Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/732

Rh constitution of Kentucky she was chosen one of six women to visit the capital, and secure a hearing before the committees on education, and municipalities, and on the Woman's Property Rights Bill then pending. When the woman's crusade movement was initiated she happened to be living in Colorado where business affairs called her husband for several years, but her sympathies were with the women of Ohio who formed the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and as soon as she returned to Louisville she joined the union there. She worked actively in various departments of that organization, her special work being given to scientific temperance instruction in the public schools. In this and in many benevolences for her city Mrs. Watts accomplished much positive good.

Mrs. Delia L. Weatherby, inheriting the same temperament which made her father an abolitionist, became an active worker in the order of Good Templars. She could endure no compromise with intemperance and in the various places she lived she was always distinguished as an advanced thinker and a pronounced prohibitionist. She was a candidate on the prohibition ticket in 1886, for county superintendent of public instruction in Coffey County, Kansas, and she was elected a lay delegate to the quadrennial meeting of the South Kansas Lay Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1888. In 1890 she was placed in nomination for the office of state superintendent of public instruction on the prohibition ticket. In 1S90 she was unanimously elected clerk of the school board in her home district. She was an alternate delegate from the fourth congressional district of Kansas to the national prohibition convention in 1892, and also secured the same year for the second time by the same party, the nomination for the office of public instruction in her own county. All this experience in political life greatly enhanced her value as a member of the white ribbon army, in which cause she has always been prominent. She was president of the Coffey County Woman's Christian Temperance Union for several years and as superintendent of the Press Department of the Kansas Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and state reporter for the Union Signal she proved herself one of the strongest women that this enterprising state has ever given to the temperance cause.

Miss Mary Allen West of Galesburg, Illinois, was a wise practical leader of the temperance cause. When the Civil War came she had worked earnestly in organizing women into aid societies to assist the Sanitary Commission, and after the war she accomplished a remarkable piece of editorial work, editing in Illinois the Home Magazine, which was published nearly one thousand miles away in Philadelphia, but later she left pen and desk for active work in the temperance cause. When the woman's crusade sounded the call of woman, the home and God against the saloon her whole soul echoed the cry, and after the organization of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union had been effected she became an earnest worker in its ranks, giving efficient aid in organizing the women of Illinois and becoming their president. In that office she traveled very extensively throughout Illinois and became familiar with the homes of the people. It was that knowledge of the inner life of thousands of homes that made her work for temperance direct, practical and efficient. She was often called upon to help in the editorial labors of Mrs. Mary B. Williard, the editor of the Signal, published in Chicago, and later whom it had been merged with our Union, into the