Lillian Marion Norton Ames Stevens
Lillian Marion Norton Ames Stevens was a prominent temperance leader, born in Dover, Maine, in 1836. The daughter of a schoolteacher and a Baptist, Stevens was educated at Foxcroft Academy and Westbrook Seminary before embarking on a career in education. After marrying Michael T. Stevens in 1865, she became heavily involved in the temperance movement, helping to found the Maine Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1875. She served as the president of the Maine WCTU from 1878 until her death in 1914, advocating for statewide prohibition, which was successfully enshrined in the state constitution in 1884. A close ally of Frances E. Willard, she also took on leadership roles at the national and international levels of the WCTU, significantly increasing its membership during her tenure.
Stevens was committed to various social reforms beyond temperance, including women's suffrage and labor rights. Despite the challenges of leading an organization following such a prominent figure as Willard, she made significant contributions to the temperance cause, which played a role in the eventual passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. Lillian Stevens passed away in Portland, Maine, leaving a legacy as a dedicated reformer whose work influenced many aspects of social justice in her time.
Subject Terms
Lillian Marion Norton Ames Stevens
- Lillian Marion Norton Ames Stevens
- Born: March 1, 1844
- Died: April 6, 1914
Temperance leader, was born in Dover, Maine, the daughter of Nathaniel Ames, a schoolteacher, and Nancy Fowler (Parsons) Ames. In addition to a brother who died in childhood, Lillian Stevens had two sisters. Her father was a Universalist, her mother a Baptist.
After formal education at the Foxcroft Academy and Westbrook Seminary, she taught school. In 1865 she married Michael T. Stevens, a grain and salt wholesaler; they had one daughter, Gertrude Mary. The family lived in Stroud-water, a suburb of Portland, Maine.
In 1875 Stevens helped found the Maine Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). This was done under the impetus of the Women’s Crusade that had swept the Midwest the previous year, as bands of women used prayer and exhortation to close down illegal saloons. In 1878 Stevens became president of the Maine WCTU, an office she held until her death.
Stevens joined forces with another Maine temperance reformer, Neal Dow, who had helped pass the nation’s first statewide prohibition law in 1851. The two worked successfully to have prohibition put into the state constitution (their goal was achieved in 1884). Like Dow, Stevens realized that no law would be effective without enforcement. She spoke around the state to obtain enforcement and lobbied the legislature to require temperance teaching in the schools.
Meanwhile, she became active in the national WCTU, and it was in the larger body that she made her most enduring reform contributions. From 1880 she was regularly one of its secretaries. A close friend and colleague of WCTU president Frances E. Willard, Stevens was elected vice president at-large in 1894 and thus succeeded to the presidency of the national WCTU when Willard died in 1898. In 1903 she also became vice president of the international WCTU.
Like Willard, Stevens traveled constantly, both in the United States and abroad. She was able to increase the number of WCTU members, and from 1900 to 1910 membership rose from 168,000 to 248,000. She also endorsed Willard’s wide-ranging program of reforms, including woman suffrage, the eight-hour day, and fair wages. Under her leadership the WCTU continued to arouse strong feelings and loyalties in middle-class women around the country. In practice, however, the WCTU became much more focused on temperance.
Partly as a result of work by the WCTU, six southern and western states passed prohibition laws, and in 1911 Stevens declared that national legislation was possible by 1920. In this she was proved correct, although the WCTU was only one of several organizations, such as the National Anti-Saloon League, that contributed to passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and its enabling Volstead Act (1919). Before she saw her prediction come true, however, Stevens died, at seventy, in Portland, of chronic nephritis. Her ashes were buried in Stroudwater Cemetery.
Best known for her temperance work, Stevens continued to support the other reforms in which she was interested. She occasionally represented Maine at the National Conference of Charities and Correction; she campaigned for a state women’s reformatory; and, as dedicated suffragist, she served as treasurer of the National Council of Women from 1891 to 1895. Stevens was a capable leader and inspirer of action whose contribution to the cause of temperance might have been more highly esteemed and more widely known had she not succeeded so gifted a woman as Frances Willard in the presidency of the WCTU.
In the absence of a full-length biography the best sources are the entry in Notable American Women (1971); a pamphlet by G. S. Leavitt (her daughter) and M. L. Sargent, Lillian M. N. Stevens: A Life Sketch (1921); F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds.,A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967); and A. Gordon, comp., What Lillian Stevens Said (1914). A posthumous tribute appeared in the WCTU’s Union Signal, April 16, 1914. An obituary appeared in The New York Times, April 7, 1914.