Mabel Cratty was an American educator. She served as the General Secretary of the National Board of the Y. W. C. A from 1906 to 1928.
Background
Mabel Cratty was born on June 30, 1868, at Bellaire, Ohio, United States. She was the daughter of Charles Campbell and Mary (Thoburn) Cratty. Her mother was a sister of Bishop James M. Thoburn, missionary bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in India, and of Isabella Thoburn, first unmarried American woman foreign missionary.
Education
Mabel was educated in the public schools of Bellaire, at Lake Erie Seminary, Painesville, Ohio, and at Ohio Wesleyan University, where she graduated with the degree of the Bachelor of Laws in 1890. In 1922 she received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the same university.
Career
Cratty taught in the Wheeling Female Seminary in West Virginia, and in the high schools of Kent and Delaware, Ohio, and was principal of the Delaware High School, 1900-1904. Through the efforts of two of her college friends she became interested in Y. W. C. A. work (1902), and for a time she was a member of the Ohio state committee. She was appointed associate general secretary of the American Committee of the Young Women’s Christian Association in 1904, and, with the unifying of Y. W. C. A. movement and the formation of the National Board in 1906, she was made general secretary of the Board. In this position she remained until her death, closely associated, during the early years, with Grace H. Dodge, first president of the Board.
Miss Cratty’s interests and activities were not limited to the organization of which she was so important a part, but extended to many other movements, among them the Camp Fire Girls of America, Institute of Pacific Relations, National Social Work Council, Council of Christian Associations, National Council Committee to study relations between the Young Men’s Christian Association and the Council of Churches, National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War. In the development of the last organization, she was prominent from its beginning.
Miss Cratty attended many meetings of the World’s Committee of the Y. W. C. A. , and World Conferences; in Paris (1906), Swanwick (1910), Berlin (1912), Stockholm (1914), Champery (1920), Washington (1924), Oxford (1926). She visited Y. W. C. A. headquarters in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy, France, Switzerland, Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, China, Japan, and Honolulu. In 1922 she was a member of the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , party which spent four months in the Orient. In July 1927 she was a delegate to the Institute of Pacific Relations at Honolulu. Seven months later, after a brief illness from pneumonia, she died at the Rockefeller Institute Hospital, New York City. She was buried in the family lot at Bellaire, overlooking the Ohio River.
Religion
Mabel Cratty was a life-long Methodist.
Personality
Mabel Cratty was not striking in appearance, and her personality was a quiet one, but those who knew her appreciated her uprightness, keen insight, patience in obtaining results, clear vision, practical sense, helpfulness, gift for developing others, and justice.