American National Biography entry penned by our very own David M. Fahey.
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The following biography is from the American National Biography,
published by Oxford University Press. Copyright 1999 ACLS.
Forsyth, Jessie (29 Apr. 1847-18 Sept. 1937), temperance reformer,
was born in London, England, the daughter of Andrew Forsyth, a
baker, and Eliza Maria Kitteridge, both of Scottish origin. The
caricaturist and illustrator George Cruikshank was her great-uncle.
Ill health left her with a skimpy formal education. She was a
devout, lifelong member of the Church of England. Orphaned in her
teens, Forsyth found her sense of belonging in a fraternal
temperance society, the militantly prohibitionist Independent (later
International) Order of Good Templars. According to her memoirs, she
had not been a teetotaler when her desire to make new friends and
enjoy sociable weekly lodge meetings persuaded her to become a Good
Templar in 1872. Late in 1874 she sailed to the United States to
take a job as a bookkeeper for a printing company in Boston,
Massachusetts. Within a few months she joined an American lodge of
the Templar Order.
Organized in central New York in 1852, the IOGT endorsed the
equality of women as members and officeholders. This universalist
ideology embraced all teetotalers who advocated prohibition. In 1868
the Order claimed over 500,000 members in North America (a figure
that quickly shrank) and later added hundreds of thousands in
Britain (and its empire) and Scandinavia. Most members were young,
often from working- or lower middle-class families, and, even when
they remained abstainers, they tended to drift quickly out of the
organization. Forsyth's lifelong commitment was exceptional.
In 1876, quarreling over the rights of blacks in the American South
who wanted to become members, the Good Templars split into two rival
international organizations. Americans and Canadians accused the
British of seeking to take over the Order and made the retention of
white Southern members their highest priority. At a time when the
IOGT was losing members in most American states, membership was
growing among Southern whites. Forsyth belonged to a small minority
of Massachusetts Good Templars who supported the predominantly
British party in condemning racism as contrary to the Good Templar
principle of universal brotherhood and sisterhood. She was an
admirer of William Wells Brown, a Boston physician, who was the
leading African American in her Good Templar organization.
In 1883 Forsyth was elected Right Worthy Grand Vice Templar in her
faction's international organization and was appointed the editor of
its monthly newspaper, Temperance Brotherhood. She also became the
American agent for the British committee that financed the campaign
to recruit blacks. Once shy, she became an effective organizer and
speaker and, in 1885-1886, traveled to Britain, Germany, and
Scandinavia. She also wrote prolifically, including memoirs,
didactic essays, biographical sketches, stories for children, and
verse. After the Order reunited in 1887 on what amounted to a
segregated basis, Forsyth remained Vice Templar until 1889.
At this time interested in socialism, Forsyth became a charter
member and secretary of the Second Boston Nationalist Club in 1889,
inspired by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). She was a
staunch advocate of women's suffrage and occasionally criticized the
Good Templars for failing to live up to their ideals of gender
equality.
Beginning in 1893 Forsyth led the Good Templar international work
for children. By the time that an Englishman defeated her for
reelection, in 1908, Good Templar juvenile auxiliaries claimed
nearly 240,000 members. The triumph of state prohibition contributed
to the virtual disappearance of Good Templary in the United States,
and the weakness of the Order in its birthplace helped explain
Forsyth's defeat. Europeans dominated the membership, so Britons,
Swedes, and Norwegians won election to most of the international
offices. Forsyth's editorship of the monthly International Good
Templar, begun in 1901, also ended in 1908, when a Scotsman defeated
its American owner for reelection as international secretary. In
1911 she retired from the printing shop where she had worked all her
American days, and which for the last eight or nine years she had
owned. She then emigrated to Australia.
In January 1912 Forsyth arrived in Freemantle, Western Australia,
where her sister lived. Although she briefly held office in the
local Grand Lodge of the IOGT, she devoted most of her energy to the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which she served as state
president for Western Australia from 1913 to 1916. In 1917-1918 she
was organizing secretary of the Australian National Prohibition
League in Melbourne. She then returned to Western Australia where,
in 1919, she founded the Dawn, a newspaper for women reformers, and
resumed work for the state WCTU. In 1922 ill health forced her to
curtail her service to temperance, although she continued to write,
notably a newspaper column for children.
In her memoirs, published in Good Templar periodicals, Forsyth said
almost nothing about her life outside the Order. She never married,
although she loved children and cherished friendships with many men
and women. She said that without the Good Templars her life would
have been colorless and lonely.
Until her death in Leederville, a suburb of Perth, Western
Australia, Forsyth remained committed to her Order. She regarded its
program of total abstinence and prohibition, combined with universal
brotherhood and sisterhood, as a moral crusade that offered a
foundation for other social reforms, such as women's rights, racial
justice, and the conquest of poverty.
Bibliography
Letters from Forsyth are in the George F. Cotterill Papers in the
University of Washington libraries and in the Grand Lodge of
Wisconsin, IOGT, papers at the State Historical Society of
Wisconsin. Her principal memoir, "Thirty Years of Good Templary,"
was published in the International Good Templar (1903-1904),
reprinted in The Collected Writings of Jessie Forsyth, 1847-1937:
The Good Templars and Temperance Reform on Three Continents, ed.
David M. Fahey (1988), with an editorial introduction, "One Woman's
World." See also Ernest Hurst Cherrington, ed., Standard
Encyclopedia of the Alcohol Problem, 6 vols. (1925-1930).
Written by David M. Fahey
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