Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/713

672 Miss Julia Colman originated the Temperance School that marked a new-departure in the temperance work among children, using text-books, tracts, charts and experiments. For fifteen years she was superintendent of literature in the Woman's National Temperance Union.

Mrs. Anna Smeed Benjamin, of Michigan, is one of the best known orators in the cause of temperance. She was a logical, convincing, enthusiastic speaker, with a deep powerful voice and urgent manner, which made her a notable presiding officer. She was also a skilled parliamentarian and became superintendent of the national department of parliamentary uses in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The drills which she conducted in the white ribboners' "School of Methods" and elsewhere were always largely attended by both men and women.

Mrs. Sarah Hearst Black bore the labor of self-denial incident to the life of a home missionary's wife in Kansas, Nebraska and in Idaho, and achieved a splendid work of organization as president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Nebraska.

Miss Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell, has come forward in the cause of temperance, as is shown in the small weekly paper of which she is the editor. This is called The Woman's Column and is also largely devoted to suffrage.

Mrs. Ellen A. Dayton Blair, of Iowa, as national organizer in the temperance cause, visited nearly every state and territory as well as Canada, and is a member of nearly every national convention.

Mrs. Ann Weaver Bradley has done notable work for temperance in Kansas and Michigan. From young womanhood she has had an inherent hatred for the destroying agents in narcotics, and has done splendid work for the cause, being especially fitted for it by her gifts of persistence, thoroughness of research and her love of humanity.

Mrs. Martha McClellan Brown worked strenuously as organizer of the National Prohibition Alliance and made her husband's newspaper the vehicle of a vigorous warfare against the liquor traffic. Later, her husband and she were appointed to the presidency and vice-presidency of Cincinnati, Wesleyan College, which offered them a field for propagating ideas of temperance in the young minds brought under their control.

Miss Cynthia S. Burnett passed her early life in Ohio, but her first "White Ribbon" work was done in Illinois, in 1879, later answering calls for help in Florida, Tennessee, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In 1885 she was made state organizer of Ohio, and the first year of this treaty she lectured one hundred and sixty-five times, besides holding meetings in the daytime and organizing over forty unions. Her voice failing, she accepted a call to Utah as teacher in the Methodist Episcopal College, in Salt Lake City. While living there she was made territorial president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and eight unions and fifteen loyal legions were organized by her. Each month one or more meetings were held by her and the work was further indorsed in a column of a Mormon paper which she