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Citation preview

NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN 1607-1950 A Biographical

Dictionary

VOLUME I A-F

Prepared under the auspices of Radcliffe College

NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN 1 6 0 7 - 1 9 5 0 A Biographical Dictionary

Edward T. James Janet Wilson James Paul S. Boyer

EDITOR

ASSOCIATE

ASSISTANT

EDITOR

EDITOR

VOLUME I

A-F

The Belknap Press of Harvard, University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London,

England

©

COPYRIGHT 1 9 7 1 BY RADCLIFFE COLLEGE ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Sixth printing, 1 9 8 2

LIBRARY O F CONGRESS CATALOG NUMBER

ISBN 0-674-62731-8

(CLOTH)

ISBN 0-674-62734-2

(PAPER)

76-152274

PRINTED IN T H E UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

COMMITTEE OF CONSULTANTS Arthur M. Schlesinger,* Chairman Carl Bridenbaugh Lester J. Cappon Rachel Carson * Helen Clapesattle Merle Curti Susanna Bryant Dakin * Elisabeth Anthony Dexter * Louis Filler Eleanor Flexner Stella Goostray 0 Constance McLaughlin Green James D. Hart W. K. Jordan

* deceased

Oliver W. Larkin ° J. C. Levenson William Lichtenwanger Alma Lutz Elsie Lewis Makel Annabelle M. Melville Frances Perkins * Ishbel Ross Francis B. Simkins * Barbara Miller Solomon Frederick B. Tolles William Van Lennep * Ola Elizabeth Winslow

CONTENTS Volume I PREFACE INTRODUCTION

BY J A N E T

BIOGRAPHIES

ix WILSON

JAMES

XVU

1—687

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Volume II BIOGRAPHIES

G-O

1-659

Vilume III BIOGRAPHIES CLASSIFIED

P-Z

LIST OF S E L E C T E D

1-707 BIOGRAPHIES

709

PREFACE This biographical dictionary, the first large-scale scholarly work in its field, grew out of a commitment to women's history which Radcliffe College originally undertook in 1943. That year the suffrage leader Maud Wood Park, a Radcliffe graduate of 1898, gave the college her woman's rights collection, including her own papers, those of many co-workers, and material she had gathered on the whole history of the woman's rights movement. Two Harvard historians, W. K. Jordan, then president of Radcliffe, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, a member of the college Council, Radcliffe's top governing board, saw the gift as an opportunity for a women's college to make a special contribution to scholarship. Under their guidance the collection by 1950 had grown into the Women's Archives, a research library for the study not merely of the suffrage movement but of all phases of women's activity in the American past. Professor Schlesinger, one of his generation's leaders in expanding the scope of historical studies, had long deplored scholars' neglect of women's history. Until 1962 he served as chairman of the Advisory Board of the Women's Archives, which upon his death three years later was renamed the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library, the college thus also honoring his wife, an active partner in her husband's interests and author of a number of articles on American women. In 1955 Professor Schlesinger proposed that the Advisory Board of the Women's Archives investigate the need for a biographical dictionary of American women on the model of the Dictionary of American Biography, pointing out that of the nearly 15,000 individuals in that distinguished scholarly reference work, only some 700 were women. Two members of the board, Elisabeth Anthony Dexter and Alma Lutz, undertook a pilot survey and reported that according to their findings the historical record included at least as many more women of comparable importance. On the board's recommendation, the Radcliffe Council in 1957 decided to sponsor the preparation of such a dictionary. A Committee of Consultants was formed the next year, and editorial work began under the direction of Edward T. James, who had been associate editor of Supplement Two of the Dictionary of American Biography. The original hope of securing financial support from outside the college was not realized, and Radcliffe paid the cost of the project from its unrestricted funds. The first step was to define the coverage of the dictionary. The year 1607 ix

Preface was chosen for a starting point, as marking the founding of the American colonies ( though the dictionary includes an article on Virginia Dare, who was born in 1587 and had disappeared with the Roanoke colony by 1590). To assure adequate historical perspective, it was decided to limit the coverage to women who had died no later than the end of 1950. With relatively few exceptions, therefore, the active careers of the women included extend little beyond 1920. (Only five women were born after 1900: Jean Harlow, Alice Kober, Carole Lombard, Margaret Mitchell, and Grace Moore. ) Most of the first year of the project was spent in assembling a card file of names. Earlier general biographical dictionaries, particularly Appletons' Cyclopaedia of American Biography, were combed for likely women. All the women in the Dictionary of American Biography were placed in the file as a matter of course. Obituaries in encyclopedia yearbooks proved a useful source, especially the long runs of Appletons' (originally the American) Annual Cyclopaedia, 1861-1902, and the New International Year Book, 190850. In addition, all the women in the first two volumes of Who Was Who in America were carefully scrutinized, and a number of them were added to the file. Earlier compendia of female biography were consulted with profit: the wide-ranging Woman's Record ( 1853 ) compiled by Sarah Josepha Hale of Godey's Lady's Book, which included a good coverage of American women of her generation, and above all the mistitled A Woman of the Century (1893), a collection of some 1,500 sketches of late nineteenth-century American women. This last, nominally edited by Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore and issued by the Buffalo publisher Charles Wells Moulton, was an unusually good work for its day—the names well chosen, the articles concise and comprehensive, reasonably accurate, and surprisingly free of windy encomia. ( In an 1897 edition, under the title American Women, a number of articles were abridged to make room for an irrelevant sprinkling of actresses' pictures. ) A later work, though too voluminous to serve as a source of names, was an invaluable reference for the suffrage and Progressive generation: the Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15, edited by John William Leonard. Much less useful was the three-volume Biographical Cyclopaedia of American Women, edited by Mabel Ward Cameron and others ( 1924-28 ), which conspicuously lacks the virtues of the Willard and Livermore work. A mimeographed Library of Congress bibliography compiled by Florence S. Hellman, List of References Relating to Notable American Women (1931-32, with supplements in 1937 and 1941 ), was also consulted. Besides general references, many names were drawn from works pertaining to particular fields in which women were active: histories of American art and the theatre; the Oxford Companion to American Literature and the Dictionary of American Medical Biography; women in the successive editions of American Men of Science; obituaries in such journals as Science, School and Society (for educators), and Survey (for social workers); books on women in the Civil War; surveys of Negro history; histories of special χ

