Mary Greenleaf Leavitt (née Clement; September 22, 1830 – February 5, 1912) was an educator and successful orator who became the first round-the-world missionary for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).

The women of Fredonia, New York, became famous as they visited local saloons to pray and sing with their leader Mrs. Esther McNeil; and, on December 22, 1873, they were the first to call themselves the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

Two days later, following a lecture at the Hillsboro, Ohio Music Hall the night before, the Crusade was born when Mrs. Eliza Thompson, a judge's wife and the daughter of a former governor, gathered 70 women in prayer at the Presbyterian Church and marched to the local saloons.

[7] "Past middle age and granite-faced," writes Patricia Ward D'Itri in Crosscurrents in the International Women's Movement, "she had what biographers described as an unfortunate family resemblance to George Washington."

Frances Willard recognized Leavitt's organizational abilities and popularity as a lecturer, by asking her new emissary to undertake a mission to the Far East to assess what the WCTU could do to organize international temperance efforts.

Willard told her followers: "Let me affectionately urge you to pray definitely for Mrs. Mary Clement Leavitt and her embassy, the most distant echo of the great Ohio crusade, the farthest outreaching of the gospel temperance wave.

In 1885 she championed the formation of the New Zealand Woman's Christian Temperance Union under the leadership of many suffragists who then became more organized nationally under the Franchise Superintendency of Kate Sheppard.

[15][16] Frances Willard sent to her the Polyglot Petition in August 1885[2] to get signatures that would show world leaders of their people's willingness to take a stand against the alcohol traffic and opium trade.

[23] She begins lecturing in Auckland, the commercial and financial center for New Zealand, on January 27 sharing the stage with an already recognized and popular temperance missionary, Rev.

Leavitt also visited the South Island: Dunedin (the largest city at the time), Port Chalmers, Ravensborne, Oamaru, Invercargill, Christchurch, Sydnenham, Papanui, Richmond.

[26] There, Leavitt traveled from Sydney to MacDonaldstown, Newton, Lithgow, Bathurst, Rockhampton, Townsville, Charter's Towers, Mayborough, Ipswich, Toowoonsba, Melbourne, Queenscliff, and Adelaide.

From February to March she also visited Tasmania, the island state of Australia, lecturing in Lancaster, Cressy, Beaconsfield, Hobart, Richmond, and Campbelltown before returning to Sydney.

Suffragist Mary Livermore contributed a leaflet in tribute to Leavitt and which local WCTU chapters purchased to read in their meetings.

[28] While in Japan for five months (June 1 through October 12, 1886), she lectured at Yokohama, Tokio, Nikko, Hieizan, Kioto, Osaka, Wakayamo, Sakai, Kobe, Okayama, and Nagasaki.

From October 21, 1886, to February 1, 1887, she gave lectures in Chefoo, Tientsin, Tungeho, Pekin, Shanghai, Foo-chow, Amoy, Swatow, Hongking, and Canton.

By April 8, she had moved on to Myanmar (then known as Burma) where she spent four months, giving speeches at Maulemien, Amhurst, Rangoon, Toungoo, Mandalay, Prine, Bassein, and Naubin.

Bareilly, Lucknow, Sitapur, Cawnpore, Etawela, Agra, Bombay, Poona, Nagpur, Jabalpur, Allahabad, Benares, Madras, Hydirabad, Secundirabad, Negapatam, Madura, Batalagundu, Kodaikanal, Tuticorin.

She left India on June 1, 1888, and spent nearly three months in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), lecturing at Colombo, Kolupitiga, Colpetty, Kandy, Anarodopura, Oodooville, Batticotta, Oodoopitty, Tillipally, Nellore, Jffna, Panadere, Kalistore, and Galle.

[33] From there she traveled east through central Africa to the Congo basin;[34] but then turned south where she began a series of lectures in the British colony of Natal.

She arrived in the port city of Durban on December 14, 1888, and for the next several weeks traveled to speak in Uruzumbi, Inanda, Amamzimrole, Verulam, Umvoti, Maritzburg, Ladysmith, and Harrismith.

She was ill much of the time there due to yellow fever plagues, and she met with some resistance from college men in Pernambuco, Brazil, who threw paving stones at her as she was speaking.

By the end of her decade of travels, Leavitt had organized over 86 worldwide WCTU international chapters, and some 21 men's temperance societies in over 40 countries.

Pandita Ramabai, for instance, who was a leading female crusader in 1880s India against confinement of widows and child brides, joined forces with the WCTU, for whom she acted as an unofficial missionary and lecturer.

[36] But the message of Leavitt and other WCTU reformers were not always received so warmly abroad, where their mingling of temperance and suffrage and emerging women's rights issues were sometimes complicated by cultural differences or long-held taboos.

In other places, Leavitt's message against tobacco, opium, alcohol and sex outside marriage did not necessarily sit well, not to mention her calls for women's right to vote.

In some locales different customs presented the WCTU crusader with unlikely predicaments: in Bangkok, for instance, she met with Thailand's King Chulalongkorn at the palace where he kept his harem.

[39] Leavitt brought copies of the Polyglot Petition to display at the first World WCTU Convention at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Massachusetts, November 10–11, 1891.

[2] In 1899, she was one of the speakers at a women's anti-lynching demonstration in Boston's Chickering Hall, along with Julia Ward Howe, Alice Freeman Palmer, Florida Ruffin Ridley, and Mary Evans Wilson.

[46] The fate of the New England schoolteacher's ex-husband, Thomas H. Leavitt, a Vermont native and Boston real estate broker whom she married in 1857,[47] was not chronicled.

Her daughter Amy, educated at "Mrs. Mary Clement Leavitt's Private School in Boston", later became a translator and musician after graduating from the New England Conservatory of Music.