PIKE COUNTY, Mo. — She was brilliant, devout and tireless, and had a flair for getting her ideas across.

Eliza Jane Read Sunderland was an author, educator, lecturer and outspoken public figure at a time when women were given few career options.

The Huntsville Illinois native, who would have celebrated her birthday April 19th, challenged the status quo while encouraging self-examination and the questioning of theories still being debated today.

Sunderland famously said education opened opportunities that made the old world of domestic life seem meager by comparison. She also questioned the idea that women could not succeed at the same occupations as men.

Sunderland was born on a farm near Huntsville on April 19, 1839. She went to college and became a teacher before moving on to speaking nationally about religion and philosophy.

“If you direct your appeal to one creed or religion, you will have but a limited audience,” she once said. “If you direct your appeal to the heart and the conscience, no walls can contain your audience.”

Sunderland spoke at the first World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, campaigned for women’s voting rights, wrote books and published many Sunday School manuals.

She died at 70 on March 3, 1910, and is buried in Michigan.

“I should have been glad for a few more years of work,” Sunderland wrote on her deathbed. “But I am content: it is all right as it is, exactly right. I have been given a very beautiful life. If this is death, then it is beautiful, too. People have said it is dreadful: but it is sweet. It does not seem to me death at all, but larger life. And the future is beautiful. I am not going away: I shall be with you.”