Preface fields with a strong feminine cast like nursing and the kindergarten movement. Suggestions were also solicited from state historical societies and college alumni offices. Eventually the card file grew to over 4,000 names, with identifying data. These were then classified by occupation, and lists were sent for appraisal to experts in the various fields. Guided by these evaluations and by their own research, the editors chose a total of 1,359 names. It is worth noting that of the 706 women who appear in the Dictionary of American Biography, 179 were omitted from Notable American Women, mostly individuals who seemed to have lost significance with the passage of time (minor writers especially ), or marginal figures about whom so little material was available that there seemed no point in attempting a fresh sketch. Conversely, a number of the individuals included in Notable American Women, though significant for women's history, would not have met DAB standards of importance, measured by the yardstick of achievement along masculine career lines. Only one group of women, the wives of the presidents of the United States, were admitted to Notable American Women on their husbands' credentials. For the others the criterion was distinction in their own right of more than local significance. The subjects chosen were necessarily women whose work in some way took them before the public. Distinction in purely domestic roles is seldom documented, even in the case of mothers of remarkable families like the Comptons, Pounds, and Menningers, and achievement in the form of contributions to a husband's career is often hard to pin down, though some wives of this sort appear in Notable American Women. In making selections, the editors construed the qualifying adjective "American" broadly; some women not citizens were included if they had lived for a number of years in the United States and engaged in important activity during that time. Unlike their predecessor Mrs. Hale, who sought to present examples of women eminent "in all pursuits tending to advance moral goodness and religious faith," the editors made no moral judgments, but included adventuresses, suspected criminals, and other notorious figures of the halfworld and underworld. Some women appear whose actual achievement was less significant than the legend that came to surround it. For each biography the editors endeavored to find an author with special knowledge of the subject or of her field. Seven hundred and thirty-eight contributors were enlisted, the scholarly community making a generous response in time and effort for which the modest honorarium was a purely token recompense. The few unsigned articles are the product of editorial collaboration. The length of the articles varies according to the importance of the individual, the complexity of her career, and the availability of material: the two longest (more than 7,000 words) are the biographies of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, and the author Harriet Beecher Stowe; the shortest is the 400-word sketch of the colonial printer Ann Timothy. The articles were given whatever editing was necessary to bring them xi

Preface into reasonable conformity in coverage, usage, and style. In some cases the editors' overview of the whole group of women, their accumulating experience in tracking down elusive data, and the ready resources of the Schlesinger Library made it desirable to add new material. Each article was given a rigorous check for accuracy and adequacy of coverage. Biographies of women, especially little-known ones, posed special problems of research and interpretation. Authors were asked to establish certain basic facts: the subject's ancestral and geographic background, her father's occupation ( and her mother's, if she worked outside the home ), and her order of birth in the family; her schooling and religious affiliation; the date of her marriage or marriages, the husband's name and occupation, and children's names and birth dates; and the cause and place of death and place of burial. Yet extended research was often necessary to assemble even this skeleton structure. For women's lives generally, documentation tends to be scanty. There were problems of falsified birth dates, hidden divorces, and even disappearances from the historical record; in four cases ( Sarah Bagley, Edmonia Lewis, Sarah Remond, and Marion Todd) the combined efforts of authors and editors were unable to unearth even an approximate date of death. The cheerful and enthusiastic assistance received in quests of this sort from scores of local libraries and historical societies, despite their small staffs and limited budgets, is recorded in the bibliographies. Problems of interpretation proved equally complicated. Few women began adult life with long-range plans or ambitions, or followed career patterns similar to those of men. Motivation was often obscure or complex. A woman's upbringing and social environment, her parents' or husband's encouragement or disapproval, her responsibilities as wife and mother, changes in the family's economic status, and the vagaries of pure chance—any or all, apparently, could have a major effect in turning her energies into nondomestic channels. The quality of a marriage, for instance, though often significant in a man's career, was vitally important in a woman's. Furthermore, the activities of many women were less specialized than those of most men and often amazing in their variety; they became meaningful only when placed in their historical context. In the end, what had started as a routine encyclopedia article had in hundreds of cases turned into a short monograph. The 1,337 articles published ( twenty-two of them joint biographies combining two or more related figures) therefore constitute a kind of history of American women for the time span covered, a history focused on the outstanding individual. Some of the outlines of this history are sketched in the Introduction, which may serve as a guide for readers who prefer their history in chronological rather than alphabetical order. For the convenience of those who may be interested in women's activity in a particular field, a Classified List of Selected Biographies appears as an appendix to Volume III. The editors hope that the biographies here presented may direct the attention of researchers to some new areas of investigation in women's history. Heretofore scholars, like the public, have concentrated mainly on that hisxii

