Clara Celestia Hale Babcock was ordained in 1888 in Erie, Illinois, and is generally identified as the first woman ordained in the Stone-Campbell movement; she preached for some twenty-five years. The movement's congregational polity is the reason: ordination required a congregation and a council of neighbouring churches, not a bishop or a national body, so a local decision could not be reversed from above. Disciples women were also central to the missionary enterprise — the Christian Woman's Board of Missions, founded in 1874, was one of the few American mission societies run entirely by women, sending and directing its own missionaries. That history was substantially forgotten in the mid-twentieth century as the denomination professionalised its clergy, and was recovered by historians from the 1970s. The Churches of Christ, on the same polity, went the other way and continue in most congregations to bar women from public leading of worship.