Newman, Angelia L. (1837–1910)

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Newman, Angelia L. (1837–1910)

American church worker and reformer. Name variations: Angie Newman; Angelia Louise French Thurston Kilgore Newman. Born Angelia Louise French Thurston on December 4, 1837, in Montpelier, Vermont; died on April 15, 1910, in Lincoln, Nebraska; daughter of Daniel Sylvester Thurston and Matilda Benjamin Thurston; attended Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, 1857–58; married Frank Kilgore (died c. 1856); married David Newman (a merchant), on August 25, 1859 (died 1893); children: (second marriage) Cora Fanny (b. 1860); Henry Byron (b. 1863).

Angelia L. Newman, called Angie, was born in 1837 to a Methodist family in Montpelier, Vermont, the eldest of four girls. Her mother Matilda Thurston died when Newman was about seven, and her father Daniel Thurston, a farmer, tanner, currier, and prominent citizen, remarried shortly thereafter; her younger halfbrother by this marriage, John Mellen Thurston, would later become a U.S. senator. Newman attended an academy in Montpelier and briefly taught school before her family relocated to Wisconsin, where at age 18 she married a Methodist minister's son, Frank Kilgore. Kilgore died before their first anniversary, and Newman began teaching at a public school and attended Lawrence University for one term. In August 1859, she married merchant David Newman, with whom she had two children: Cora Fanny Newman , born in 1860, and Henry Byron Newman, born in 1863. The family moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1871.

Angelia Newman was apparently an invalid from 1862 to 1875, when her pulmonary condition was cured "in answer to prayer." She was urged to become active in Methodist causes by her husband, who was a longtime Methodist Sunday School superintendent, so she joined the Women's Foreign Missionary Society and soon became secretary of its western branch. As part of the society, Newman organized missionary trips into the frontier of western Nebraska, raised funds to aid missionary work in India and elsewhere, and wrote numerous articles for its magazine, the Heathen Woman's Friend. Newman was a forceful lecturer, advocating missionary work abroad and calling those who opposed the missionary movement "the heathen at home"—a term which became the title of her widely distributed 1878 pamphlet.

In the late 1870s, in part due to lack of support within the church establishment for foreign missionary work by women, Newman and other leading churchwomen began to focus on missionary projects within the United States. After a trip to Salt Lake City taken for health reasons, Newman returned home convinced that the city was "to all intents [as] foreign" as any place overseas. The Mormon practice of polygamy, she believed, substituted "the Harem for the Home," and in her speeches she argued that Mormonism was not a religion. She advanced the already well-known campaign of Ann Eliza Young , the 27th wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, who had filed for divorce from her husband in 1873. Although the publicly favored Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1882 outlawed polygamy, the Mormon Church did not officially follow suit until 1890, in order to gain statehood. Newman sustained her offensive against the Mormons, becoming secretary of the Mormon Bureau of the Woman's Home Missionary Society and superintendent of the Mormon Department of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).

Newman sought to establish a refuge in Salt Lake City for Mormon wives and children who were left homeless by the enforcement of the Edmunds-Tucker Act. To this end, she worked in Washington, D.C., from 1885 to 1891, testifying before a Senate committee and submitting petitions, and in 1886 helped to win a $40,000 Congressional grant to create a home for refugee Mormon wives in Utah. In 1887, she became the first woman appointed as a lay delegate to the General Conference, the Methodist legislative body, although she was not seated due to what the male delegates termed "female ineligibility." For 12 years, she was state superintendent of jail and prison work for the WCTU, and beginning in 1889 lectured on temperance and "social purity." Nebraska governors appointed her a delegate to the National Conference of Charities and Correction every year from 1883 until 1892, and she was active in several other organizations as well, including the National Council of Women and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

After her husband died in 1893, Newman traveled to Hawaii—"a natural mission field," as she characterized it—where she evidently worked as a hospital inspector. She so approved of President William McKinley's policies that she praised them in her privately printed McKinley Carnations of Memory in 1904. Still working hard in her late 60s, she continued to give lectures on foreign travel to the women of Lincoln, Nebraska. An embodiment of the affluent American Methodist women of her time, much admired for her oratory and her dedication both to her Christianity and to reform, Angelia Newman died in 1910 at age 72.