Preface tory's most dramatic and controversial aspect, the feminist protest. Certainly much more remains to be done with this major theme, which has, for instance, hardly been touched at the local level. But there are many other possibilities. Among them could be mentioned the liberating effect of American women's Civil War experience on their collective life style; the origin and development of the nursing profession; the kindergarten, child study, and industrial education movements of the late nineteenth century, in which women were variously active; the impact of the Philadelphia and Chicago world's fairs on the woman movement; the special roles of Southern women over the years; the reasons for women's greater success in some scholarly fields—astronomy, anthropology, psychology—than in others; the impact of college education, first widely available after the Civil War, upon women's values and goals; the phenomenon of the first generation of vigorous, confident, dedicated ( and unmarried ) career women, as symbolized by college presidents like M. Carey Thomas and Mary E. Woolley; the rise and subsequent decline of the woman's club movement. Indeed, the whole role of women's organizations in American social history has been largely unexplored. Little has been done with the early nineteenthcentury charitable and moral reform societies ( see Isabella Graham, Joanna Bethune, and Margaret Prior), still less with the emergence of women's foreign and home mission societies in the various denominations (see Alice Coleman, Jennie Willing, Belle Bennett, Helen Montgomery) and their twentieth-century turn toward ecumenicism (see Mary Bennett and Lucy Peabody), or with the Y.W.C.Α., which surpassed its masculine counterpart in concern for the needs of the working class. Little attempt has been made to put into historical perspective the post-Civil War Association for the Advancement of Women; the proliferation of local clubs that began with the New England Women's Club in Boston and Sorosis in New York; the International Council of Women, organized in 1888; and the eventual General Federation of Women's Clubs. The role of women, organized and as individuals, in contributing to the evolution of twentieth-century Progressivism has yet to be explored. A significant part of the groundwork may well have been laid by the civic and social welfare efforts of such regional women's groups as the New Century Club and the Civic Club in Philadelphia ( see Eliza Turner and Mary Mumford) and the Chicago Woman's Club. The juvenile court is a particular case in point ( see Lucy Flower and Julia Lathrop in Chicago, Hannah Schoff in Philadelphia, Charlotte Eliot in St. Louis, Madeline Breckinridge in Kentucky ), Southern women seem to have been especially significant in shaping progressive social change in their section, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Here one is struck by another phenomenon worth investigating: the clusters of women actively concerned with social betterment that turn up not only in Chicago ( from the Hull House group through labor leaders like Agnes Nestor and even such figures of high society as Bertha Palmer and Ellen Henrotin ) but also in such cities as New Orleans ( Caroline Merrick, xiii

Preface Jean and Kate Gordon, Eleanor McMain, Sophie Wright, Sarah Mayo) and Richmond (Mary Cooke Munford, Lila Valentine, Orie Latham Hatcher). Black women, too, need further study: history would seem to have been especially neglectful of them. The emergence of Afro-American women into activities outside the home could well be explored, with an eye to the extent to which their patterns parallel or differ from those of white women. The editors, incidentally, have been aware of shifting and diverse contemporary feelings about the use of the word "Negro." While bearing in mind the possibility that the term may in the future pass out of use, we decided to retain this designation in general as best suited to the historical context. Notable American Women has had the support of many loyal staff members over its thirteen-year history. The two original assistants were Elizabeth Owen Shenton, secretary and researcher, and Margaret I. Porter, researcher. Mrs. Shenton has remained a friend of the project in her position as assistant to the director of the Schlesinger Library; Mrs. Porter continued to do parttime research over the years and performed yeoman's service in the final processing of manuscripts for the printer. Other protean members of the staff have included Ann Townsend Zwart, who after a year as secretary was for seven years a free-lance editorial assistant; and Paul S. Boyer, who progressed from checker to assistant editor. Elizabeth F. Hoxie, for nearly forty years research secretary to Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, joined the staff in 1966. This undertaking has drawn heavily upon her varied talents as author, editor, secretary, tireless pursuer of documented fact, and proofreader extraordinary. Others who have worked on the project in an editorial capacity are Moses Rischin, the late Sylvia Chace Lintner, Patricia Watlington, Jo Ann Reiss, Jane W. Watkins, Helen L. Horowitz, and Lyle G. Boyd. Those who have served in a research capacity include Elise F. Friedman and, in conjunction with their duties as secretary, Jennifer Prescott, Suellen Peterson, Ann Zwart, Elizabeth M. Rubenstein, Margaret Maslin (Baum), Dorsey Phelps, and Joan H. Stanley. The responsible work of checking articles for accuracy has been shared by a variety of staff members, most of them graduate students in history or English. Those who served for more than a few weeks are ( in chronological order): Victoria S. Róemele, David H. Crook, Robert Sklar, Irene J. Westing, Jill Ker (Conway), Miles L. Bradbury, Pauline R. Maier, Ross E. Paulson, Marjorie Madonne, Paul S. Boyer, Joan Burstyn, Julian T. Baird, Jr., Jean V. Johnson, Carol F. Baird, Sheldon M. Stern, Charles A. Shively, Roy L. Bartolomei, Arthur E. Regan, Marc L. Pachter, Margaret Cook, Elizabeth F. Hoxie, Atarah Twersky, Peter Stanley, Ethel P. Cardwell, and Kenneth Waltzer. The Committee of Consultants is listed on an earlier page. Its members furnished important and continuing advice. The editors are greatly indebted xiv

