In 1893, she helped found a chapter of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Rochester, New York, and served as president until 1911, nearly two decades.

In 1899, Montgomery was the first woman elected to the Rochester School Board and any public office in the city, 20 years before women could vote.

Since 1995, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School has held an annual conference on Women in Church and Society, named in honor of Helen Barrett Montgomery.

In addition, the School is establishing an endowed fund in her name for its Program for the Study of Women and Gender in Church and Society.

[2] On September 6, 1887, Barrett married a Rochester businessman, William A. Montgomery, owner of North East Electric Company.

[1] Helen Barrett Montgomery's life work may be described under four headings: church, social reforms to benefit women, Bible translation, and missions.

Like many other Progressives, she believed that the moral influence of True Womanhood and the values of the Victorian home ought to be extended throughout the state and the society.

The Convention was formed in 1907, bringing together most Baptists in the North who were associated with the historical missions to establish schools and colleges for freedmen in the South after the American Civil War.

In 1921, Montgomery was the first woman to be elected president of the Northern Baptist Convention (NBC), and of any religious denomination in the United States.

He alone among the founders of the great religions of the world looked upon men and women with level eyes, seeing not their differences, but their oneness, their humanity.

In 1893, she joined with Susan B. Anthony, the activist for civil rights who was nearly 40 years older, in forming a new chapter of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU) in Rochester.

Following the example of chapters in Buffalo and Boston, the WEIU of Rochester served poor women and children in the city, which was attracting many Southern and Eastern European rural immigrants for its industrial jobs.

In 1898, Montgomery and Susan B. Anthony responded to a challenge by the trustees of the University of Rochester, who had voted to make it coeducational if women's groups raised $100,000 to help with expenses.

Montgomery was inspired to write a new English translation because of her experience teaching street boys in her church, and finding they did not understand the dated language of the King James Version of the Bible.

Montgomery's translation was notable for her practice of inserting chapter and section titles (as seen in photo), a pioneering feature now commonly used in Bibles in many languages.

She included interpretations supporting enlarged roles for women in the church, which was influenced by her reading the works of Katharine Bushnell, a Methodist missionary.

[7] Bushnell's influence is seen in Montgomery's translating 1 Cor.11:13-15 as statements rather than questions (as formerly interpreted by others), as illustrated below with comparisons between the New American Standard Bible and the King James Version.

Not limiting her audience to adults, Montgomery worked as associate editor of Everyland, a magazine for children that reported on international missions.