Julia Chester Emery (1852-1922) was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. She was the fourth daughter (and fifth child) of the merchant marine Captain Charles Emery and Susan Hilton Kelley. Beyond being one of eleven children little is known about Emery’s early life, although her biographer shares an anecdote in which she led the quiet revolution of her peers in an English class after the instructor spent longer teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost than the course schedule called for. The instructor was forced to surrender when every student arrived with Shakespeare in hand instead.

Emery’s leadership as Secretary of the Woman’s Auxiliary began in 1876 upon the resignation of her elder sister, Mary Emery. When Mary Emery resigned, she recommended Julia Emery as her replacement, saying, “Julia is young, but she can do it. She has it in her.” Emery was elected and held the position for the next forty years. During that time, Emery oversaw the expansion of the Woman’s Auxiliary as an organization, encouraged the establishment of the United Offering (now the United Thank Offering), and visited nearly every missionary district in the United States as well as many overseas. Additionally, she represented both the Diocese of New York as a delegate at the 1908 Pan-Anglican Congress in England, a trip she chronicled in The Spirit of Missions as “A Travelling Secretary,” and the Board of Missions at the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Scotland.

While much of the Woman’s Auxiliary’s early work involved sending clothing and other useful articles gathered by parishes to be forwarded to missionaries in the field, Emery, an “insatiable reader” herself, thought they might need reading material as well. Thus the Woman’s Auxiliary began a Lending Library for Missionaries, a mail-order library that gave missionaries access to books of fiction and non-fiction alike for their continuing entertainment and education.

Emery’s last great work was to contribute to the history of The Episcopal Church and the Woman’s Auxiliary not by making it, but by writing about it. In 1921, shortly before her death, she published a book on the hundred-year history of The Episcopal Church, entitled A Century of Endeavor, and a short history of the Woman’s Auxiliary’s early years entitled, A Half-Century of Progress.

Julia Emery died on January 9, 1922, at the age of 69.