Preface also to the several hundred individuals who went over the preliminary lists of names and evaluated their relative importance. Any venture in cooperative scholarship draws on the friendly assistance of libraries and individuals beyond reckoning or acknowledgment. Special mention should be made, however, of some of the local institutions which have felt our personal impact. From the beginning this project has relied heavily on the resources of the Schlesinger Library (earlier the Women's Archives ) and the good will of its successive directors—Elizabeth B. Borden, Barbara M. Solomon, Janet W. James, Alison Hanham, and Jeannette Β. Cheek—and their staffs. A particular debt of gratitude is owed the Radcliffe College ( now the Hilles ) Library, especially to its librarian, Ruth K. Porritt, and assistant librarian, Lucy M. Manzi, for generous assistance in providing books for office use and a steady succession of interlibrary loans. Harvard's Widener Library and other libraries in the University have been our fundamental resource for research and checking; special mention should be made of the Harvard Theatre Collection, whose extensive clipping files, thanks to the kindness of the director, Helen D. Willard, we have often consulted. The library of the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston has been of great assistance in tracing matters of family history and genealogy. From the beginning, Notable American Women has had the encouragement and advice of the Harvard University Press. Particular mention should be made of the late Thomas J. Wilson, who as director warmly welcomed the prospect of publishing the finished work, and of his associate and successor, Mark Carroll, as well as David Home, associate director; Eleanor D. Kewer, chief editor; Dimmes McDowell Bishop, managing editor; and Ellen Goldfield Kurnit. A final word of gratitude is owed President Mary I. Bunting of Radcliffe College and the College Council, who have borne with patient good will, for more years than they bargained for, this steady drain upon the College budget. Mrs. Bunting's support and judicious counsel have assisted to completion a project begun by her predecessor, Professor Jordan, and have helped fill the place left vacant by the death of the dictionary's founding father and wise counselor, Professor Schlesinger. EDWARD T . J A M E S JANET WILSON JAMES

February 1971

XV

INTRODUCTION by Janet Wilson James

The historical survey which follows is the product of more than a decade of immersion in the biographies of Notable American Women, but it reflects also a scholarly commitment of much longer duration to women's history. Much of this complex field is still unexplored, but the biographies have brought together enough information about the activities and concerns of American women in the world of affairs to make possible an attempt at synthesis at least in this area. The period principally covered extends from colonial times to about 1920. A more impressionistic account of the 1920's and a brief identification of major trends since that time conclude the survey.

I

The Colonial Years

1607-1775

Historically, women's public activity has been more irregular and improvised than that of men. By the same token, it has been more flexible and responsive to social change and developing needs. This appears to have been particularly true in the rapidly changing society that emerged from the European settlements on America's eastern seaboard in the seventeenth century. Back in the mother country, in the preindustrial society of that day, when the home was headquarters for farmer, shopkeeper, or merchant, women, whether married or single, had had convenient opportunities to exercise managerial and even entrepreneurial talents. In America, where there was wider economic opportunity and a chronic labor shortage, their activities quickly expanded, with resulting improvements in status. Several Englishwomen of property, like Margaret Brent in Maryland, brought over households, took up land, and established settlements. As family interests dictated, women of landed families continued to manage large holdings, whether a Southern plantation or a Hudson Valley patroonship ( or, later, a Texas ranch ). In New Amsterdam, in the Dutch tradition, they energetically engaged in overseas trade as merchants and shipowners. Middle-class women often conducted retail and wholesale businesses, including some of the printing shops, lively centers of intelligence in the eighteenth-century towns. In government, women's behind-the-scenes influence has been a commonxvii

Introduction place of history, and this kind of power was exerted in the colonies by such politically astute wives of public leaders as Lady Frances Berkeley. A new element was the role played in frontier diplomacy, formal and informal, by the Indian daughters or wives of white traders and officials. Englishwomen had not been known for leadership in religion, but Anne Hutchinson, shortly after her arrival in Massachusetts, became the first of a long line of American female rebels against religious orthodoxy, many of whom were founders of new sects stressing a personal sense of God's indwelling spirit and offering freer modes of religious expression. In Europe ladies of a literary turn had long dabbled in verse, yet though the early years in the colonies were a starving time for the arts, the encounter of a sensitive woman with the wilderness created, in Anne Bradstreet, not a dabbler but America's first real poet. The literary hostess and the actress, cultural ornaments of the latter eighteenth-century coastal towns, were transplanted without alteration. As Americans looked back on their colonial past, they built national myths around certain women whose actual lives were lived in relative obscurity, perhaps finding it easier to relate to the great events of history with a Pocahontas, a Priscilla Alden, a Betsy Ross, or a Molly Pitcher in the center of the tableau. Women who rose to fame on the strength of beauty and sex alone or, conversely, who performed feats of courage and endurance more typical of men, also tended, in the course of history, to become popular legends.

