Elizabeth Preston Anderson

• Elizabeth Preston Anderson
• Born: April 27, 1861
• Died: November 30, 1954

Temperance advocate, suffragist, and moral reformer, was born in Decatur, Indiana. Her father, Elam Stanton Preston, a Methodist minister with a lineage stretching back to Quaker ancestors in Virginia, had attended Asbury University. Her mother, Marie (Shepley) Preston, a descendant of the Revolutionary general James Hill, had been a resident of Maine. Elizabeth Preston had two brothers, Wilbur and Asher. Her mother died when she was two, and her father remarried. She attended an academy and Asbury University and then taught.

In 1880 an abrupt change came when the Preston family emigrated to the Dakota Territory, settling near Tower City. Elizabeth Preston continued her teaching in Sanborn and Page, Dakota Territory. In 1880 she also received a calling to serve God, in the form of a temperance crusade. Prohibition people were historically Northeastern, Protestant, well-educated, religious, and male. Women entered the temperance movement through the “praying crusade” after the Civil War and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union led by Frances E. Willard. By the 1880s abstinence indicated respectability.

The Dakota WCTU was formed in 1882, guided by Helen M. Barker and women from southern Dakota. The Dakota WCTU split into two state chapters in 1889, one for South Dakota, the other for North Dakota. Willard attended that meeting, at which Preston was elected to a minor office. In 1893 Adelaide M. Kinnear retired as president of the North Dakota WCTU, and Preston took her place. She strove mainly to prevent the state prohibition clause of the North Dakota constitution from being resubmitted to the voters, and she succeeded with the aid of Robert M. Pollock, Judge Charles A. Pollock, the state Enforcement League, and the large, dry-voting Norwegian population.

In 1901 Elizabeth Preston married a Methodist minister, James Anderson, who aided her in her temperance work. Combining her name with his, she used the surname Preston Anderson. She was stepmother to his four children.

Preston Anderson’s second interest was woman suffrage. She had always favored equality for women, tracing her support to Quaker ancestors. Like her WCTU colleagues—she served as national recording secretary for twenty years—Preston Anderson was a “social” suffragist, confident that women would vote correctly on prohibition and moral issues; Susan B. Anthony, in contrast, was a “radical” feminist, giving priority to winning woman suffrage. Preston Anderson, however, cooperated with such radical suffragists as Clara Dillon Darrow, and in 1915 they supported a female suffrage bill in North Dakota. Victory did not come until the action of the Nonpartisan League legislature in 1917, when women received the right to vote in municipal and presidential elections.

Preston Anderson and the North Dakota WCTU obtained passage of laws in that state strengthening the legal definition of intoxicating liquor and raising the age of consent. They supported physical-fitness programs in the schools and an annual temperance day in classrooms. They also successfully supported laws that banned smoking in restaurants, outlawed Copenhagen snuff, and the manufacture, sale, and advertising of cigarettes.

Preston Anderson opposed the ninety-day divorce law in effect in North Dakota in the 1890s. Divorces were difficult to obtain elsewhere, and unhappily married people flocked to Fargo to wait out their ninety days. The major argument for the law was economic. Supporters said a newly developed region needed outside revenue, but Preston Anderson and other moralists who did not agree were successful in bringing about repeal of the law.

A proposal to establish a lottery in North Dakota also aroused Preston Anderson’s ire in the 1890s. The proposal was backed by Alexander McKenzie’s Republican machine but ran into opposition from Republican Governor John Miller. Miller hired Pinkerton detectives, who found evidence that supporters of the lottery were using bribery. This disclosure, coupled with the opposition of Preston Anderson, was enough to prevent enactment.

For more than forty years Elizabeth Preston Anderson and the WCTU were instrumental in defending state and national prohibition in North Dakota, but they were defeated when North Dakota joined the trend to legalized liquor in the 1930s. Preston Anderson was also a pillar in drives to obtain woman suffrage in North Dakota and to obtain passage of a rigid set of laws for the enforcement of a code of personal morality. She ultimately was defeated in the latter crusade, as North Dakotans swung against such a program in the 1920s and 1930s, but her earlier efforts to repeal the ninety-day divorce law and to kill the state lottery scheme were successful.

Preston Anderson died at Miles City, Montana, at the age of ninety-three.

Source material on Elizabeth Preston Anderson is provided in Autobiography: Under the Prairie Wing. For her “calling,” see the Minnie J. Nielson Papers, State Historical Society, Bismarck, North Dakota. Preston Anderson also wrote The Story of Fifty Years: North Dakota Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1889-1933, which covers her career, and “Lights and Shadows of a North Dakota Legislature,” held by the North Dakota Historical Society. See also E. B. Robinson, History of North Dakota (1966); J. R. Gus-field, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (1966); and W. L. O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America (1971).