Zerelda Gray Sanders Wallace

• Zerelda G. Wallace
• Born: August 6, 1817
• Died: March 19, 1901

Suffrage and temperance leader, was born in Millersburg, Kentucky the eldest of five daughters. Her father, John H. Sanders, was descended from a South Carolina family; her mother, Polly C. (Gray) Sanders, from Virginians. She was educated at a local grammar school and then for two years in a boarding school in Versailles, Kentucky (1828-30). In 1833 the family moved to Indianapolis, where John Sanders established a prosperous medical practice.

Zerelda Sanders benefited from her father’s view that women should be educated like men and from his habits (as reported by Frances E. Willard) of discussing with his daughters “all the great questions, religious, political, and scientific.” In 1836 she married David Wallace of Indianapolis, lieutenant governor of Indiana, a widower twice her age who had three young sons. These she reared, along with six children of their own (of whom only Mary, Agnes, and David survived childhood).

David Wallace’s political career prospered; he was elected governor of Indiana (1837) and later U. S. Representative on the Whig ticket (1841-43). After he died in 1859, Zerelda Wallace began to participate in activities outside the home. She had already had some exposure to public life from her duties as a politician’s wife, but not until 1873, at age fifty-six, did she engage in any activity on her own. In December of that year she became involved with the Women’s Crusade, the antiliquor upheaval in which bands of women used prayer and exhortation to shut down hundreds of illegal saloons in the Midwest. The movement spread through women’s networks centered on local churches. When her Christian Church (Campbellite) became such a center, Wallace joined in.

She quickly developed a deep interest in the liquor issue. At the end of 1874, she, along with women delegates from seventeen state temperance societies, met in Cleveland to form the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). As a member of the committees on Resolutions and Plan of Work, which produced the first coherent platform for the new organization, she met Frances E. Willard, its future president, and they became good friends.

Upon returning to Indiana, Wallace organized a state WCTU and served as its president until 1877, and again from 1879 to 1883. Like most of the women who had participated in the crusade, she believed in the inherent moral superiority of women but assumed that prayer would lead men of good will to close the saloons and enforce the liquor laws that were then on the books of most states in the Midwest. This, she felt, would end drunkenness and reduce immorality and poverty. Along with most temperance reformers of the time, she saw no need for women to enter politics or obtain the right to vote.

In 1875, however, she made a complete reversal. An attempt was being made by the liquor interests to repeal the state prohibition law and replace it with a liquor license system. Wallace led a delegation of a hundred women to the statehouse, where she spoke against the license law in a formal address to the assembled legislators. After the speech, the representative from her district said that he and his colleagues were not free to vote their consciences on the matter because they had to follow the desires of their constituents. Suddenly Wallace was struck by a question: “Why am I not one of this constituency?” She shook the man’s hand and thanked him. “You have made me a woman suffragist,” she told him. “You have proved to me how trifling a cypher an unfranchised person is in the eyes of a Legislature.” That same year she persuaded the annual meeting of the national WCTU to endorse the right of women to vote on matters concerning temperance. This was still a radical idea to most temperance workers, and was allowed to come to the floor only in deference to Wallace’s prestige.

In 1878 she helped organize the Indianapolis Equal Suffrage Society and became its first president. In 1887 she helped found the Indiana Woman Suffrage Association, serving as its vice president at-large for three years. Meanwhile, the national WCTU had endorsed full woman suffrage, and Wallace was appointed head of the Franchise Department, which was coordinating the union’s suffrage activities. She held this post from 1883 to 1888. In her various temperance and suffrage posts she was known less for her administrative skill than for her remarkable abilities as a public speaker.

After 1898 failing health put an end to Wallace’s active career. She died, at eighty-three, in Cataract, Indiana, at the home of her daughter Agnes Wallace Steiner, of a bronchial ailment, and was buried in Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis, beside her husband.

Known for her reform work, she is also remembered as the stepmother of General Lew Wallace, author of the best-selling novel Ben Hur (1880), who once told her that she was the model for one of the most appealing characters in the book, the Mother.

Valuable sketches appear in F. E. Willard and M. A. Liver-more, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967); F. E. Willard, Woman and Temperance (1883); and E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 3-5 (1886-1922). The best account published at a later date is that in Notable American Women, (1971). Obituaries appeared in The Indianapolis News, March 19, 1901, and The Indianapolis Journal, March 20, 1901.