Zara A. Wilson (born October 8, 1840) was an American reformer and lawyer.
Zara Mahurin was born in Burnettsville, Indiana, on October 8, 1840. She was the fourth in a family of eight children. Her maiden name was Mahurin, to which form it had been Americanized from the Scotch Mac Huron. Her father, Caleb Mahurin (1786-1859), was of southern birth and education, a native of North Carolina. He was twice married, his second wife being Matilda C. Freeman (1809-1882), the mother of Wilson, to whom he was married near Troy, Ohio, in 1832. [1]
Wilson's early life was spent on a farm, but she had the advantages of a seminary education in an institution founded and presided over by a half-brother, Isaac Mahurin (August 16, 1814 - August 23, 1870), in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her sister, Mathilda L. Mahurin, was assistant principal. The Methodist College opened in 1852 and closed in 1863 when the Union Army claimed most of its students. The old brick building was on West Street and US 24. [1] [2]
Mathilda L. Mahurin (November 11, 1827 - April 16, 1916) was for many years a resident of Indianapolis, and taught in the public school there for many years. She was born in Miami County, Ohio, on November 11, 1827, and moved to Indiana with her parents when she was a girl. She began teaching when a young woman, being for a time connected with the Methodist College at Fort Wayne. She moved to Indianapolis in 1867 and lived with her sister, Mary Kilbun Robinson (1821-1909), whose home was at 603 North New Jersey Street. Mathilda Mahurin was an active member of Meridian Street M.E. Church and died at Elkhart, Indiana. [3]
Zara Mahurin had always shown a fondness for books, and during her student days mathematics was to her a fascinating study. [1]
At the age of seventeen Zara Mahurin began to teach. After one year in Fort Wayne College, then in thriving condition, she became assistant in that school. The sudden death of her father called her home to the support of a sorrowing mother, whom she assisted, during the next year, in the settlement of a large estate. Then she resumed teaching and served with success in Lafayette and other towns of Indiana. [1]
In Lafayette, Indiana, Wilson took her first public stand in favor of the equality of sex, refusing to accept a position as principal because the salary offered was ten dollars per month less than was paid to a man for the same work. She had already suffered from the disability custom had laid upon her sex. She had, in her earnest longing to do good, a strong desire to enter the ministry, but found that, because of sex, she would not be admitted to the Biblical Institute in Evansville, Indiana. [1]
Wilson organized the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Goodland, Indiana, and was corresponding secretary of that district until, her health demanding change of climate, the family home was removed to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1870. She gradually improved in the climate of Nebraska. She was district corresponding secretary of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Nebraska. [1]
Wilson was an efficient member of the Nebraska Woman's Christian Temperance Union, delivering addresses and publishing state reports. She was three times elected corresponding secretary of the Nebraska body, resigning because of overwork. For four years she was a member of the national convention. She was State superintendent or franchise for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. In the fall of 1892 she was a candidate on the prohibition ticket for county attorney. [1]
Wilson was always active in the cause of woman's advancement and was a warm advocate of woman's political enfranchisement, wielding a ready pen in its favor. Since her admission to the bar, in 1891, she made the legal status of women a specialty, and she wrote in that line for the press. [1] She is the author of A Concise Compilation of Nebraska Laws, Of Special Interest to Women (1891).
In 1897 Wilson was nominated for Supreme Court justice by the Liberty Party, a Nebraska third-party organization. [4]
In the year 1867, Zara Mahurin married Port Wilson, a merchant of Goodland, Indiana. Owing to broken health, her energies were for ten years confined mostly to home duties and the care of her only child, a son. [1]
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) is an international temperance organization. It was among the first organizations of women devoted to social reform with a program that "linked the religious and the secular through concerted and far-reaching reform strategies based on applied Christianity." It plays an influential role in the temperance movement. Originating among women in the United States Prohibition movement, the organization supported the 18th Amendment and was also influential in social reform issues that came to prominence in the progressive era.
The Diocese of Lafayette in Indiana is a Latin Church ecclesiastical territory, or diocese, of the Catholic Church in central Indiana in the United States. The current bishop is Timothy L. Doherty. The Diocese of Lafayette in Indiana is a suffragan diocese in the ecclesiastical province of the metropolitan Archdiocese of Indianapolis.
Zerelda Gray Sanders Wallace was the First Lady of Indiana from 1837 to 1840, and a temperance activist, women's suffrage leader, and inspirational speaker in the 1870s and 1880s. She was a charter member of Central Christian Church, the first Christian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana. Her husband was David Wallace, the sixth governor of Indiana; Lew Wallace, one of her stepsons, became an American Civil War general and author.
