{{Short description|English Temperance advocate}} {{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}} {{Infobox person | name = Agnes Elizabeth Slack | image = Agnes E. Slack (The Union Signal, 1922).png | caption = | birth_name = | birth_date = 15 October 1858 | birth_place = Ripley, Derbyshire | death_date = 16 January 1946 | death_place = Kettering | death_cause = | other_names = Agnes Saunders | known_for = activist for temperance | education = | employer = | occupation = | spouse = Charles Saunders }} '''Agnes Elizabeth Slack''' or '''Agnes Elizabeth Saunders''' (15 October 1858 – 16 January 1946) was a leading English Temperance advocate.
==Life== Slack was born in Ripley, Derbyshire in 1858. Her Liberal Wesleyan Methodist parents were Mary Ann (born Bamford) and Thomas Slack. Her father made bricks and her elder brother, John Bamford Slack, would become a minister and politician. At the age of 14 she was sent to a boarding school in Lincoln.<ref name="odd"/> Methodists believed in temperance and religion was Slack's life's work.<ref name="Abreu2014"/>
In 1895 she became the secretary of the British Women's Temperance Association and the World's Women's Christian Temperance Union.<ref name="odd"/> [[File:Entrance Gates to Wesley's Chapel.jpg|left|thumb|Slack was the first woman to preach in Wesley's Chapel ]] Slack had good connections with the American Woman's Christian Temperance Union and she referred to their President, Lillian Stevens as "mother". She continued her education afterwards attending summer schools at Oxford and Cambridge in bible studies before the First World War. During this time she established strong links with the American vice-President Anna Adams Gordon in Boston.<ref name="odd"/> Gordon became the President of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union when Stevens died in 1914.<ref name="odd" /> In 1920 the United States banned alcohol. thumb|Slack in 1930 In 1925, there were two women's temperance organisation's in the UK, because of a disagreement over the suffrage movement in 1893.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/vcdf/detail?coll_id=10631&inst_id=65|title=AIM25 collection description|website=www.aim25.ac.uk|access-date=2017-08-10|archive-date=10 August 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170810211039/http://www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/vcdf/detail?coll_id=10631&inst_id=65|url-status=dead}}</ref> She was the last President of the National British Temperance Women's Association until it merged with the Women's Total Abstinence Union. As a result, she was the founding President of the National British Women's Total Abstinence Union.<ref name=odd>Eve Colpus, ‘Slack, Agnes Elizabeth (1858–1946)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2012 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/103418, accessed 10 Aug 2017]</ref> The following year, her niece Aelfrida Tillyard, published the first biography of her life, documenting her travels to Canada, America, Scandinavia and South Africa.<ref name="Abreu2014">{{cite book|author=Maria Zina Gonçalves de Abreu|title=Women Past and Present: Biographic and Multidisciplinary Studies|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CsYxBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA128|date=2 June 2014|publisher=Cambridge Scholars Publishing|isbn=978-1-4438-6114-4|pages=128–130}}</ref> In the same year she became the first woman to preach at Wesley's Chapel.<ref name="Abreu2014"/>
Slack married an architect named Charles Saunders in 1943 and she died in Kettering in 1946.<ref name=odd/>
==Books== *“Agnes E. Slack” (“Two Hundred Thousand Miles Travel for Temperance in Four Continents”) by Aelfrida Tillyard, 1926. Published by W. Heffer & Sons Ltd, Cambridge, England. *Slack, A. E. (1908), ''My travels in India'', published by John Heywood Ltd, Manchester, England. *''People I have met and places I have seen: some memories of Agnes E. Slack'', 1942<ref>{{Cite book |last=Slack |first=Agnes E. |url=https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/People_I_Have_Met_and_Places_I_Have_Seen/l5UrHQAACAAJ?hl=en |title=People I Have Met and Places I Have Seen: Some Memories of Agnes E. Slack |date=1941 |publisher=Rush & Warwick |language=en}}</ref>
==References== {{reflist}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Slack, Agnes Elizabeth}} Category:1858 births Category:1946 deaths Category:20th-century English memoirists Category:20th-century English women writers Category:English women memoirists Category:Writers from Derbyshire Category:People from Ripley, Derbyshire Category:English temperance activists Category:English women activists Category:Woman's Christian Temperance Union people Category:British travel writers Category:English women travel writers