üPARA yPAR@ ` üTEXT ` sStewart, Eliza Daniel1816╨1908reformerBorn in Piketon, Ohio, on April 25, 1816, Eliza Daniel was educated in local schools and in seminaries in Granville and Marietta, Ohio. In 1833 her older brother, who was Piketon╒s postmaster, appointed her assistant postmaster; she was said to be the first woman ever to hold such a position officially. Soon, however, she turned to teaching school. In 1848 she married Hiram Stewart, with whom she moved to Athens, Ohio, a short time later. About 1858 she organized an Athens lodge of Good Templars, a temperance order. During the Civil War her work in gathering supplies for the Union army and visiting sick and wounded soldiers earned her the name ╥Mother╙ Stewart, by which she continued to be known. In 1866 she and her family moved to Springfield, Ohio. There, in January 1872, she gave a temperance lecture in which she urged her listeners to seek out the wives of drunkards and to persuade them to bring suit against liquor dealers under the Adair Act, an Ohio statute that allowed such suits for damages to be brought by the wives or mothers of drunkards. A short time later she made an address to the jury in such a case, and in October 1873 she took part in a second. She organized local women in a petition drive to force the Springfield city council to adopt a local-option ordinance against liquor. In December, in response to but one of many invitations that began to come to her from other towns, she organized in Osborn, Ohio, the first Woman╒s Temperance League. In January 1874 she was elected president of the new Springfield Temperance Union; she became head of the county union in April and in June led in forming a statewide Temperance Union. Throughout 1874 a largely unorganized but effective wave of temperance fervor, which came to be known as the ╥Woman╒s Crusade,╙ swept over regions of western New York, Ohio, and parts of the Midwest. In November a general convention was called (by Martha M. Brown and others) in Cleveland to organize the movement, and Stewart played a prominent part in the founding there of the Woman╒s Christian Temperance Union. In 1876 she made a lecture and organizing tour of Great Britain, during which she contributed to the formation of the British Women╒s Temperance Association and the Scottish Christian Union. In 1879 she toured the South as chairman of the WCTU╒s committee on Southern work. She was a WCTU delegate to the World╒s Convention of Good Templars in Edinburgh in 1891, and in 1895 she delivered the opening address to the World╒s WCTU convention in London. Stewart published Memories of the Crusade: A Thrilling Account of the Great Uprising of the Women of Ohio in 1873, against the Liquor Crime, 1888, and The Crusader in Great Britain; or, The History of the Origin and Organization of the British Women╒s Temperance Association, 1893. She died in Hicksville, Ohio, on August 6, 1908. ╞styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ * !I Ω 5¬ δ !I ╝ 5¬ ╜ !I ╢ !I ▐ ┼ !I
