Rebecca Naylor Hazard

At the breaking out of the American Civil War, Hazard, who was an ardent Unionist, engaged in hospital work, including the care of sick and wounded soldiers.

She helped to organize the Union Aid Society and served as a member of the executive committee in the great Western Sanitary Fair.

Finding that large numbers of African American women and children were by the exigencies of war helplessly stranded in the city, Hazard sought means for their relief.

With Mary Foote Henderson, Hazard co-founded the School of Design for women in the field of decorative art.

[2] Deeply impressed with the disabilities under which women labor in being deprived of political rights, Hazard, Virginia Minor, Anna Clapp, Lucretia Hall, and Penelope Allen,[4] met in May 1867, and formed the Woman Suffrage Association of Missouri, the first society bearing the name, and having for its sole object the ballot for woman.

She authored the popular suffragist song, "Give the Ballot to the Mothers"[5] which was sung by a choir at the first convention of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association in November 1889.

[9] After the death of her husband, in 1879, Hazard mostly retired from public work, but at her home in Kirkwood, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, a class of women met each week for study and mutual improvement.

[3] Hazard was a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and of the American Akademe, a philosophical society having headquarters in Jacksonville, Illinois.