Woman of the Century/Harriet G Walker

WALKER, Mrs. Harriet G., reformer and philanthropist, born in Brunswick, Ohio, 10th September, 1841. She is the youngest daughter of Hon. Fletcher and Fanny Hulet, who were natives of Berkshire county, Mass. HARRIET O. WALKER. . In her sixth year the family removed to Berea, Ohio, for the advantages of education in the Baldwin University, where Harriet made a more brilliant record in music and composition than in the heavier studies. At eleven years of age she united with the Methodist Church, of which she has ever since remained a member. Before her school days were ended, she was a regular contributor to several publications, and the dream of her life was to write a book. On 19th December, 1863, she became the wife of Thomas B. Walker, her schoolmate and companion since their sixteenth year. They moved to Minneapolis, Minn. Eight children were born to them, of whom one died at eighteen years of age. Mrs. Walker turned her attention to charitable work some twenty years ago, and she is to-day associated with many of the charities of Minneapolis, some of which she has been largely instrumental in calling into existence and maintaining with money and hard work. For seventeen years she has been secretary of the reformatory for women called the Bethany Home, in Minneapolis, which has been carried through that period by the labors of four women. Ten years ago Mrs. Walker organized the work of women for women, the Northwestern Hospital for Women and Children, at the head of which as president she has stood to the present time. With a strong board of women directors, a training school Tor nurses, with women physicians, and women and children as patients, the history of that institution has been one of continued success and prosperity. The society owns one of the finest hospital buildings in the Northwest, which is valued, with the other property in their possession, at not less than $60,000. Mrs. Walker has always been strongly devoted to temperance principles, and she was one of the first to take up the work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. When that organization took up the political issue, it shut her out for many years from work in that field. Upon the division of the Union, she joined the Non-partisan Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and took an active part in temperance again. She holds the positions of national vice-president and State president of the non-partisan organization. Her private charities are broad and extensive, though quietly administered. So much of her time is now required in the giving of advice and counsel to the unfortunate and in the arrangements for their relief, that she has been obliged to establish and observe regular office hours and employ a stenographer to carry on her correspondence. She has her husband's support in all her work. Minneapolis is indebted to her for the introduction of police matronship. She is now chairman of the police matron joint committee. She will never look upon this branch of work as complete until she sees a separate woman's prison under the care of a board of women, including reformatory features and indeterminate sentence for all women who come under the restraining or corrective hand of the law, and for that object she is now laboring. In 1892 she was elected to the presidency of a new organization, called the Woman's Council, which is a delegate association representing all the organized woman's work of Minneapolis. Fifty Associations are included, each sending two delegates, who thus represent a constituency of over two-thousand women from all fields of organized woman's work. This council has been thus far a great success and furnishes a fine field for the exercises of the peculiar abilities which have made a success of Mrs. Walker's public efforts.