II

The Early Republic

1775-1825

In women's history the inauguration of the new nation was not a landmark. The home- and family-centered economy continued much as before. The Revolutionary generation which provided the young republic's political leaders also produced wives and mothers who in intellect and character seem to have been feminine counterparts of the founding fathers, true Roman matrons. Several of them, like Abigail Adams, wielded a talented pen in private commentary which has given later generations a behind-the-scenes view of public events. In the larger political society of the successive national capitals, certain hostesses played an important role, most notably Dolley Madison, whose generous hospitality in Jeffersonian Washington made her another popular heroine. The religious freedom assured under the Constitution made possible for the first time in America the establishment of Catholic institutions, and upper-class women of that faith could now exert their traditional prerogatives as founders and leaders of religious orders dedicated to charity and education. The Protestant community, having in 1812 sent its first missionaries to the Far East, was shortly drawing inspiration from the legendary piety and courage of missionary wives. At home the Evangelical revival brought a new seriousness and sense of social responsibility to the religious outlook. Concepts of women's charitable duty expanded, and ladies in the Protestant and Jewish communities moved to cope with the growing problems of urban xviii

Introduction poverty by forming societies for the relief of poor women and children—the first women's organizations. In the self-conscious cultural life of the time women carried out both old and new functions: as governesses to daughters of the well-to-do and proprietresses of fashionable girls' schools, as authors composing conventional verse for polite society or sentimental fiction for a popular (mainly female) readership, or as miniaturists supplying families in the leading cities with likenesses on an intimate scale. Women intellectuals were isolated and only fitfully productive. A few were touched by the egalitarianism of French Revolutionary thought and took up the feminist cause in print, but most women, even when they were, like one bluestocking, "well acquainted with the plausible reasonings of modern theorists who contend for the equality of the sexes," accepted the standing order with its strong sense of rank and masculine authority.

Ill

The Age of Expansion

1825-1860

In the second quarter of the nineteenth century the United States began an accelerated expansion which closed some fields of activity to women while opening others. In the South, women with managerial talents still ran inherited plantations, but elsewhere business operations had moved out of the household into factories and mercantile offices. Few women seem to have made a name among the business entrepreneurs of the period. Yankee farm girls served as the initial labor force in New England's textile mills—the earliest American factories—and from their ranks came the first woman leader of organized labor, Sarah Bagley. The expanding economy, however, was producing wealth sufficient to relieve most middle- and upper-class women of any necessity of working. By and large, the middle class considered materialistic strivings the province of men. Separated from the economy, the home came to be regarded as the sanctuary of religion, morality, and culture, of which women were the appointed guardians. Such a view could be narrowly interpreted merely to impart an exalted purpose to the daily routines of homemaking and child care. But this ran counter to the spirit of the age. The country was bent on occupying a continent and Christianizing a planet while pursuing individual perfection and reforming society. Delegating domestic drudgery where possible to immigrant and Negro help, many middle-class women devoted themselves to realizing the national ideal of progress. Those who believed themselves invested with the gift of prophecy pointed out new and faster roads to salvation, including Spiritualism, Seventh-Day Adventism, and the movement for Christian perfection. The Quakers, reared in their faith's tenet of sex equality, had a long tradition of female ministry, at home and as missionaries in foreign lands. During these years, however, their concern for redemption widened from the individual to the whole fabric of society. When the major social reform movements of the era got under xix

Introduction way, notably the abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, world peace, and prison reform, Quaker women were in the forefront. For the next two generations they played a part in these movements out of all proportion to their numbers. The antislavery crusade brought to public attention a group of remarkable Negro women. Former slaves gave powerful testimony for abolition or, in the case of Harriet Tubman, undertook the dangerous work of guiding other fugitives out of slave territory. Free Negroes bore witness to the pattern of discrimination against blacks in the North. Few women—even Negroes—managed to champion abolition without finding themselves obliged to defend their right as women to do so, and many eventually went over to the cause of woman's rights. There were a number of ways of demonstrating for feminism: writing, lecturing, and organizing and attending conventions; wearing the Bloomer costume or complete masculine dress; attempting to vote or refusing to pay taxes. The movement's first radical intellectuals, like Frances Wright, came from Europe, but Margaret Fuller gave feminism a native base by linking it with Transcendentalism in her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century ( 1845 ). Another group of reformers was particularly concerned with the health problems of their sex. Middle-class women of the day seem to have been chronically afflicted with illness or languor, for a complex of reasons—the romantic ideal of fragile feminine beauty, poor health habits, feminine ignorance of physiology, Victorian prudery, the strain of marital and sexual problems, and the limited gynecological knowledge of the time. To cope with these ills there was an increasing demand for female practitioners. These women offered a wide range of remedies : lectures on physiology and hygiene, the water cure, the insights of phrenology, and the practice of medicine learned in a variety of small schools (most of them irregular by the professional standards of the time ). The most notorious abortionist of the day also offered her services as a "female physician." Women's efforts to improve the education of their sex, though not always generously supported, were generally approved. The fashionable proprietary schools of the past had been adequate for preparing upper-class girls for a leisured domestic life, but this age of progress had a new job for women: teaching in the expanding public schools. For this role a more solid education was necessary. Catharine Beecher prepared the public mind for the change by associating teaching with homemaking and motherhood as a female vocation and calling for special advanced training for these sacred callings. The pioneering and pacesetting school of the new era, Emma Willard's Troy Female Seminary, introduced into the secondary curriculum many studies then offered at the college level; its graduates, models of intelligent ladyhood, went out to staff other seminaries all over the country. Another innovation was the establishment by Mary Lyon of the first permanent, endowed, nonprofit institution for the education of women, Mount Holyoke Seminary. Despite widespread nativist prejudice the Society of the Sacred Heart and XX

