Women of the Week

Editor and temperance reformer Julia A. Ames, and author, poet, and philanthropist Helen Maria Fiske Jackson are this week's Women of the Week   

• To learn about them by viewing their items, please click on their images.  

• To read their biographical sketches in A Woman of the Century, please click on the highlighted page numbers to the left of their images.

Julia A. Ames, a gifted editor, orator, and temperance reformer, was born in Odell, Illinois, on October 14, 1860.  She graduated from Streator High School, Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, and the Chicago School of Oratory.

Julia spent much of her life in the Chicago area.  During her early efforts for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Julia worked closely with Levancia Holcomb Plumb. Frances Elizabeth Willard and Matilda B. Carse are just two other people in Julia's personal network. Matilda B. Carse gave Julia the nickname "Yolande," after she noted Julia's similarity to the heroine of an 1883 novel by William Black (A Young Woman Journalist, 39).

In addition to her efforts on behalf of temperance reform, Ames wrote for the Chicago Inter-Ocean and edited the Union Signal. She was a member of, and later the president of, the Woman's Temperance Publishing Circle of King's Daughters.

Julia passed away in Boston on December 12, 1891, after having become very ill while participating in a convention.  She was just thirty-one years old. Julia was buried in Riverview Cemetery in Streator, Illinois. The year after "Yolande's" death, The Woman's Temperance Publishing Association published A Young Woman Journalist: A Memorial Tribute to Julia A. Ames.

Helen Maria Fiske Jackson, better known as Helen Hunt Jackson, or "H. H.", was an extremely popular writer.  She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, on October 18, 1831.

Jackson was a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, Galaxy, Hearth and Home, The Independent, Nation, and Scribner’s Monthly. 

During the 1870s, Helen began publishing juvenile fiction with Roberts Brothers. Mercy Philbrick’s Choice, a fictional work published by in 1876, was noticed in numerous periodicals. She continued to publish with Roberts Brothers as more and more readers knew of “H. H.” 

Helen capitalized on her known name to support the Native American cause. However, for her A Century of Dishonor (1881), she chose Harper Brothers. When "H. H." published Ramona, her fictional work about Native Americans in 1884, she published it through Roberts Brothers. At least eleven periodicals reviewed this popular work.

She passed away on August 12, 1885.