Mary Hunt

Who was Mary Hunt?

Mary Hunt became one of the most powerful women in the United States temperance movement promoting Prohibition of alcohol. As Superintendent of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, she worked from the grass roots to the national level to ensure passage of laws requiring that textbooks teach every school child a curriculum promoting complete abstinence for everyone and alcohol prohibition.

She achieved the de facto power to veto any such textbook of which she did not approve. Hunt sent the first of her criteria for acceptable books to publishers, who then submitted the resulting drafts to her for recommendations and possible endorsement. For example, the WCTU leader did not approve of any book that mentioned the widespread medicinal use of alcohol or any book that even implied that drinking in moderation did not inevitably lead to serious alcohol abuse.

By the mid-1890s, the WCTU’s program of temperance instruction and the textbooks endorsed by Mary Hunt were increasingly being criticized .