LIVERMORE, MARY ASHTON [RICE] (1821-1905), American reformer, was born
in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 19th of December 1821. She studied at
the female seminary at Charlestown, Mass.; taught French and Latin
there, taught in a plantation school in southern Virginia; and for
three years conducted a school of her own in Duxbury, Mass. Upon
returning from Virginia she had joined the abolitionists, and she took
an active part in the Washingtonian temperance movement.[1] In 1845 she
married Daniel Parker Livermore (1819-1899), a Universalist clergyman.
In 1857 they removed to Chicago, Illinois, where she assisted her
husband in editing the religious weekly, _The New Covenant_ (1857-1869).
During the Civil War, as an associate member of the United States
Sanitary Commission, and as an agent of its North-western branch, she
organized many aid societies, contributed to the success of the
North-western Sanitary Fair in Chicago in 1863, and visited army posts
and hospitals. After the war she devoted herself to the promotion of
woman's suffrage and to temperance reform, founding in Chicago in 1869
_The Agitator_, which in 1870 was merged into the _Woman's Journal_
(Boston), of which she was an associate editor until 1872. She died in
Melrose, Mass. on the 23rd of May 1905. She had been president of the
Illinois, the Massachusetts and the American woman's suffrage
associations, the Massachusetts Woman's Christian Temperance Union and
the Woman's Congress, and a member of many other societies. She lectured
in the United States, England and Scotland, contributed to magazines and
wrote: _The Children's Army_ (1844), temperance stories; _Thirty Years
Too Late_ (1848), a temperance story; _A Mental Transformation_ (1848);
_Pen Pictures_ (1863), short stories; _What Shall We Do With Our
Daughters? and Other Lectures_ (1883); _My Story of the War_ (1888); and
_The Story of My Life_ (1897). With Frances E. Willard, she edited _A
Woman of the Century: Biographical Sketches of Leading American Women_
(1893).
FOOTNOTE:
[1] This movement was started in 1840 by habitués of a Baltimore
(Md.) tavern, who then founded the Washington Temperance Society
(named in honour of George Washington). The movement spread rapidly
in 1841-1843, but by the close of 1843 it had nearly spent its force.
The members of the Society made a pledge not to drink spirituous or
malt liquors, wine or cider. Women organized Martha Washington
Societies as auxiliary organizations.
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