Stoddard, Helen M.

Helen M. Stoddard announced as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1912. She ran from California's Eleventh congressional district, receiving 8.3% of the total vote. Stoddard, a teacher and temperance activist, was born in Wisconsin and spent much of her life in Texas before moving, for her health, to California in 1907. In the 1880s she became interested in temperance reform and was elected president of the Texas Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1891. She expanded the Union's membership in Texas and successfully lobbied for state temperance instruction legislation as well as a pure food act, and laws raising the age of protection for girls (1895) and forbidding the sale of cigarettes to minors (1899). She was active in the legislative fight against child labor and for the establishment of a College of Industrial Acts for girls (and was subsequently appointed by the governor to a commission to select a site for the new institution). In 1871 Stoddard graduated at the top of her class at Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York. She married in 1873 and was widowed five years later.