Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/728

Rh Mrs. Emily Pitt Stevens devoted her life to educational and temperance work on the Pacific Coast. She started an evening school for working girls; she organized the Woman's Co-operative Printing Association, and edited the Pioneer, a woman's paper produced entirely by women on the basis of equal pay for equal work. She was aided by prominent men in placing the stock of the company and through it she exercised great influence in advancing the cause of women in California. After the organization of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in California she labored earnestly in that society. She contributed to the columns of the Bulletin, Pharos, and Pacific Ensign, and served as state lecturer. She joined the prohibition party in 1882 and she led the movement in 1888 to induce the Woman's Christian Temperance Union to endorse that party. As far back as 1874, she instituted the Seaman's League in San Francisco, and in 1875 the old Seaman's Hospital was donated by Congress to carry on the work, and the institution became firmly established. The inception of this splendid work together with many other California reforms in those days was from the mind of Mrs. Stevens.

Mrs. Lillian M. N. Stevens of Maine, co-worker with Neal Dow for the prohibition of Hquor traffic, her first attempt as a speaker was made in Old Orchard, Maine, when the Woman's Christian Temperance Union for the state was organized. This movement fired her soul with zeal and she threw her whole heart into reform work. She was treasurer of the Maine union for the first three years of its existence and then was made its president. She was also one of the secretaries of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union and corresponding secretary for Maine of the national conference of charities and corrections, treasurer of the National Woman's Council of the United States and was one of the commissioners of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago is 1893. She was one of the founders of the temporary home for women and children near Portland and one of the trustees of the Maine Industrial School for Girls. In all these manifold lines of work she proved herself an honorable daughter of a state noted for its distinguished sons.

Mrs. Eliza Daniel Stewart, a leader in all movements, whose purpose was the happiness and upholding of humanity, in 1858 became a charter member of a Good Templar Lodge organized in her town of Piketon, Ohio, and she remained a warm advocate of the order for the rest of her life. She delivered her first public temperance address before the Band of Hope in Pomeroy, and continued thereafter to fight for the temperance cause with voice and pen. When the boom of cannon upon Sumter was heard she devoted her time to gathering and forwarding supplies to the field and hospital, and at length she went South herself, to aid in the hospital work. She remained at the front during the Civil War and became convinced that in the appetite for drink that had come to so many of the soldiers the country was fostering a foe even worse than the one which the soldiers had conquered by force of arms. On the twenty-second of January, 1872, she delivered a lecture on temperance in Springfield, which was her first step into crusade movements. Two days later a drunkard's wife prosecuted a saloon keeper under the Adair law and Mrs. Stewart, called Mother Stewart since the war, going into the courtroom, was persuaded by the attorney to make