Judith Ellen Horton Foster was an American lecturer, temperance worker, and lawyer. She is thought to be the first woman in Iowa who was actually engaged in practice and the fourth woman admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of Iowa. In her time she was known as "The Iowa Lawyer".
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 American Home Missionary Society was a Protestant missionary society in the United States founded in 1826. It was founded as a merger of the United Domestic Missionary Society with state missionary societies from New England. The society was formed by members of the Presbyterian, Congregational, Associate Reformed, and Dutch Reformed churches with the objective "to assist congregations that are unable to support the gospel ministry, and to send the gospel to the destitute within the United States." In 1893, the Society became exclusively associated with the National Council of Congregational Churches and was renamed the Congregational Home Missionary Society.
Esther Pugh was an American temperance reformer of the long nineteenth century. She served as Treasurer of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), a Trustee of Earlham College, as well as editor and publisher of the monthly temperance journal, Our Union.
Angie F. Newman was an American poet, author, editor, and lecturer of the long nineteenth century. She served as superintendent of jail and prisons, and flower mission work in the State of Nebraska for 25 years, for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU); was an acting member of the National Council of Women and the Woman's Relief Corps; and was for several years, vice-president general of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Newman was the first woman delegate ever elected to the Quadrennial Genera; Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the session at New York City, after debating the question for six days, decided against the admission of women by a majority of one. This led to the submission of the question to the church, which was settled by the admission of women delegates to the Conferences of 1904 and 1908.
Amanda M. Way was a pioneer in the temperance and women's equal rights movements, an American Civil War nurse, a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1870s, and a Society of Friends (Quaker) minister by the mid-1880s. Way, a founding member of the Indiana Woman's Rights Association, called for the state's first women's rights convention in 1851 and served as vice president of the proceedings. Way remained active in the Association, including service as its president in 1855, and helped reactivate it in 1869, renamed as the Indiana Woman's Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony dubbed her the "mother of 'The Woman Suffrage Association' in Indiana" for her early leadership and efforts in initiating the first women's rights convention in the state.
Katharine Lent Stevenson was an American temperance reformer, missionary, and editor. She was a successful platform speaker, writer, and officer of the World Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU) on whose behalf she also visited Japan, China, India, Australia and other countries as a missionary. She also served as president of the Massachusetts WCTU in 1898.
Mary Helen Peck Crane was a 19th-century American church and temperance activist, as well as a writer. She was the mother of the writer, Stephen Crane. She died in 1891.
Mary Sparkes Wheeler was a British-born American author, poet, and lecturer. She wrote the lyrics to several hymns, including two well-known soldiers' decoration hymns. Her poems were set to music by Professor Sweeney, P. P. Bliss, Kirkpatrick and others. She was the author of Poems for the Fireside (1883), Modern Cosmogony and the Bible (1880), First decade of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church : with sketches of its missionaries (1883), As it is in Heaven (1906), and Consecration and purity, or, The will of God concerning me (1913).
Anna Fisher Beiler was a British-born American Christian missionary and newspaper editor, who engaged in temperance, missionary, and philanthropic work. Associated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, she served as Secretary of the Bureau for District of Alaska. She thoroughly identified herself with this work, and visited the region in 1897, that she might do better at directing it. She made an extended tour in the service of that region in the interests of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and supervised the erection of the building in Unalaska. Beiler was a prominent officer of the Woman's Home Missionary Society for many years and influential in the shaping of its policy and work. She lectured on Alaska in many states, increasing the public interest.
Elizabeth Lownes Rust was a 19th-century American philanthropist, humanitarian, and Christian missionary. She conceived the idea of the Woman's Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and as its corresponding secretary for nearly twenty years, she helped to shape its policies. Rust is remembered as a woman of vision. Rust died in 1899.
Susan J. Swift Steele was an American social reformer. She was affiliated with the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the Newton, Massachusetts Wesleyan Home, among other organizations.
Lucy Switzer was an American temperance and suffrage activist. She wrote many articles for Pacific Christian Advocate and the Christian Herald, and was a columnist in Cheney, Spokane County, Washington. She established the women's suffrage movement in eastern Washington Territory.
Martia L. Davis Berry was a 19th-century American social reformer. From her childhood, she took for her life motto and work, "God and home and native land" in whatever opportunities might be available to her. She organized the first Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church west of the Missouri River and the first woman's Club in Cawker City, Kansas. She served as State treasurer of the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association and president of the sixth district of the Kansas Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
Mary Osburn Adkinson was an American social reformer active in the temperance movement. She took a leading part in the organization of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Madison, Wisconsin, serving four times as its elected president. In Louisiana, she held the position of superintendent of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and matron in the New Orleans University.
Drusilla Wilson was an American temperance leader and Quaker pastor. She was the second president of the Kansas Woman's Christian Temperance Union (W.C.T.U.).
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