Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/716

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Women as Temperance Workers
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Ocean Grove camp meeting, as the pioneer of press work by women, she gave valuable service and her reports for the New York Tribune and the New York Associated Press during the last ten years of those great religious and temperance gatherings at that noted Mecca of the Methodist Church, are models of their kind. She led the life of a sincere Christian, and died December 7, 1891, after a short illness contracted at the national convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

Mrs. Emma A. Cranmar of Wisconsin has lectured on literary subjects and on temperance in many of the cities and towns of the Northwest. An earnest worker in the white ribbon movement, with which she has been connected for years, she served with great efficiency as president of the South Dakota Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

Mrs. Lavantia Densmore Douglas has shown during her long life such ardent enthusiasm and untiring zeal in her work for prohibition that it made her name in her own community of Meadville, Pennsylvania, a synonym for temperance. She became a member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and for many years was president of the Meadville Union. Arriving home from a trip to Europe on the twenty-third of December, 1873, the day of the great woman's crusade, and finding Meadville greatly aroused, she went immediately to the mass meeting that had been called and effected the temperance organization, which under one form or another has existed up till the present time.

Miss Cornelia M. Dow is the youngest daughter of Neal Dow, almost the original temperance reformer in the United States, and it is most natural that the greater part of her time should be given to works of temperance. For years she was officially connected with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Portland, Maine. She was president of the Union in Cumberland County, one of the superintendents of the state union as well as one of the most effective vice-presidents. Her mother died in 1883 and Miss Dow became her distinguished father's housekeeper and companion up to the time of his death.

Mrs. Marion Howard Dunham, of Iowa, entered upon the temperance field in 1877 with the inauguration of the red ribbon movement in her state, but believing in more permanent effort she was the prime mover in the organization of the local Woman's Christian Temperance Union. In 1883 she was elected state superintendent of the Department of Scientific Temperance and held the office for four years lecturing to institutes and general audiences on that subject most of the time. She procured the Iowa State Law on the subject in February, in 1886. When the Iowa State Temperance Union began to display its opposition to the national union she came to be considered a leader on the side of the minority who adhered to the national and when the majority in the state union seceded from the national union October 16, 1890, she was elected president of those remaining auxiliary to that body. She spends a large part of her time in the field lecturing on temperance, but is interested in all reforms that promise to better the system and condition of life for the multitudes.

Mrs. Edward H. East, of Tennessee, has spent much of her time and money in the cause of temperance. When the prohibition amendment was before the people of Tennessee she was active in the work to create sentiment in its favor.