Betsy (Bessie) Lee Cowie (1860–1950), 'Australia's Temperance Queen', spent the early part of her life in Daylesford, Victoria, one of the five children of Henry Vickery, a butcher and miner, and his wife Emma. Following her mother's death from tuberculosis in 1868, Bessie was sent to Melbourne to live with an uncle and aunt who mistreated her amid their regular bouts of drunkenness. In 1869 her father committed her to the care of another uncle and his wife who provided a model of austere Christianity. In Melbourne in 1880 she married Harrison Lee, a railway worker who 'never got drunk, and went to church regularly on Sundays'. Seeking an outlet for her evangelical inclinations she began teaching Sunday school, and delivering lectures for women's groups such as the YWCA. She then took to preaching to mixed congregations and became a district visitor and community worker for the Anglican church. It was in this capacity that she became aware of 'drink's share in the poverty and degradation of the people', and applied herself to the prohibitionist crusade. She was involved in the founding of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in 1887 and as its designated 'Colonial Evangelist' travelled throughout Victoria holding meetings on the WCTU's behalf. Around 1890, she resigned from the WCTU executive having created controversy with her advocacy of sexual abstinence in marriage. She travelled and lectured extensively in the early 1890s with sponsorship from the Victorian Alliance for the Suppression of Liquor Traffic, and from 1896 began working in New Zealand, the USA and the UK. Following her husband's death in 1908 she received a written offer of marriage from Andrew Cowie, a retired farmer of Winton, New Zealand. With her husband's financial support she continued her work in New Zealand and internationally, also becoming involved in prison reform and other social issues. Returning to the WCTU fold, she was appointed a world missionary in 1911; in 1912 she became a foundation member of New Zealand's United Labour Party. A prodigious writer of letters to the editor, poems, articles and moralising tracts, Lee also published the memoirs One of Australia's Daughters: An Autobiography (1906), and One of God's Lamplighters: Incidents in My Life Work (1909). Widowed for the second time in 1928, Lee moved to Honolulu on medical advice in 1930. She relocated to California following the bombing of Pearl Harbour and completed another account of her life's work – From Nine to Ninety – shortly before her death in Pasadena.
