Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/730

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Women as Temperance Workers
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ing in different parts Woman's Christian Temperance Unions and Bands of Hope. Having been located in Washington, D. C, for a year or more she was led to establish a mission school for colored children, to whom she taught the English branches, with the addition of work in an industrial department. Later she returned to Boston, Mass., where her labors were numerous and her charities broad and noble. She believed that "To oppose one evil to the neglect of others is not wise or Christian."

Miss Missouri H. Stokes, while in charge of the Mission Day School in Atlanta, and very successful in that missionary field, found herself drawn into the crusade for temperance which invaded even the South. She became a member of the first Woman's Christian Temperance Union organized in Georgia, and in 1881 was made secretary, going in 1883 to be corresponding secretary of the state union organized that year. She worked enthusiastically in the good cause, writing much for temperance papers and she was for years the special Georgia correspondent of the Union Signal. She took an active part in the struggle for the passage of the local option law in Georgia, and she made a most valiant attempt to secure from the state legislature scientific temperance instruction in the public schools, a state refuge for fallen women, a law to close the barrooms throughout the state, and she fought on for these acts of legislation for years despite the fact that she and her co-workers were everywhere met with the assertion that all these measures were unconstitutional. After being a conspicuous figure in the temperance revolution in Atlanta, Mrs. Stokes made several successful lecture tours in Georgia paying her expenses from her own slender purse and never allowing a collection to be taken in one of her meetings.

Mrs. Lucy Robins Messer Switzer is one of the most prominent temperance workers which Washington Territory, now State, has ever known. In 1882 she was appointed vice-president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union for Washington Territory, and before Miss Willard's visit in June, and July, 1883, she had organized unions in Spokane Falls, Waitsburg, Dayton, Olympia, Port Townsend and Tacoma. She arranged for the eastern Washington convention in Cheney, the twentieth to the twenty-third of July, 1883, and she acted as president for the Eastern Washington State Union, then formed, for many years. Her work in the campaign of 1885-1886 for scientific instruction and local option and constitutional campaigns for prohibition are matters of record, as representing arduous work and wise generalship. She traveled thousands of miles in the work, having attended the national conventions in Detroit, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Nashville, New York, Chicago and Boston. She was active during the years from 1883 to 1888, when women had the ballot in Washington, voting twice in territorial elections and several times in municipal and special elections. She wrote many articles in forceful and yet restrained style on all the phases of woman's temperance work and woman's suffrage, and it is safe to conclude that the present equal suffrage law in Washington State was made easier of accomplishment through the earlier works of such strong, thoughtful women as Mrs. Switzer.

Mrs. Eliza J. Thompson was early led into temperance work both by her own inclination and by the influence of her father, the late Governor Trimble of