. She had gone to Persia with the expectation of remaining until death, but ill-health forced her to return in July 1858.
Home again, she addressed missionary meetings and was a kind of chaplain to Mount Holyoke Seminary. An invitation to become principal she declined in the hope that she would be able to return to Persia, but her constitution was too seriously impaired, and death came to her at Shelburne in her forty-ninth year.
She had been able, however, to prepare, Memorial, Twenty- fifth Anniversary of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (1862), and at the time of her death was at work upon Recollections of Mary Lyon, which was published in 1866. She also furnished the material for Thomas Laurie’s Woman and Her Saviour in Persia (1863), which contains much information about her work.
Religion
Beyond the Bourne (1891) is a spiritualist story.