A wife, mother, and housekeeper, she addressed the British Social Science Congress on the question of capital and labor.

[8] Parker was a great admirer of the U.S. She and her husband were converted by John B. Gough after one of his lectures in Dundee, becoming total abstainers.

The press having brought to her the name of Mother Stewart of Ohio, as prominently connected with the Crusade, Parker invited her to Scotland, and arranged a temperance trip for her which greatly enlisted the public interest, and from which resulted a meeting in April 1876, at Newcastle-on-Tyne.

Parker was elected president of this new society, and was sent as a delegate to the Woman's International Temperance Convention which met in the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, in June 1876.

There, Parker was unanimously elected President of the International WCTU, the avowed object of which was "to spread a temperance Gospel to the ends of the earth."

A book, entitled Six Happy Weeks among the Americans, recorded her impression of the land she had so long desired to see.

[8] Parker was not an orator, but her refined manners and gentle presence, combined with her strong sense and ready wit, made her one of the favorite speakers at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893,[9] called by the National Temperance Society, of which John Newton Stearns was Secretary.