Introduction the Sisters of the Holy Cross, led by women of old American Catholic families, did much to transmit European cultural traditions in the education of girls through their founding of convent schools. The profession of writing, so conveniently pursued within the purlieus of the home, offered other ways of enlightening a public now increasingly literate. Many literary women turned their talents to the advocacy of reform— or the defense of the status quo. By attacking slavery in the 1830's Lydia Maria Child antagonized her Boston public and lost her livelihood; twenty years later Harriet Beecher Stowe s Uncle Tom's Cabin became the best seller of the generation, inspiring a host of imitators. The few Southern women who took up the pen felt compelled either to justify the slavery system or to smooth over the sectional rift by glorifying a common ground of domestic sentiment. Most women who turned to writing did so as a means of support. In the beginning, when the literary market was small, it was hard to make a living, and the first women who tried it had to be versatile, able to write novels, magazine stories, juveniles, etiquette books, and housekeeping manuals, as well as edit gift books and women's and children's periodicals. Lydia Sigourney, a fountain of sentimental poesy, made the first unabashed commercial success. By the 1850's, however, female journalists with a personal style were flourishing, and Hawthorne's "damned mob of scribbling women" threatened to take over the largely female market for novels. Tear-drenched religious tales were the best sellers of the fifties, rivaled only by domestic melodramas with feminist undertones. In the visual arts one or two woman painters became known for domestic scenes in the popular genre style, which reached a mass market through the new process of lithography. A curiosity of the art world was the group of expatriate sculptresses in neoclassic vein who prospered in Rome beginning in the 1840's, including Harriet Hosmer and the half-Negro, half-Indian Edmonia Lewis. The American theatre, while continuing to welcome traveling players from England, now produced in Charlotte Cushman its first great native actress. Since equal billing was built into theatrical society, women worked on and off the stage on more or less equal terms with men, commonly marrying and rearing children the while, and several became successful actress-managers. But the theatre was a separate and self-contained world, its morals suspect among middle-class Americans. The traditions of the craft and its way of life often descended by families (the Drakes, Kembles, Batemans, Chapmans, Drews ). Middle-class women usually turned to acting as a career only as a last remedy for fallen fortunes or when they had lost their place in respectable society. One branch of the theatre, ballet, had been introduced into the United States in the 1790's; by the time of the ballet craze of the 1840's theatregoers had native ballerinas to admire, and Augusta Maywood even reversed the transatlantic flow of artists and was acclaimed in Europe. As America moved westward, women carried ideals of culture and imxxi

Introduction provement to a succession of frontiers, where they confronted the native inhabitants of the wilderness. Both white and certain Indian women were sometimes able to meliorate the hostility and destruction of these encounters (the Indian women finding a place in white history probably for this reason ). Several sensitive missionary wives managed to impart literacy in a Christian mold to Indian communities with minimum damage to the more primitive culture. Meanwhile, the stock of frontier legends grew. The public was fascinated by accounts of Indian captivity, especially of little girls who lost their identity as whites, and by stories of Indian women extending friendship to the white man in trouble in the wilderness. In the safe communities back east, women shared in the development of more protective attitudes toward the once-dreaded redskin. Noble savages (and sometimes accurate information about Indian life and customs ) were incorporated into popular romances, and one Massachusetts lady, Elizabeth Sanders, even published polemics denouncing the removal of the Cherokee and other tribes across the Mississippi and condemning the cultural presumptions of missionaries, including those now advancing to Hawaii and Polynesia. Hawaiian women of the ruling class, who traditionally shared the prerogatives of leadership, seem from the first to have been receptive to the missionary message and leaders in adopting Western ways. The Far Eastern mission fields attracted young Americans who dreamed of extraordinary service to the faith. As teaching became a standard vocation at home, the mission boards sent out the first single women to India and China, who devoted themselves, like most of the missionary wives of this generation, to establishing schools for girls. Between the Pacific Coast and the Eastern centers of population, land and souls were still waiting to be reclaimed. Catharine Beecher preached that the special mission of women was to transmit Christian culture to the rude West, a challenge taken up by educators who founded female seminaries for the training of teachers in the new states of Illinois and Wisconsin. The Mormon community that found its promised land in Utah had as an embodiment of refinement the versatile Eliza Smith, hymn writer and leader of the church's influential women's organizations. In the chaotic society of Gold Rush California, women were quickly employed in founding schools and hospitals; recording pioneer experiences in letters and journals which, later published, became regional classics; and bringing the glamour and entertainment of the theatre to the mining towns and coastal cities. A significant footnote would record the active promotion of westward expansion, both before the public and behind the scenes, by Jessie Benton Fremont and several other ladies of notable charm and intellectual gifts.

TV

The Civil War, and Industrial Society

1860-1890

The Civil War launched women permanently into serious activity on a large scale outside the home. From the first major battles came reports of xxii

