author
Georgeanna M. Gardenier
A late-19th-century writer and reformer, she helped preserve the early history of New York's Woman's Christian Temperance Union in a book shaped by activism, memory, and public purpose.
1 Audiobook
Two Decades A History of the First Twenty Years' Work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the State of New York
by Frances W. Graham, Georgeanna M. Gardenier
About the author
Georgeanna M. Gardenier is best known as the co-author of Two Decades: A History of the First Twenty Years' Work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the State of New York (1894), written with Frances W. Graham. The book was prepared at the request of the state W.C.T.U.'s twentieth annual convention and set out to record the organization's work across its first twenty years.
The surviving front matter of Two Decades places her in Oswego, New York, and identifies her as the recording secretary of the State Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1894. That connection helps explain the book's point of view: it was not written as distant scholarship, but as a firsthand institutional history by people closely involved in the movement.
Very little biographical detail about her appears to be widely documented online, so the clearest picture that remains is through her work itself. Even so, that work gives her an important place in the record of women's organizing, temperance activism, and reform writing in New York during the late nineteenth century.