Sarah "Annie" Turner Wittenmyer was an American social reformer, relief worker, and writer. She served as the first President of the Women's Christian Temperance Union from 1874 to 1879. The Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home was renamed the Annie Wittenmyer Home in 1949 in her honor.
The Woman's Relief Corps (WRC) is a charitable organization in the United States, originally founded as the official women's auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) in 1883. The organization was designed to assist the GAR and provide post-war relief to Union veterans. The GAR had been created as a "fraternal" organization and refused to allow women to join up until the creation of this auxiliary. It is largely dedicated to historical preservation of research and official documentation related to the WRC and GAR.
Mary Jewett Telford was a humanitarian who worked as a nurse at Hospital No. 8 in Nashville, Tennessee, during the American Civil War. In her later years, Mary was a published author, editor of numerous journals, lecturer on the temperance circuit and charter member of the Woman's Relief Corps, an auxiliary to the Grand Army of the Republic.
Ellen Rankin Copp, also called Ellen or Helen Houser Rankin, was an American sculptor. Her works were featured at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Emma Ann Reynolds (1862-1917) was an African-American teacher, who had a desire to address the health needs of her community. Refused entrance to nurses training schools because of racism, she influenced the creation of Provident Hospital in Chicago and was one of its first four nursing graduates. Continuing her education, Reynolds became a medical doctor serving at posts in Texas, Louisiana and Washington, D.C. before permanently settling in Ohio and completing her practice there.
Mary Louise Frost Ormsby (1845–1931), later Mary Frost Evans, was an American writer, editor, and educator involved in the peace movement.
Kate Brownlee Sherwood was an American poet, journalist, translator and story writer of the long nineteenth century, as well as a philanthropist, and patron of the arts and literature. Sherwood was also the founder of the Woman's Relief Corps and served as its second president.
Hannah Rebecca Cope Plimpton was a Woman's Relief Corps worker.
Cynthia Eloise Cleveland was an American lawyer, politician, writer, and temperance worker. She was the first woman lawyer admitted to the bar in the Dakota Territory.
Hisa Nagano was a Japanese nurse and medical student in Chicago.
Margaret Ray Wickens was an American public affairs organizer and social reformer. She served as national president of the Woman's Relief Corps (W.R.C.). Eloquent, Wickins was called the "Golden-tongued orator of the Woman's Relief Corps". Her executive abilities during the years that she was actively engaged in W.R.C. advanced the organization's patriotic work. As an orator, philanthropist and industrial worker, Wickens had no peer. She served as president of the Kansas State Assembly of Rebekahs, and was active in the temperance movement, filling the role of district president of her Woman's Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) for several years. She was a teacher, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and a prominent Good Templar. In her later years, she held a number of state positions in Illinois.
Ella M. George was an American teacher, lecturer, and social reformer. For 25 years, she was a teacher in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A long-time leader in temperance and other moral reforms, George served as Pennsylvania state president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) for 22 years. While she deplored the methods of militant suffragettes, she held that equal suffrage would go a long way toward winning the victory the WCTU sought. She also sat on the board of directors of the National Reform Association, briefly serving as its executive secretary.
Louise M. Harvey Clarke (1859-1934) was a medical doctor and widely known writer, speaker, and clubwoman in Los Angeles and Riverside counties, California.
Ella B. Ensor Wilson was an American social reformer and writer of the long nineteenth century associated with the women's suffrage and temperance movements. She was a strong advocate of "equal rights" and although her birth place was in Maryland, a slave State, and having been reared and educated under that influence, she was always opposed to slavery. Wilson supported women's causes with her influence and money. A year and a half before her death, she was declared insane.
Alice E. Heckler Peters was an American social reformer, educator, writer, and poet. She was involved in several women's religious, reform and social organizations of her era including the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, National American Woman Suffrage Association, and the Woman's Relief Corps. Her poetry was a valuable addition to American literature.
Helen Morton Barker was an American social reformer active in the temperance movement. For twelve years, she served as treasurer of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
Susanna M. D. Fry was an American educator and temperance worker. Her teaching career began in the primary department of the village school, but her superior ability as a teacher led her swiftly into positions of greater responsibility. Fry was a professor who held the chair of English literature at Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Illinois and at the University of Minnesota. She served as president of the Minnesota Woman's Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.), and managing editor of The Union Signal, the organ of the National W.C.T.U. During her career as a professor and as an official of the W.C.T.U., Fry was a frequent speaker in Prohibition campaigns and at temperance conventions. Fry was the only woman chosen from the Methodist church to speak before the Parliament of the World's Religions, 1893.
Non-Partisan National Women's Christian Temperance Union was an American temperance association organized at Cleveland, Ohio, January 22, 1890, as a protest against the attitude of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.) toward political parties.
Charlotte A. Gray was an English educator and temperance missionary. She was engaged in education from her teens, first in family or school, then in the wider field of the temperance movement, particularly in continental Europe. With a talent for learning foreign languages, Gray served as Continental Good Templar Missionary for the Independent Order of Good Templars (I.O.G.T.) and was instrumental in establishing branches of the organization in Holland, Switzerland, France, Bavaria, and Saxony. She was also the founder of the International Anti-Alcohol Congresses.
Rev. Emma Pow Bauder was an American evangelist, missionary, reformer, and author. Affiliated with the Church of the United Brethren in Christ in Michigan since 1879, she soon thereafter relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she was also active with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.), the largest women's organization in the U.S. during the Gilded Age.
