Annie Turner Wittenmyer

Annie Turner Wittenmyer (born Aug. 26, 1827, Sandy Springs, Ohio, U.S.—died Feb. 2, 1900, Sanatoga [now in Pottstown], Pa.) American relief worker and reformer who helped supply medical aid and dietary assistance to army hospitals during the Civil War and was subsequently an influential organizer in the temperance movement.

Wittenmyer and her husband settled in Keokuk, Iowa, in 1850. At the outbreak of the Civil War, having shortly before been left a widow with a considerable estate, Wittenmyer devoted herself to relief work. As secretary of the Keokuk Soldiers’ Aid Society, she visited troop encampments and organized a statewide system of local aid societies to promote the collection of hospital supplies, and soon the society became the de facto distributing agency for the state.

Under a state law of September 1862, Wittenmyer was appointed a paid state sanitary agent to carry on the work she had begun. In October 1863 she was elected president of the Iowa State Sanitary Commission, a group organized to resist an attempt by the all-male Iowa Army Sanitary Commission to take over the work of the Iowa women. The rivalry continued into 1864, when opponents falsely accused Wittenmyer of mismanagement and corruption. After refuting the charges and fighting off the threat to her position, she resigned as state agent in May 1864.

On her own Wittenmyer proceeded with a plan to open special diet kitchens at army hospitals. Supported by the United States Christian Commission, she began with a kitchen in Nashville, Tennessee. Women trained by Wittenmyer soon established similar kitchens at other hospitals, and by the end of the war Wittenmyer’s idea had been generally adopted by the army medical department. During and after the war she also worked on behalf of the Iowa Orphans’ Home Association.

In 1868 Wittenmyer led in organizing the Ladies’ and Pastors’ Christian Union, an organization of Methodists interested in aiding the sick and needy. She was chosen corresponding secretary of the successor General Conference Society in 1871. About that time she moved to Philadelphia and founded the periodical Christian Woman, of which she remained editor for 11 years.

Wittenmyer joined in the “Woman’s Crusade,” the largely unorganized wave of temperance fervour that swept over parts of western New York, Ohio, and other midwestern states in 1873–74. In November 1874 she attended the Cleveland, Ohio, convention at which the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was organized, and she was elected the union’s first president. For the next year she and Frances Willard, the WCTU’s corresponding secretary, traveled widely to lecture on temperance and to organize local and state branches.

Wittenmyer also saw to the founding of Our Union, the WCTU’s journal. She was reelected president regularly until 1879, when she lost to Willard, with whom she had split over the question of taking up the cause of woman suffrage in addition to temperance. Wittenmyer continued to oppose the politicization of the WCTU and supported the formation in 1890 of the splinter Non-Partisan Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, of which she served as president (1896–98).

She was also president of the Woman’s Relief Corps (1889–90), an auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic. She led a campaign to establish a National Woman’s Relief Corps Home for Civil War nurses and the widows and mothers of veterans, and she served as a director for such homes established in Ohio and Pennsylvania. In 1892 Wittenmyer lobbied Congress on behalf of a bill to provide Civil War nurses with pensions, and in 1898 she herself received a special pension. Among her written works are Woman’s Work for Jesus (1871), History of the Woman’s Temperance Crusade (1878), Women of the Reformation (1884), and Under the Guns (1895).