While helping her son Alfred E. Hunt study for a chemistry course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she became interested in how the textbooks addressed the effects of alcohol on the human body.

She provided step-by-step instructions to the WCTU chapters' superintendents for education, including how to put direct, single-issue pressure on elected representatives through demonstrations, meetings, petitions, pamphlets and letters.

She envisioned success from the grass roots to the national level to ensure passage of laws requiring that textbooks teach every school child a curriculum promoting complete abstinence for everyone and alcohol prohibition.

[4] Mrs. Hunt prepared a reply in which she charged the Committee of Fifty with being prejudiced against abstinence instruction, criticized it for what she considered gross misrepresentation of facts, and insisted that the endorsed textbooks were completely accurate.

[6] Although she stirred controversy, one writer noted that "by the time of her death in 1906, Mary Hunt had shaken and changed the world of education" with her campaign for mandatory temperance instruction.

In order to deal with the accusation that she profited from her position and power, Mary Hunt had signed over to charity the royalties due her on the thousands of temperance textbooks sold annually.

[14] The association used its funds to support the maintenance of the national headquarters of the WCTU's Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, a large house in Boston that was also Mrs. Hunt's residence.