Woman of the Century/Josephine Penfield Cushman Bateham

JOSEPHINE PENFIELD CUSHMAN BATEHAM. BATEHAM, Mrs. Josephine Penfield Cushman, temperance reformer, born in Alden. N. Y., 1st November, 1829. She is descended from a godly New England ancestry. The attractions of Oberlin College and the desire to help the infant colony and educate their children drew her parents from New York State to Oberlin, Ohio, when Josephine was five years old. Her father died in a few years, and her mother was married to Prof. Henry Cowles, author of "Cowles' Bible Commentaries," and became a number of the Ladies' Board of Managers of the college. Josephine, soon after graduation, was married to the Rev. Richard S. Cushman, of Attleboro, Mass., and went on a foreign mission to St. Marc, Hayti. Alter eleven months of laborious service Mr. Cushman died, and unable to carry on the new mission single-handed. Mrs. Cushman reluctantly resigned the work and returned home, a widow at nineteen years of age. After teaching a short time in Oberlin College, she was married to M. B. Bateham. editor of the "Ohio Cultivator," and removed to Columbus. Ohio. There they resided fourteen years, spending part of their summers in travel in the old world and the new, and jointly editing the "Cultivator," afterward the "Ohio Farmer." Always foremost in church and reform work and widely known by her writings, her hospitable home was ever a center of attraction. In 1864 they removed to Painesville, Ohio, for the benefit of Mr. Bateham's health. There for sixteen years Mrs. Bateham devoted herself to her growing family, to writing, to missionary and temperance work, and was then bereft of her husband, who had always encouraged her literary and reform efforts. Thenceforward she did the work of both parents. One child, twelve years old, had died. At the opening of the temperance crusade in Ohio, in 1874, Mrs. Bateham became the leader of the Painesville crusade band, and later one of the leaders in the State Woman's Christian Temperance Union. In 1884 she was made national superintendent of the Sabbath observance department of that organization, and her eldest daughter, Minerva, was her secretary till her death, in 1885, after eighteen years of invalidism. Mrs. Bateham removed to Asheville, N. C., in 1890, where she devotes her time to the work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. During 1890 she traveled sixteen-thousand miles, in nearly every State and Territory and through the Hawaiian Islands, and gave nearly three-hundred lectures. She has written a long line of valuable leaflets on Sabbath questions, of which she sends out more than a million pages every year. A natural leader and organizer, and acceptable both as a writer and speaker, she is now one of the foremost workers in the interest of a protected civil and a well-kept Christian Sabbath in our land.