Amanda M Way was a pioneer in the temperance and women's equal rights movements, an American Civil War nurse, a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1870s, and a Society of Friends minister by the mid-1880s.
19 Facts About Amanda Way
1.
2.
Amanda Way remained active in the Association, including service as its president in 1855, and helped reactivate it in 1869, renamed as the Indiana Woman's Suffrage Association.
3.
Amanda M Way was born on July 10,1828, in Winchester in Randolph County, Indiana, to Hannah and Matthew Way.
4.
Amanda Way was the second of the family's eight and the oldest daughter.
5.
Amanda Way attended local schools, including Union Literary Institute, and was trained as a teacher.
6.
Amanda Way was a schoolteacher by profession, but after the death of her father in 1849, she worked as a milliner and seamstress to support her widowed mother and other members of her family.
7.
Amanda Way began her reform work as an activist in the local temperance movement, and in 1844 joined the Winchester Total Abstinence Society.
8.
Amanda Way was not included in a civil lawsuit that William Page, the plaintiff and one of the store owners, filed against some of the other women, as well as their husbands.
9.
Amanda Way later became a lecturer and organizer of the Independent Order of Good Templars, a temperance group, and was the first women elected as Grand Worthy Chief Templar.
10.
In January 1851, when Amanda Way attended a Society of Friends meeting in Greensboro, Henry County, Indiana, she proposed that a women's rights convention be held in Indiana.
11.
Amanda Way remained active in the Indiana Women's RIghts Association in the 1850s and became president of the association in 1855.
12.
In 1861 Amanda Way served as a battlefield and hospital nurse, which earned her a government pension in 1897 for her service during the war.
13.
In 1869 Amanda Way helped revive the Indiana Women's Rights Association, which became an affiliate of the American Woman Suffrage Association, and changed its name to the Indiana Woman's Suffrage Association.
14.
Amanda Way served as a delegate to the National Temperance Convention in 1869 in Chicago that led to the organization of the Temperance party, which later changed its name to the Prohibition Party.
15.
In 1871 Amanda Way became a licensed minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church and moved in 1872 to Kansas, where she continued to remain active in the temperance and women's suffrage movements.
16.
Amanda Way was a founder and first president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in Kansas.
17.
Later that year, after the Methodist Episcopal Church barred women from the ministry, Amanda Way renewed her membership in the Society of Friends and served as a Friends minister for the remainder of her life.
18.
Amanda Way moved to the western United States in the late nineteenth century.
19.
Amanda Way's contributions are not well known in the present-day; however, she was remembered for her efforts on behalf of the temperance and women's suffrage movements during her lifetime.