American National Biography entry penned by our very own David M. Fahey. Return-Path: <[log in to unmask]> Approved-By: [log in to unmask] Date: Wed, 1 Dec 1999 02:00:01 -0500 Reply-To: [log in to unmask] Sender: "Oxford University Press: Biography of the day" <[log in to unmask]> From: [log in to unmask] Organization: Oxford University Press Subject: ANB - Bio Of The Day To: [log in to unmask] 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 Note: This email has been sent in plain text format so that it may be read with the standard ASCII character set. Special characters and formatting have been normalized. Copyright Notice Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of the American National Biography of the Day and Sample Biographies provided that the following statement is preserved on all copies: From American National Biography, published by Oxford University Press, Inc., copyright 1999 American Council of Learned Societies. 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