Woman of the Century/Adelaide Avery Claflin

CLAFLIN, Mrs. Adelaide Avery, woman suffragist, born in Boston, Mass , 28th July, 1846. She is a daughter of Alden Avery and Luanda Miller Brown, both natives of Maine, and both of English extraction, although there is a little Scotch-Irish blood on the Miller side. Narcissa Adelaide was the second of four children. Her father, although an active business man, had much poetical and religious feeling. He is a prominent member of the Methodist Church, and, on account of his eloquence, was often in earlier life advised to become a minister. Her mother, of a practical, common-sense temperament, had much appreciation of nature and of scientific fact, and a gift for witty and concise expression of thought. So from both parents Mrs. Claflin has derived the ability to speak with clearness and epigrammatic force. Adelaide was sixteen when she was graduated from the Boston girls' high school, and a year or two later she became a teacher in the Winthrop school. Although in childhood attending the Methodist Church with their parents, both her sister and herself early adopted the so-called liberal faith, and joined the church of Rev. James Freeman Clarke. She became the wife of Frederic A. Claflin, of Boston, in 1870, a man of keen and thoughtful mind and generous and kindly spirit They have for many years resided in Quincy, Mass., and have a son and three daughters. In 1883 Mrs. ADELAIDE AVERY CLAFLIN. Claflin began to speak in public as an advocate of woman suffrage. In 1884 she was elected a member of the Quincy school committee, and served three years in that position, being the only woman who ever held office in that conservative town. Although too much occupied with family cares to take a very active part in public life, her pen is busied in writing for the Boston papers, and she finds opportunity to give lectures, and has occasionally been on short lecturing tours outside of the limits of New England. Best known as a woman suffragist, she writes and speaks on various other topics, and her wide range of reading and thinking makes it probable that her future career as a lecturer will not be limited chiefly to the woman suffrage field.