Introduction dire shortages of medical personnel and hospital supplies. Quickly pushing aside sentimental notions about women's sacred domestic vocation and the formal proprieties prescribed for ladies of leisure, women all over the North plunged into hospital and relief work. Dorothea Dix, nationally known for her successful lobbying for state hospitals for the mentally ill, was given an army appointment as superintendent of volunteer female nurses, but the lack of standards for recruitment and performance in this day before any profession of nursing, together with Miss Dix's own failings as an administrator, frustrated her work. Most women found better opportunities for service through the Sanitary Commission, a citizens' organization devoted to supplementing army medical care. Some with hospital experience served successfully as nurses in army or Sanitary Commission hospitals or on hospital ships, but nursing was more often delegated to male orderlies, usually convalescents. The famed battlefield and field-hospital workers, like Clara Barton and "Mother" Bickerdyke, stood by with emergency services, administering first aid, coffee, and soup, distributing supplies and comforts, and writing letters for the wounded. In the army's general hospitals women proved expert administrators, superintending nursing services, pioneering in the new position of "matron," in charge of housekeeping services, and even organizing new hospitals. Work for the Sanitary Commission on the home front also turned up hitherto untapped administrative talents. The women's auxiliaries in the major cities took on the responsibility for collecting hospital supplies, organizing for this purpose a network of tributary county and village relief societies, raising funds, and spurring on the work through vigorous correspondence and traveling lecturers. The Chicago Sanitary Fair of 1863, organized by Mary Livermore and Jane Höge, proved to be the most successful fundraising expedient of the war and was imitated all over the North. Lacking either a Sanitary Commission or any real tradition of activity outside the home, Confederate women made more personal contributions to the war effort. On the shorthanded plantations they revived home manufactures and redoubled efforts to produce food. A few set up and supervised hospitals, sometimes pouring in their private resources. They seem also to have been more disposed than Union women to keep diaries or, later, to compose memoirs—documents that today give a firsthand impression of those years of upheaval. Altogether, for the countless women who took part in it, the war effort was "a very developing and vivid experience," as one of them later wrote. With the end of the fighting came a redirecting of national energies. The business world over the next quarter century attracted most of the abler men, but fewer women, relatively speaking, ventured into it than before. Those who did, like Hetty Green or Lydia Pinkham, either had the usual strong family assistance or were associated with new businesses catering to women customers—or both. Most of the executive talents developed during the war found a congenial new outlet in welfare work. The plight of the xxiii

Introduction freedmen was the most immediate postwar problem. Some veterans of the Sanitary Commission promptly transferred their energies to the support and administration of freedmen's aid societies, which raised money for relief and for schools to help ex-slaves. Many women who had been abolitionists felt a call to teach the freedmen. A number volunteered for the "Port Royal Experiment," a pilot project of relief and education started in the Sea Islands of South Carolina after their occupation by Union forces in 1861. Others, after the war, founded Negro schools elsewhere in the South and sustained them with help from Northern churches and friends. Working among the black refugees in Washington, D.C., Josephine Griffing helped many to find homes and jobs in the North and lobbied for a broad government welfare program for the ex-slaves. She was partly responsible for the establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau, but its closing in 1869 left her almost alone in feeling a sense of responsibility for the aftermath of slavery. Yet in the North the wartime experience of working in a large-scale endeavor for the common welfare, men and women together, setting aside local and sectarian loyalties, was not easily forgotten. The same energies could be directed to other goals. By the early 1870's, campaigns to improve public charitable and correctional institutions were under way in several states. The Massachusetts Reformatory Prison for Women at Framingham, one of the pioneering institutions in modern penology, was established in 1877 after Ellen Johnson had led ten years of lobbying for a separate prison for women where reform work would be possible. In New York, Louisa Schuyler invented a multipurpose approach that was widely copied: the State Charities Aid Association (formed in 1872), an organization of local citizen groups for the purpose of visiting public charitable institutions, making reports, and educating the public regarding their condition and needs. Her project, a decided success, had two significant incidental effects: it started many welfare leaders of the coming generation, like Josephine Shaw Lowell, on their careers, and it gave an important impetus to the nursing profession. The war had indicated the usefulness of women nurses with discipline and training, and the New England Hospital for Women and Children, in Boston, had just opened a school for nurses, from which Linda Richards, America's "first trained nurse," graduated in 1873, and Marie Mahoney, the first Negro professional nurse, six years later. Miss Schuyler, however, with her insistent concern for excellence, had consulted Florence Nightingale and visited her school in London. The Training School for Nurses which she was instrumental in establishing in New York City's municipal hospital, Bellevue, in 1873, was the first on the Nightingale plan in the United States, firmly setting standards which within a few years made nursing an attractive profession for middle-class young women. The depression of 1873, suddenly spotlighting the problem of poverty in an industrial society, stimulated new thought and new action in the welfare field. To the established families in the big cities who had long been accustomed to assuming responsibility for charity, it now became clear that the xxiv

Introduction host of small private and sectarian societies dispensing relief and religion needed coordination and a new, more "scientific" outlook. Women, now experienced in fund raising and executive board work, were able partners and often innovators in the planning and direction of this new approach—the more in demand because the pressures of business left men less and less time for civic concerns. The first step was the importation of the charity organization idea from England, a system of district organization and central record-keeping which stressed discriminating aid to the worthy poor and social rehabilitation through "friendly visiting" by the more privileged members of society. In this last, women were expected to be especially effective by reason of their superior moral sensibilities. Scientific relief was followed by efforts, through education, to make the unskilled immigrant poor employable. Charitable societies soon were sponsoring some projects of this sort, and others started independently. These concentrated on the two main groups of dependents, women and children. Long-range efforts began with the formative years. Day nurseries had been conducted before by women's groups as an aid to working mothers; now they were infused with a philosophy aimed at instilling middle-class values of industry and thrift. The kindergarten, a German innovation, got its real start in the United States as a movement to provide a better environment for preschool children wandering unsupervised on city streets. From early beginnings in Boston, kindergartens quickly spread to the Middle and Far West, everywhere introduced, financed, and staffed by women. An offshoot was the "kitchen garden," which taught domestic skills to little girls of the working class, using the same methods employed in the kindergarten. The kitchen garden movement merged with the campaign to introduce vocational, or "industrial," training for children. Women philanthropists in Boston initiated the pilot experiments: sewing and cooking classes for girls and programs for manual training, both of which were gradually absorbed into public school systems. The problems of working girls and women drew a sympathetic response. For them, poverty and the loneliness of city life held a particular moral hazard: through desperation or dupery they might be drawn into a life of prostitution. Attention focused especially upon native-born girls from the country, who, unlike most of the immigrants from Europe, shared a common religious background with their city benefactors. Young Women's Christian Associations, first formed in New York and Boston, offered a meeting place, a familiar atmosphere of evangelical Protestantism, and help in securing employment. A more secular institution, first established in Boston and then copied in other large cities, was the Woman's Educational and Industrial Union, designed as a center for cultural activities and employment guidance which would bring together the new arrivals and city women of means. A similar society in New York conceived of the cooking school, to train women for domestic employment. The evening classes in sewing, cooking, millinery, telegraphy, and bookkeeping started in 1881 by Philadelphia's first woman's XXV

