This is a transcription of the Mary (Clement) Leavitt biography from New Hampshire Women: A Collection of Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Daughters and Residents of the Granite State, Who are Worthy Representatives of their Sex in the Various Walks and Conditions of Life, The New Hampshire Publishing Co., Concord, NH, 1895, page 33.
Mary (Clement) Leavitt
MRS. MARY CLEMENT LEAVITT, honorary life president of the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union, daughter of Rev. Joshua and Eliza (Harvey) Clement, was born in Hopkinton, September 22, 1830. She studied at the Thetford, Vt., Academy, and prepared for teaching at the Framingham, Mass., Normal School, graduating, class valedictorian, in 1851. She taught in Boston before and after her marriage, and was a frequent contributor to the leading papers of the day. Always actively interested in missions and reforms, she helped to organize both the Massachusetts and Boston W. C. T. Unions, working and speaking zealously for the latter while still in the schoolroom. The demands for her services upon the platform became so numerous that she closed her school and devoted herself to lecturing. At the call of the National W. C. T. U., she gave up the brilliant openings before her, and started out alone to encounter the privations and dangers of a pioneer journey around the world to organize W. C. T. Unions. This she accomplished with heroic courage and persistence, visiting nearly every country on the globe, speaking, through interpreters, in forty-seven languages, winning the confidence and support of the best people, and often of royalty itself. She organized men’s temperance societies and introduced the White Cross movement into many lands. Without remuneration she undertook the work, raising nearly all of the seven thousand dollars expended on this remarkable journey. Her “Round the World” series of letters was for eight years a most interesting feature of the Union Signal. Mrs. Leavitt combines a high spiritual nature and good practical ability with a strong, clear intellect, and is a logical, effective speaker. At sixty-five, with unabated powers, enabling her to give one hundred lectures in ten consecutive weeks during her 1894 California tour, and promising great future usefulness, she is still ardently working for God and humanity.