# Woman of the Century/Angelia F. Newman

​NEWMAN, Mrs. Angelia F., church worker and lecturer, born in Montpelier, Vt., 4th December, 1837. Her maiden name was Angelia Louise French Thurston. When she was ten years old, her mother died, and when she was fifteen years old, her father removed to Madison, Wis. ANGELIA F. NEWMAN. She studied in the academy in Montpelier, and afterwards in Lawrence University, in Appleton, Wis. She taught in Montpelier at the age of fourteen years, and later in Madison. She was married in 1856, and her husband, Frank Kilgore, of Madison, died within a year after marriage. She afterwards became the wife of D. Newman, a dry goods merchant of Beaver Dam, Wis., and on 5th August, 1859, moved to that town. She has two children of that marriage, a son and a daughter. From 1862 to 1875 she was an invalid, aflicted with pulmonary weakness. In August, 1871, she removed to Lincoln, Neb., when, as she believes, health was restored to her in answer to prayer. From December, 1871, until May, 1879, when she resigned, she held the position of western secretary of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society, lecturing on missions throughout the West and serving on the editorial staff of the "Heathen Woman's Friend," published in Boston. Mass Her attention being drawn to the condition «»f the Mormon women, in 1883, at the request of Bishop Wiley, of the Methodist Episcopal Church, she went to Cincinnati, Ohio, and presented the Mormon problem to the National Home Missionary Society She was elected western secretary of the society, and a Mormon bureau was created, to push missionary work in Utah, of which she was made secretary. She acted as chairman of a committee appointed to consider the plan of founding a home for Mormon women, who wish to escape from polygamy, to be sustained by the society. She returned home to proceed to Utah in behalf of the society. In a public meeting called in Lincoln she fell from a platform and was seriously injured, and her plans were frustrated. During the interval the Utah gentiles formed a "Home" association, and on her recovery, Mrs. Newman went as an unsalaried philanthropist to Washington to represent the interests of the Utah gentiles in the Forty-ninth, Fiftieth and Fifty-first Congresses. She prepared three elaborate arguments on the Mormon problem, one of which she delivered before the Congressional committees. The other two were introduced by Senator Edmunds to the United States Senate, and thousands of copies of each of those three papers were ordered printed by the Senate for Congressional use. Mrs. Newman also secured appropriations of eighty-thousand dollars for the association. A splendid structure in Salt Lake City, filled with polygamous women and children, attests the value of her work. In Nebraska Mrs. Newman has served as State superintendent of prison and flower mission work for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union for twelve years. In 1886 a department of Mormon work was created by the national body, and she was elected its superintendent. In 1889 she became a member of the lecture bureau of the same organization. In the cities of every northern and several of the southern States she has spoken from pulpit and platform on temperance, Mormonism and social purity. She has long been a contributor to religious and secular journals. In 1878 her "Heathen at Home," a monogram, was published and had large sale. "Iphigenia," another work, was recently published, and at this writing other books are engaging her thought. From 1883 to 1892 she was annually commissioned by the successive governors of the State as delegate to the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. In 1888 she was elected a delegate to the Quadrennial General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which held its session in New York City, the first woman ever elected to a seat in that august body. In January, 1890, on the way to Salt Lake, she met with an accident which held her life in jeopardy for two-and-one-half years, from which she is now slowly convalescing