Family Women's Suffrage and Temperance leaders

I am proud of the strong women in my family history. I never have been able to understand the feminists and their version of history with helpless women who hated their family responsibilities. I work in the prolife movement as the director of a Pregnancy Center which seeks to assist women to affirm their bodies, their pregnancies and their children. We also provide healing through Jesus Christ to women to have made poor choices. Here are two distant relatives who helped women get the right to vote and who helped to protect their families from the troubles which come from the abuse of alcohol.

Zerelda Wallace is a great niece of my great grandfather, Nathaniel Chalfant. Corporal Nathan Chalfant served in the War of 1812 under her grandfather, Lt. Col. Presley Gray.

Copied from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Zerelda G. Wallace
Zerelda Gray Sanders Wallace (August 6, 1817 – March 19, 1901) was a First Lady of Indiana, a contemporary of Susan B. Anthony, an early temperance and women's suffrage leader, a charter member of Central Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) of Indianapolis, and stepmother of Lew Wallace, author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.

Early life and family
Born Zerelda Gray Sanders, August 6, 1817 in Kentucky , she came to Indianapolis with her family in the early 1830s . She was a charter member of the Church of Christ in 1834 (later renamed Central Christian Church) which went on to be the "mother church" of all Disciples of Christ congregations in Indiana. She was elected the first president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union of Indiana in 1874 and was a member of the Equal Suffrage Society of Indiana.

She married David Wallace on December 25, 1836; they had six children, Mary, Ellen, Sanders, Jemina, Agnes and David. She was stepmother to Wallace's three sons from his first marriage to Esther French Test. Her stepsons were William, Lewis and Edward. David Wallace became the sixth governor of Indiana, serving from December 6, 1837 to December 9, 1840.

Temperance and suffrage leader
Zerelda spoke nationally on temperance and suffrage. On January 21, 1875, she testified before the Indiana General Assembly, presenting 21,050 signatures on temperance petitions from 47 counties. (Do you see that petitions have a long and effective history?) On January 23, 1880, Zerelda testified before the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary on women's right to vote. She died March 19, 1901 and is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.

Zerelda Wallace became a temperance leader first in the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, when in 1883 she refused communion at Central Christian Church because of her convictions about alcohol. Her refusal eventually led to the use of grape juice rather than wine at communion celebrated during each worship service of the Disciples of Christ.

An Indiana State Historical Marker was erected in Zerelda Wallace's honor in 2004 along Fort Wayne Avenue in downtown Indianapolis on the grounds of the Central Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The marker is located on Fort Wayne Avenue, an angle street, in the block between Alabama and Delaware Streets. Indiana's first female lieutenant governor, Kathy Davis, led the dedication ceremony for the marker.

Caroline Thomas Merrick was the sister of my great, great, grandmother, Ellen Aurelia Thomas Miller. Here is a copied biography. The book that Caroline wrote in 1906 is available on line.

Louisiana: Comprising Sketches of Parishes, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Person in Cyclopedia Form, Vol. 5, pp. 298 - 299.

Merrick, Caroline E., was a daughter of Capt. David and Elizabeth (Patillo) Thomas. She was born at Cottage Hall, parish of East Feliciana, LA., Nov 24, 1825, died in New Orleans, LA, 29 March 1908. Her father was a native of South Carolina and a soldier in the War of 1812, settling afterward in LA where he became a prominent planter.

Mrs. Merrick was secretary of the board of St. Ann's Asylum for Widows for 12 years, and in the constitutional convention of 1879 she with Mrs. Saxon petitioned the convention to remove those disabilities which restricted the independent action of women, and to grant them a vote in educational matters, since many were large tax payers. The convention gave them a public hearing, at which Mrs. Harriett Keating, of New York, and Mrs. Saxon spoke, and Mrs. Merrick made the concluding address. Her husband, Edwin Thomas Merrick - former Chief Justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, encouraged her to the undertaking which resulted in the concession which enabled women of 21 years and older to hold any managerial position under the school laws of the state.

Another constitutional convention was held in 1899 and another opportunity was afforded Mrs. Merrick and her associates to plead their cause. They begged for power for to sign notarial acts, to witness wills, to own their own wardrobes, to draw their own money from banks without written authorization from their husbands, and to exercise municipal suffrage. But the convention revoked the concessions granted in 1879, and gave in its place only the small privilege of voting when a question of imposing taxes came up, a privilege restricted to tax paying women. Mrs. Merrick continued to work for the enfranchisement of women in her own state and elsewhere. She was made honorary vice president for life of the Woman's Suffrage Association of LA when she resigned the presidency in 1900. For 10 years she was president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Louisiana, and was one of the first presidents of the Woman's general society of which she became honorary vice president.

She was the author of published stories of pronounce literary merit and of a volume of recollections of her own times entitled "Old Times in Dixie Land". She was a notable example of what a woman may do when actively interested in public and private benevolence, and at the same time maintain her position as a leader in domestic circles.

"She is clothed with strength and dignity." Proverbs 31:25a Hurrah for women who know their minds and speak them!