Maria Beulah Underwood was born on 22 July 1844 in Lisbon, Ohio. She was widowed twice, buried five of her six children, and began itinerant preaching in 1880 under the auspices of the Churches of God (Winebrennerian) in northern Indiana.
By 1885 her meetings at Hartford City, Indiana were drawing 25,000 attendees over a two-week span — remarkable for the pre-electric-lighting era — and were characterised by what contemporary newspapers called "trances": entire sections of the audience falling motionless for hours, sometimes days. Local physicians examined subjects and pronounced them physiologically normal but unresponsive.
She was arrested for practising medicine without a licence in St Louis in 1890 and acquitted. Her 1912 meetings at F.F. Bosworth's Dallas tabernacle — attended by John G. Lake, Aimee Semple McPherson and F.F. Bosworth himself — became the pivot between the 19th-century Holiness healing tradition and the emerging Pentecostal movement.
Woodworth-Etter died on 16 September 1924 in Indianapolis. Her Signs and Wonders (1916) remained in print for a century and is regularly reissued as source material within the modern charismatic renewal.