Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/709

668 Mrs. Ella Hoover Thacher is of old Holland and English descent. She taught school when she was fifteen and one-half years old; was prepared for college, but too young to enter; married at 17; began her temperance work when only five years old; joined church at twelve years of age; taught a Sunday school class of three little children when eleven years of age; moved to Florence, New Jersey, after her marriage and with the help of her husband, organized a Sunday school there, from which a church grew, with an attendance of more than 600 people. They organized settlement work — cooking, sewing classes, boys' and girls' clubs, evangelistic work and helpers in work with boys in library; began Woman's Christian Temperance Union work with children of the town and a Woman's Christian Temperance Union followed; was elected county president of Burlington County Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1893 ; made national superintendent of soldiers' and sailors' work; made world's superintendent of soldiers' and sailors' work; has traveled all over the United States and many foreign countries in interest of this department ; visited every National Soldiers' Home and many State Homes; organized Christian Temperance Unions. Over 10,000 soldiers and sailors in forts, barracks, navy yards and on the large battleships and cruisers have pledged against strong drink through her influence; many of these are filling places of trust in the business world to-day. Some of them are preaching the Gospel of Christ.

Mrs. Thacher has been sent by the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union to Mexico where President Diaz became interested in the work; also sent to Cuba and the Bahama Islands. Visiting government reservations while the canteen was in them, she learned of the dreadful havoc it was making and traveled extensively telling the people of the country of its dreadful wickedness; also arousing her own organization which, with other temperance societies and the Christian people of the nation, helped in the abolishing of the curse.

For twenty-five years she was treasurer of an associational Woman's Foreign Missionary Society; is connected with the National Congress of Mothers and is on many local boards of philanthropic societies. For years she was the only woman on the executive board of the New Jersey State Red Cross Society, having been instrumental in its organization.

Mrs. Mary Harris Armor of Eastman, Georgia, was called "The Southern Joan of Arc." She is state president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and has electrified the whole community, North and South with her matchless eloquence, her unanswerable logic, and her magnetic personality, as she has gone from city to city pleading the cause of prohibition. Mrs. Armor is credited with being the main factor in the passage of the state prohibitory law for Georgia, and she is now in constant demand as a speaker at Chautauquas and all over the country. Mrs. Armor's chief claim to distinction, aside from her platform work,