organization of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. After that she began work of organizing forces in neighboring parts of the state. She became president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in her own county and secretary of the State Temperance Association, and she has greatly aided the cause from the lecture platform, for though a member of the Society of Friends, she availed herself of the freedom accorded to the speaker in meeting.
Mrs. Jennie Florella Holmes began her public work at the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, by giving good service to the Soldier's Aid Society of Jerseyville, Ill. Earnest and untiring in her advocacy of the temperance cause and all equal political rights for women, on her removal, at marriage, to Tecumseh, Nebraska, she immediately allied herself with these elements and in the winter of 1881 she became a member of the first woman's suffrage convention held in that state and labored for the amendment submitted at that session of the legislature. She was chairman of the executive committee of the state suffrage society from 1881 to 1884. In 1884 she was elected president of the State Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which office she held for three years. She was elected delegate-at-large from Nebraska to the National Prohibition Party Convention held in Indianapolis in 1888, and in her ardent love for the cause she considered this the crowning honor of her laborious life. She remained, however, with all her love for the temperance cause an active member of the Woman's Relief Corps and was sent a delegate to the Woman's Relief Corps Convention held in Milwaukee in 1889. She died in her home in Tecumseh the twentieth of March, 1892.
Mrs. Esther T. Housh became a prominent temperance worker in 1883 but she had done editorial work in the periodical Woman's Magazine published by her son in Brattleboro, Vermont, and when she attended the national convention in Detroit, she was immediately elected press superintendent of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She held that position until 1888, instituting the National Bulletin which averaged eighty thousand copies a year. In the national conventions in Nashville and New York she furnished a report of the proceedings to a thousand selected papers of high standing. In 1885 she was elected state secretary of the Vermont Woman's Christian Temperance Union and was given editorial charge of Our Home Guards, the state organ. Her literary work has been of the most valuable character for the cause.
Mrs. Mary H. Hunt, after a careful study of the sentimental, religious, and legal phases of temperance reform became convinced that if the nation were to develop on a high plane the liquor evil must be abolished by the wide dissemination of actual knowledge concerning the nature of the effects of alcohol upon the body and mind of man. She felt she must reach the children through the medium of the public schools. To reach the public schools with authority to teach, she must have behind her the power of the law, and her plan of operation she decided must include direct attack upon legislation, and to secure an influence over legislation there must be a demand from the people. Miss Hunt laid her plan before the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union and there was created an educational department of which she became the national superintendent. By an appeal to the American Medical Association in their annual meeting of 1882,
