the early 1880s, after the failure to achieve women's suffrage in Indiana, Wallace felt that a national constitutional amendment would be the fastest and most efficient way to achieve voting rights for women. In 1883 she sent a letter to suffragist Susan B. Anthony expressing her sentiments, and Anthony read Wallace's inspirational letter to delegates attending the fifteenth annual convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association. This group, which was headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anthony, was one of the two major suffrage groups in the United States at that time. The other was the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. In 1890 the two groups joined forces to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Between 1883 and 1888, Wallace was active in the women's suffrage movement at the national level as head of the franchise (suffrage) department of the national WCTU. In 1887 she was a founder of the Indiana chapter of the National Woman Suffrage Association and delivered an address at the NWSA's national convention. She also served three years as its vice president at large. In 1888 Wallace spoke at the International Conference of Women in Washington, D.C. By that time she was a well-known and popular speaker on social reform issues, especially temperance and woman suffrage. Later years In the late 1880s, after Wallace collapsed on a speakers podium, she became less active in the women's suffrage and temperance movements. She spent her final years at the home of her daughter, Agnes, in Cataract, Owen County, Indiana. Death and legacy Wallace died March 19, 1901, at Cataract, Indiana, at the age of eighty-three. After her funeral service at Central Christian Church, she was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis. Lew Wallace memorialized his stepmother as "Mother Wallace, the sweet-tongued apostle of temperance and reform." In 1930 the League of Women Voters selected Wallace to represent Indiana and installed a bronze plaque in recognition of her efforts on behalf of women's suffrage at its headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 2004 an Indiana State Historical Marker was dedicated in Wallace's honor on the grounds of the Central Christian Church. The marker is installed along Fort Wayne Avenue, in the block between Alabama and Delaware Streets, in downtown Indianapolis. Kathy Davis, Indiana's first female lieutenant governor, led the June 13, 2004, dedication ceremony. Notes References External links 1817 births 1901