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Mary H. Hunt
American Temperance Reformer and Educator
1830-1906
Mary Hannah Hanchett Hunt
was a leader in the campaign for temperance
education in the schools. She was known in her
day as the woman who appeared before more
legislative bodies than any other person. She
traveled thousands of miles and delivered
innumerable messages on temperance, education,
and similar themes. The groundwork that Mary
Hunt laid helped to develop and legislate the
Eighteenth Amendment which put Prohibition into
effect in the United States.
Mary was born on June 4,
1830 in South Canaan, Connecticut. She was the
second child of the four daughters born to
Ephraim Hanchett and Nancy Swift. Her father
owned and operated a family ironworks in
Salisbury, Connecticut and was also a courageous
and enthusiastic worker in the anti-slavery
movement. Mary’s mother was a direct descendent
of Edward Winslow, governor of the Plymouth
Colony and Thomas Thacher, the first pastor of
Boston’s Old South Church.
Mary was a well educated
woman. She attended local schools as a child and
went on to teach in a country school for one
year before enrolling in Amenia Seminary in New
York in 1847. In 1848 she entered Patapsco
Female Institute, near Baltimore, Maryland.
After a thorough course of studies she became a
professor of natural science at the Seminary.
While working at Patapsco Female Seminary, Mary
began to study the physiological effects of
alcohol. Though she did not realize it, Mary was
unconsciously training for her life work in
behalf of scientific temperance instruction.
In 1852 Mary married
Leander B. Hunt. After becoming a mother she
found a further education and preparation for
her great work. She saw the sale of liquor and
the consumption of alcohol as the great enemy of
society and the sorrow of mothers and wives.
While contemplating the
problems that the use of alcohol created in
society, she quickly realized that rescue work
was only part of the answer. She felt that the
real nature and effects of alcoholic drinks upon
the mind and body needed to be taught to
children. She believed that instruction in the
negative effects of alcohol to children should
not be optional, but mandatory.
Mary was an active member
of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union (W.C.T.U.). She became the superintendent
of the newly formed educational department of
that group. With Mary in the lead, a new school
curriculum on hygiene was created, which
included a section on the evils of alcohol.
While Mrs. Hunt did have a high regard for
science, saving family from the devastating
effects of alcohol became her passion. She
readily acknowledged that her true goal was to
produce “from the schoolhouses all over the
land....trained haters of alcohol to pour a
whole Niagara of ballots upon the saloon”
(quoted in Standard Encyclopedia of the Alcohol
Problem, III, 1269).
The Eighteenth Amendment is often traced
back to the influence that Mary Hunt had on the
generation of school children brought up on
W.C.T. U. approved textbooks. Though Mary died
before it’s enactment in 1920, her life’s work
helped bring into law the prohibition of the
manufacturing, sale and consumption of alcohol
in the United States, which lasted from
1920-1933.
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