The first meeting of the group that would one day become the Massachusetts Woman’s Home Missionary Union was held in the vestry of the Park Street Church in Boston on November 4, 1879. The following year, a constitution for the organization of women was adopted and the Woman’s Home Missionary Association was formally chartered on September 28, 1881. The association was founded to “promote the spiritual and temporal welfare of those in need, especially women and children…” and the purpose of the association was “to engage all churchwomen in home mission work and to collect money towards that end.” The group was supported both by direct membership and by auxiliary organizations, such as the Suffolk Alliance of the Woman’s Home Missionary Association, throughout the whole of Massachusetts.

The Woman’s Home Missionary Association was successful at raising funds, with annual gifts increasing from $2,500 in the first year to $29,000 in the tenth. The funds were used to support many initiatives and missionaries throughout the years. For example, the association supported Almira Steele’s work in the post-war South as the associations first missionary, Lilla Davis and the Cotton Valley School for African-American women in Alabama, the Santee Indian School in Nebraska, the Tuskegee Normal School in Alabama, the Bethlehem Readers Home in Ohio, which later became Schauffler College and eventually Oberlin College, and the French Protestant College in Massachusetts.

The Woman’s Home Missionary Association worked closely with the Massachusetts Congregational Conference during the association’s early years. Then, in the early 1920s, the Massachusetts Congregational Conference merged the previously separate men’s and women’s missionary groups into the singular Massachusetts Missionary Society. Due to this merger, a Massachusetts court ordered that the bequests and money held specifically for women and children must be kept separate and administered separately from the Massachusetts Missionary Society. To adhere to this order, the Woman’s Home Missionary Association was reorganized as the Massachusetts Woman’s Home Missionary Union in 1924. By around 1927, many of the auxiliary groups previously associated with the union were moved under the umbrella of the Massachusetts Missionary Society.

The Massachusetts Woman’s Home Missionary Union continues to operate today. The union is affiliated with the Southern New England Conferences of the United Church of Christ and annually disburses invested income as grants from an endowment of over $1 million.