Way, Amanda M. (1828–1914)

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Way, Amanda M. (1828–1914)

American preacher and social reformer . Born on July 10, 1828, in Winchester, Indiana; died on February 24, 1914; daughter of Matthew Way and Hannah (Martin) Way; attended Randolph Seminary in Winchester; never married.

Worked on behalf of women's rights and for temperance in Indiana and Kansas; was the first woman to be elected Grand Worthy Chief Templar of the Independent Order of Good Templars; served as first president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in Kansas.

Born in 1828, Amanda M. Way was the second of eight children of Matthew and Hannah Martin Way , both Quakers. She was educated in public schools and at Randolph Seminary in Winchester, Indiana. A brief teaching career ended when she opened a millinery and dressmaking shop to help support her widowed mother and a sister's orphaned children.

In 1851, Way attended an anti-slavery meeting in Greensboro, Indiana, where she proposed a resolution calling for a state women's rights convention. As a result, the Indiana Woman's Rights Society was formed and, during her nine years of service, Way became vicepresident and later president. In addition to her administrative duties, she assisted Sarah Underhill in editing the Woman's Tribune, an Indianapolis newspaper; she also contributed to the temperance movement, organizing the Woman's Temperance Army in Winchester in 1854. Way lectured and organized for the temperance-oriented Independent Order of Good Templars and was the first woman to be elected Grand Worthy Chief Templar.

With the onset of the Civil War, Way's reform activities ceased when she followed four of her brothers who had joined the Union Army to become a nurse, serving both in hospitals and on the battlefield. Following the war, she resumed her work for women's rights by initiating another call for a state-wide convention in 1869. The subsequent reorganization of the prewar women's movement resulted in the creation of the Indiana Woman Suffrage Association. In January 1871, Way read a memorial from the state society to the state legislature, asking for an amendment to the Indiana Constitution granting women the right to vote. That same year, she became a licensed preacher of the Methodist Episcopal Church, to which she had converted from Quakerism several years before. In 1872, her ministry took her to Kansas where she continued to lecture on temperance and the women's movement. After the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church discontinued licensing women preachers in 1880, she returned to her Quaker faith and served as a minister for the remainder of her life.

Way founded the Women's Christian Temperance Union in Kansas and served as its first president. She served as a delegate to a Chicago convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1880 and would address the convention again in 1905 as one of the few survivors from the pre-Civil War suffrage movement. Around that time, Way left Kansas for the West and, after a short stay in Idaho, made her home in California. She settled in Whittier, where she died in 1914.

sources:

James, Edward T., ed. Notable American Women, 1607–1950. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1971.

Judith C. Reveal , freelance writer, Greensboro, Maryland

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