page_title: Zerelda G. Wallace
section_title: Temperance and suffrage leader
hierarchical_section_title: Zerelda G. Wallace / Temperance and suffrage leader
caption_attribution_description: English: Zerelda Gray Wallace
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: Wallace had a longstanding interest in social reform, but she became more vocal in her support and an activist in the temperance and women's suffrage movements after 1873. Although she never spoke publicly until the age of fifty-six, Wallace earned a reputation as capable and effective speaker. Better known as an inspirational speaker rather than an administrator among the social reformers of her era, Wallace was popular on the national lecture circuit for her speeches on temperance and suffrage. The speaking engagements she made throughout the United States also provided Wallace with an income.
  Wallace's first efforts as a social reformer were tied to the temperance movement. On March 3, 1874, she was among the organizers of the Women's Christian Temperance Union of Indiana. Wallace was elected the Indiana chapter's first president, serving from 1874 to 1876, and also served as its president from 1879 to 1882. In November 1874 Wallace attended the national WCTU conference at Cleveland, Ohio, where she met suffragist Frances Willard. Wallace was described as a "calm" and "non-radical" activist. Her friend Willard later remarked, "A man of equal ability would have been entitled to lead a party or to organize a cabinet."
  On January 21, 1875, she testified before the Indiana General Assembly, presenting 21,050 signatures on temperance petitions from forty-seven Indiana counties. Many of the legislators showed "open contempt" as Wallace spoke, and afterwards she credited the event for prompting her to become a suffragist. Later that year she attended the national WCTU conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the delegates approved her proposed resolution for a national vote of men and women on prohibition of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.
  By the late 1870s, Wallace had become involved in the women's suffrage movement. In April 1878 twenty-six people who attended a meeting held at Wallace's home agreed to form the Equal Suffrage Society of Indianapolis. Wallace was elected as the group's president; May Wright Sewall, who initiated the group's first meeting a month earlier, was elected secretary. For nearly a decade the Indianapolis suffrage group did not formally join a specific suffrage organization at the national level. Instead, the Society preferred to work with several different groups that were politically active in lobbying, letter-writing campaigns, gathering petitions, and speechmaking on behalf of women's suffrage. The Society finally affiliated with the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1887.
  On January 23, 1880, Wallace was one of several who testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on women's right to vote. As she explained in her address, "You must admit that in popular government the ballot is the most potent means of all moral and social reforms." In 1881 Wallace was among those who lobbied the Indiana General Assembly to approve a woman's suffrage amendment to the state's constitution. The state legislature voted in favor of the suffrage amendment and a prohibition provision in 1881; however, at that time Indiana law required passage in two consecutive sessions of the general assembly followed by approval from the state's voters before the legislation could become state law. At the next legislative session in 1883, the Indiana House of Representatives approved the woman suffrage resolution by a 53 to 42 vote, but the Indiana Senate refused to act on it. The Indiana legislature took no further action on woman suffrage until 1920, when it ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
  In the early 1880s, after the failure to achieve women's suffrage in Indiana, Wallace felt that a national constitutional amendment would be the fastest and most efficient way to achieve voting rights for women. In 1883 she sent a letter to suffragist Susan B. Anthony expressing her sentiments, and Anthony read Wallace's inspirational letter to delegates attending the fifteenth annual convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association. This group, which was headed by Elizabeth
caption: Zerelda Wallace
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