Mary Livermore

Mary Livermore was an American and social reformer who devoted her life to women's suffrage and the temperance movement.
Synopsis
Mary Livermore was born on December 19, 1820, in Boston, Massachusetts. She was an American suffragist and social reformer who lectured and wrote for religious and reform periodicals. She served as president of the American Woman Suffrage Association, the Association for the Advancement of Women and the Massachusetts Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Livermore died in 1905.

Early Life and Education
Mary Livermore was born Mary Ashton Rice on December 19, 1820, in Boston, Massachusetts, into a strict Calvinist Baptist family. Her father believed in educating his daughters, and, subsequently, Livermore excelled at her studies at an early age. Also during her youth, she became devoutly religious and studied the Bible passionately. She became known in the Livermore household for often pretending to be a preacher, sometimes conducting "sermons" to her family members, at other times to an imaginary audience.

Livermore attended the Hancock School and went on to enroll at the Female Seminary, a Christian school in nearby Charlestown, graduating in 1836. She later returned to Charlestown, accepting a teaching position at her alma mater. After a two-year stint at the seminary, in 1839, Livermore was hired as a tutor by a wealthy slave-owning family from Virginia. For the next three years, she lived and worked on the family's plantation. It was during this time that Livermore witnessed firsthand the brutality of slavery and its corroding effects on Southern families and society.