Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/723

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Part Taken by Women in American History


thousand dollars for the establishment of the Girls' Industrial Home, a reformatory school in Adrian, Michigan. Mrs. Lathrop's lectures have always been successful and she is equally at home on the temperance platform, on the lecture platform, or at the author's desk. Her memorial ode to Garfield was widely quoted and her brilliant oratory won for her the title "The Daniel Webster of Prohibition."

Mrs. Olive Moorman Leader, on her marriage in 1880, going to live in Omaha, Nebraska, immediately identified herself with the active work for the temperance cause. She introduced the systematic visiting of the Douglas County jails and she was one of the first workers among the Chinese, being first state superintendent of that department. For twelve years she was identified with the suffrage cause and an adherent and devout believer in the efficacy of Christian Science.

Mrs. Harriett Calista Clark McCabe, in April, 1874, wrote the constitution of the Woman's Temperance Union of Ohio, which was the first union organized. After serving the union for nine years she withdrew from public life but in time yielded to earnest persuasion to aid in the National Woman's Indian Association, and then in the Woman's Home Missionary Society, becoming the editor of Woman's Home Missions the official organ of that society.

Mrs. Caroline Elizabeth Merrick, wife of Edwin T. Merrick, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana at the time of the Civil War, began her work for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union at a time when the temperance cause was widely agitated in the South, though its reception on the whole was a cold one. She was for many years state president for Louisiana. She has written extensively on the subject but her chief talent was impromptu speaking and she developed into a very successful platform orator, holding an audience by the force of her wit and keen sarcasm. Her sympathies were also aroused upon the question of woman's suffrage and for years she stood comparatively alone in her ardent championship of the cause. She was the first woman in Louisiana to speak publicly in behalf of her sex. She addressed the state convention in 1879, and assisted in securing an article in the constitution making all women over twenty-one years of age eligible to hold office in connection with the public schools. It required considerable moral courage to side with a movement so derided in the South at that time, but Mrs. Merrick never faltered in her work for the emancipation of women; moreover, she always took active part in the charitable and philanthropic movements of New Orleans, her native city.

Mrs. Mary Clement Leavitt after being prominent in New England temperance work for years was elected president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Boston, and national organizer of the society. In 1883 she accepted from the president of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Miss Willard, a roving commission as pioneer for the temperance union which was organized in that year. Thenceforth Mrs. Leavitt's work has been without parallel in the records of labor in foreign missions and for temperance. When volunteers were asked for a canvas of the Pacific Coast states she was the first one to answer, and she was also the first to go abroad in the interests of the new organization. The association offered to pay her expenses but she decided not to accept it. She bought her ocean ticket with her own money and in 1883 sailed from Cali-