Julia Colman
Julia Colman was a prominent temperance writer and educator born in Northampton, New York, in the early 19th century. She was the daughter of Henry Root Colman, a minister, and Livia Spier Colman, and spent her formative years in Wisconsin, where her family was actively involved in education and mission work. Colman became an itinerant teacher before pursuing her education at Lawrence University and Cazenovia Seminary, ultimately graduating in 1853.
Colman's career as a temperance advocate began in earnest when she worked with the Methodist Sunday-School Union, where she contributed to various publications and helped establish antitobacco groups. Her significant works include "Alcohol Our Enemy" and her influential pamphlet "Catechisms on Alcohol and Tobacco," which sold over 300,000 copies. She played an important role in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), helping to organize and improve their publication efforts and advocating for a scientific approach to temperance.
Throughout her life, Colman wrote extensively and lectured on topics related to alcohol, diet, and health, producing over 500 publications, including her notable work "Alcohol and Hygiene: An Elementary Lesson Book for Schools." Despite her declining influence in the late 1880s due to the rise of a competing publishing association, Colman's contributions to the temperance movement were significant. She passed away at the age of eighty, with her legacy preserved in various publications and historical accounts.
Subject Terms
Julia Colman
- Julia Colman
- Born: February 16, 1828
- Died: January 10, 1909
Temperance writer, was born in Northampton, New York, to Henry Root Colman, whose Puritan ancestors had settled in Connecticut, and Livia (Spier) Colman, the descendant of Welsh settlers in Boston. In 1840 the Colmans moved to Wisconsin, where Henry Colman, a minister, became head of the Oneida Methodist Indian mission near Green Bay. In 1847 he cofounded Lawrence College (later Lawrence University) in Appleton, across Lake Winnebago from the family’s home in Fond du Lac.
Julia Colman, the second of five children and the family’s only daughter, was educated at home and became an itinerant teacher in Fond du Lac and Calumet counties, “living in the parlor” (as boarding with host families was called). She taught herself botany, and in 1849 she entered the preparatory course at Lawrence University. She was graduated in 1853 from Cazenovia Seminary in Cazenovia, New York, where she studied science and languages.
Colman taught for a time and then got a job in the editorial office of the Methodist Sunday-School Union and Tract Society, in which she served for thirteen years as librarian and assistant. She helped edit the Sunday-school Advocate, wrote articles for it under the pen name Aunt Julia, and supervised the formation of more than one hundred antitobacco groups for boys. Her first book, The Boys’ and Girls’ Illustrated Bird Book, was published in 1857.
In 1867 Colman became a full-time lecturer and writer on alcohol, diet, and health. She started her new career with two series of lectures on food at the Dixon Institute in Brooklyn. The following year she delivered a speech entitled “Alcohol Our Enemy,” which she repeated at numerous church gatherings. During 1870-71 she had more than one hundred speaking engagements before Methodist conferences and at teachers’ workshops. Her pamphlet Catechisms on Alcohol and Tobacco, published in 1872, sold more than 300,000 copies. In 1875 she set up the first temperance school for children.
Colman’s growing reputation attracted the attention of the newly founded Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. At the national convention of the WCTU in 1876 Colman was named editor of the children’s page of Our Union, the house organ, and head of the leaflet committee. Four years later, when the Department of Temperance Literature was established, she was appointed superintendent.
At that time, the WCTU’s publication program was a jumble of pamphlets and tracts, and orders from the field went unfilled. Colman, working from an office in New York, devised an effective system of distribution, organizing the publications into subject areas, each of which was catalogued according to the audience it was intended to reach. This material provided the latest information on the “scientific” approach to temperance, which drew on medical research (rather than moral admonition) to persuade drinkers to give up alcohol. Colman herself wrote more than 500 of these short works—her major contribution to the field was Alcohol and Hygiene: An Elementary Lesson Book for Schools (1880)—and issued a line of greeting cards with temperance messages. She supported her work by writing health articles and by editing two magazines for children, The Young People’s Comrade and The Temperance Teacher.
Colman’s prominence in the publishing activities of the WCTU began to suffer in the late 1880s, when Matilda B. Carse organized the Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association in Chicago. The association was an independent stock company that quickly became the publishing arm of the WCTU. Carse, a shrewd businesswoman, benefited from her friendship with WCTU president Frances Willard, who was eager to put the union’s publication efforts on a sound fiscal base. The split that developed between Carse and Colman was resolved in 1891 when the latter was replaced as superintendent of the Department of Temperance Literature by an officer of the Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association.
Although she continued for some time to head the WCTU’s health department and to write temperance tracts, Colman gradually faded from the scene. In her final years she was severely ill. She died at the age of eighty in her apartment in Brooklyn, of gas asphyxiation, a probable suicide. She was buried at Fond du Lac.
In addition to her books and pamphlets, Colman wrote numerous articles for such magazines as Ladies’ Repository, Moore’s Rural New Yorker, and the Phrenological Journal. Some of her papers are in the Henry Root Colman Papers at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison. The best account of her life is in Notable American Women (1971). Additional information may be found in F. E. Willard, Woman and Temperance (1883); and F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, January 11, 1909.