Lucy Whitehead Peabody was born on March 2, 1861 in Belmont, Kingman County, Kansas, United States. She was the daughter of William McGill, a merchant born in Canada, and Sarah Jane (Hart) McGill, a native of Pittsford, New York. The family soon after returned to Pittsford, and in 1872 moved to Rochester. An older brother died very young, but Lucy shared the home with younger sisters and brothers: Helen, Charles, Margaret, and Edgar.
Lucy Whitehead Peabody attended secondary school in Rochester, New York, graduating from New York's Rochester Academy in 1878 and attending classes at the University of Rochester.
In 1878 Lucy Whitehead Peabody was a teacher at the Rochester State School for the Deaf for three years. The American Baptist Missionary Union appointed her and her husband missionaries to India that summer, and they were stationed at Madras to minister to Telegu-speaking people rather than to the dominant Tamil-speaking population. Her husband engaged in evangelism, church building, and Bible translation, and Lucy itinerated in the villages and initiated education for children in the Telegu area. Lucy returned to Rochester in August 1887.
Lucy Waterbury became assistant secretary of the Woman's American Baptist Foreign Mission Society and moved to Boston in 1889. She succeeded the retiring secretary the next year. Her position brought into light remarkable talents in promotion and administration, made especially visible in building up an efficient voluntary system of Baptist women's societies for education and support on every level from the local to the entire Eastern half of the nation. She established the Farther Lights Society of young girls as an auxiliary in 1890. Christian literature became the subject of prime importance to her. May Leavis became her assistant in this work and remained associated with her for forty years. It was concern for literature which first brought Waterbury into the creation of agencies and organs for cooperative special services. The World's Missionary Committee of Christian Women was founded in 1888 by Abbie B. Child, secretary of the Woman's Board of Foreign Missions (Congregational). American leaders of that body planned the women's sessions of the Ecumenical Missionary Conference in New York in 1900, in which Waterbury became known nationally and interdenominationally.
The committee during the period of the conference met and established the Central Committee for the United Study of Missions. Abbie Child died in 1902, and Lucy Waterbury succeeded her as chairman. She served in that office for twenty-eight years, and then was made honorary chairman. The Central Committee each year published a mission study book used by the several women's denominational boards in the local churches. In order to provide effective teaching of the annual study book and other literature, the Central Committee developed under the personal direction of Lucy Waterbury and Helen Barrett Montgomery summer schools of missions, eventually numbering about thirty across the nation. The most noted were at Chautauqua, New York, and Winona Lake, Ind. After 1910 the committee did its own publishing. The offices, headed by May Leavis, were at West Medford, Massachussets The program inspired parallel publication ventures by the Foreign Missions Conference and the Home Missions Council, and eventually all three were merged into the Missionary Education Movement.
The Central Committee was independent, but it reported to the Interdenominational Conference of Woman's Boards of Foreign Missions in the United States and Canada, founded in 1896, and it became the publisher for that conference. Lucy Peabody played an influential role in developing the Interdenominational Conference into a well-structured body parallel to the Foreign Missions Conference of North America and then in leading it into cooperation with that organization. She established a mission magazine for American children, called Everyland, and personally edited and financed it. She then became passionately devoted to providing literature for women and children overseas. She presented to the Interdenominational Conference in 1909 the basic concept that led in 1912 to the formation of the Committee on Christian Literature for Women and Children, with herself as an ex officio member.
The committee worked through a commission in the United States and Canada that solicited support from mission boards and gathered material. There were parallel commissions in each major mission land abroad. These bodies selected material, employed translators, and published vernacular magazines for women and for children, such as Treasure Chest in India. This committee continues as a department of Inter-media, a functional section of the Division of Overseas Ministries of the National Council of Churches in the U. S. A. It was Lucy Peabody, with the assistance of Helen Barrett Montgomery, who promoted the jubilee celebration of the American women's foreign mission enterprise in 1910. Forty-two two-day "great jubilees" were held across the country, along with a great number of local meetings in smaller communities. The president gave a reception at the White House. A thank-offering of over $1 million was gathered. Lucy Peabody spoke at nearly all the major meetings. The momentum to cooperation generated by the jubilee led her to take the initiative in transforming the old Interdenominational Conference into the more formal and effective Federation of Woman's Boards of Foreign Missions (1916).
This body joined with the Council of Women for Home Missions in creating the United World Day of Prayer, which she had suggested in the 1890's and which is now broadly international. The Central Committee's office in Medford published and distributed the literature. Much of the increasing annual offerings went to women's Christian colleges in Asia, and they were the last great new cause to which she devoted herself. She and Helen Montgomery made an around-the-world trip in 1913 to study the need for such institutions. Then in 1919-1920 the federation sent around the world a commission, chaired by Lucy Peabody, to make a thorough study of the existing schools and need for others. She was chairman of the ensuing financial campaign, and raised $2. 9 million.
In 1924 Lucy Whitehead Peabody became chairman of the Cooperating Committee for Women's Christian Colleges in Foreign Fields. It gave great stimulus to the development of such institutions as the Woman's Christian College of Madras and Ginling College in Nanking. While engaged in interdenominational activity, Peabody did not neglect Baptist concerns. When the WABFMS united with its counterpart in the west (Chicago) in 1914, she was elected foreign vice-president. A new independent society, the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism, was organized to support a new mission in the Philippines in 1927. Mrs. Peabody was president during the first seven years. However, she never severed relations with the WABFMS.
During her last few years Mrs. Peabody lived in a retirement home. She died within a week of her eighty-eighth birthday on February 26, 1949 and was interred at Beverly.
In August 1881, Lucy Whitehead Peabody married Rev. Norman Waterbury, soon after he graduated from Rochester Theological Seminary. Norman Waterbury died of dysentery late in 1886. They had three children. Two of the three children had been born in India: Norma Rose and Howard Ernest. The third child died during the return voyage to Rochester. Lucy resigned as secretary of the WABFMS to marry on June 16, 1906, Henry Wayland Peabody, a widower. Peabody, a member of a prominent family, was head of an import-export firm and active in Baptist foreign missions. The couple resided at the Peabody home, Parramatta, in Beverly, Massachussets. Peabody died in December, 1908, leaving his widow with the wealth to devote herself to missionary causes.
