Boston, in the great celebration in that city of the Emancipation Proclamation, and lately in the festivities on the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Haverhill, Mass. She has sung in oratorio in New York. Chicago, Philadelphia and
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JULIA E. HOUSTON WEST.
Washington. She has appeared with Parepa, Formes. Adelaide Phillips, Nilsson, Guerrabella, Rudersdorf and many others. She visited Europe, where she studied with Randegger and Madame Dolby. She sang in a reception in Rev. Newman Hall's church, in London. Her voice is an extended mezzo-soprano of even quality. She was married in 1870 to James F. West, a well-known business man of Haverhill, Mass., where she now resides.
WEST, Miss Mary Allen, journalist and temperance worker, born in Galesburg, Ill. 13th July, 1837. Her parents were among the founders of Knox College, one of the earliest collegiate institutions in the Mississippi valley Mary was a healthy, vigorous, studious girl, maturing early, both mentally and physically. She was prepared for college before she had' reached the age for admission She was graduated in her seventeenth year and at once began to teach school, which she then believed to be her life work.
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MARY ALLEN WEST.
She was so successful in teaching and so influential in educational circles that she was twice elected to the office of superintendent of schools in Knox, her native county, being one of the first women to fill such a position in Illinois. She served in that capacity for nine years and resigned on accepting the presidency of the Illinois Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She attended many educational
conventions and was a power in them, and continually wrote for school and other journals. She thus discovered to herself and others her marvelous capacity for almost unlimited hard work. Home duties were at that time pressing heavily, including as they did the care and nursing of an invalid mother and sister. She occupied a prominent social position, and her work included Sunday-school teaching. When the Civil War came, she worked earnestly in organizing women into aid societies to assist the Sanitary Commission. Her first editorial work was at long range, as she edited in Illinois the "Home Magazine," which was published nearly one-thousand miles away, in Philadelphia. Later she left the pen and the desk for active work in the temperance cause throughout the State. When the woman's crusade sounded the call of woman, the home and God against the saloon, her whole soul echoed the cry, and after the organization of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union she became an earnest worker in its ranks. She gave efficient aid in organizing the women of Illinois, and in a short time became their State president In that office she traveled very extensively throughout Illinois and became familiar with the homes of the people. It was that knowledge of the inner life of thousands of homes, together with her intimate studies of children in the
school-room, which efficiently supplemented her natural bias for the task of writing her helpful book for mothers, "Childhood, its Care and Culture." She has written scores of leaflets and pamphlets, all strong, terse and full of meat, but that is her great work, and will long survive her. While she was State president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, she was often called upon to "help out" in the editorial labors of Mrs. Mary B. Willard. the editor of the "Signal," published in Chicago. Later it was merged with "Our Union." becoming the "Union Signal." under the editorship of Mrs. Willard. Before Mrs. Willard went to Germany to reside, Miss West removed to Chicago, and accepted the position of editor-in-chief, with Mrs. Elizabeth W. Andrew as her assistant. As editor of that paper, the organ of the national and the world's Woman's Christian
