The Story of Mary Stewart’s Collect (as told by Mary Stewart)

The Collect was written as a personal prayer for the day, and without any organization in mind. It was written at Longmont, Colorado in 1904 where, just out of college, I was entering my first job as principal of the local high school. The prayer was offered for publication under the title, “A Collect for Club Women” because at that time I felt that women working together with wide interest for large ends was a new thing under the sun, and that perhaps they had need for special petition and mediation of their own and distributed it throughout the Empire. The first printing of the Collect was in an obscure paragraph in the column called “Club Notes” in the Delineator, a woman’s magazine no longer published, but at the time nationally popular. Later, copies were struck off by a local printer for the members of Longmont Fortnightly Club of Colorado a federated club. About 1909, Paul Elder and Company of San Francisco printed it as a wall card. In 1924, wall cards were put out by the Armstrong Stationary Company of Cincinnati. All the earlier copies were signed by Mary Stuart, a spelling used until 1920 as a pen name. Since then the spelling Stewart has been both for a pen name and signature, and the Collect has been so signed.

The first women’s organization to hear or use the Collect or to print it in its yearbooks and biennial reports was the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Since then it has been reprinted in many forms in many lands.