Introduction club, the New Century Club, grew into the New Century Guild of Working Women. In New York the same year the young philanthropist Grace Dodge formed a group of factory girls her own age which by 1890 had grown into a national association of working girls' clubs. Some women in factories, led by Irish immigrants, attacked their own problems by forming unions under the umbrella of the Knights of Labor, which at its national convention in 1886 created a special department for organizing women. Alongside the secular programs to combat poverty and dislocation in the industrial cities, the churches continued their efforts, convinced that only spiritual regeneration could arrest social decline. The Methodists led the way in organizing women for evangelical and relief work, particularly in the Midwestern cities. Funds raised by a multitude of parish groups were disbursed by a central Woman's Home Missionary Society. To assure a supply of skilled workers, Methodist women leaders introduced the deaconess movement, a kind of lay sisterhood for social service. Foreign missions from the beginning had had a particular attraction for women, who answered this call for adventure under religious auspices either directly as workers in the mission field, or, if encumbered by domestic care, vicariously as fund raisers back home. By the early 1860's the women's missionary circles in hundreds of local churches in the North were beginning to band together, in regional societies within each denomination and, on the East Coast, in an interdenominational body, the Woman's Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands. With the increased resources provided by these groups, women field workers in China, India, South Africa, Turkey, and Spain were able to found the first girls' boarding schools, designed to provide a more encompassing Christian environment than day schools. Concern for the female heathen sitting in darkness had done much to reconcile the public mind to the idea of women studying medicine, since healing skills might gain them and their Christian message access to these secluded women of the Orient. The Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania trained most of the early missionary doctors, the first of whom, Clara Swain, went out to India in 1869. In the established churches pastoral leadership was still assumed to be a male role, although a number of women successfully held pastorates in the Universalist Church, a small, liberal sect whose members were mostly of the working class. Women with a call to preach were more often found on the fringes of organized religion, responding to emotional needs not met by existing institutions. The message of salvation carried by the evangelists Maggie Van Cott and Amanda Smith was heard at revival meetings around the world. Women who discovered new shortcuts to religious truth provided more spectacular leadership. Mary Baker Eddy, out of her own experience of illness, anxiety, and estrangement, developed a faith in the power of right thinking to heal sickness and other ills. Institutionalizing her "science of health" in the Church of Christ, Scientist, she assured it a permanent place in American religious life. Women were conspicuous among her followers, xxvi

Introduction and as readers and practitioners they shared fully in the ministry of the Church. The cult of Theosophy, introduced by the wandering seeker Helena Blavatsky, opened a more exotic road to the exploration of psychical powers. Throughout the Protestant stronghold of farming and small-town America, the old faith in perfecting society through moral reform continued unabated. The temperance movement sprang into new life in the winter of 1873-74 through a women's antisaloon prayer crusade which started simultaneously in several Ohio towns. The next summer three Methodist women, meeting at a Sunday school conference at Lake Chautauqua, issued a call for the convention that formed the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. For women of the Protestant hinterland the W.C.T.U. provided an opportunity for action and leadership on many levels in a campaign for a basically conservative ideal. After Frances Willard assumed the leadership in 1879, the organization was committed to a wide range of other reformist goals appealing to middle-class women, notably suffrage, peace, and social (sexual) purity, and became something of a vehicle for feminism. After the Civil War, the woman's rights movement was avowedly committed to suffrage as its central goal, strong in the faith that women as voters could remold society. Its members were already veterans of the petition drive, the public meeting, and the lecture platform, and it was clear that large-scale organization was the next step. Clashes of personality and policy among the national leaders, however, precluded the forming of a united front. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had cherished hopes that women would be given the vote along with the ex-slaves, clung to the idea of enfranchisement at one sweep by federal amendment, though they also worked for suffrage by state action, the strategy preferred by Lucy Stone and such Massachusetts co-workers as Julia Ward Howe and Mary Livermore. Miss Anthony had a strong sympathy for the working woman and for a time assisted the labor movement; Mrs. Stanton, the intellectual and iconoclast, always intrigued by theories for modifying the institution of marriage, lent an ear to that exponent of free love, the adventuress Victoria Woodhull. Both of these aspects of feminism were distasteful to the conservatives in Massachusetts. The result was a twenty-year organizational schism, with two national suffrage associations. Meanwhile, local and state leaders built up organizations, staged conventions, issued publications, and with the national leaders went down to defeat in a grueling series of state suffrage referenda campaigns. It was in large measure owing to women's efforts that the American Indian became an object of humanitarian concern. In 1879 two Philadelphia Baptists, Mary Bonney and Amelia Quinton, organized the first of a series of mammoth petitions that protested the alienation of tribal lands in Oklahoma and elsewhere and called for their allotment to individual Indians. The two women then formed the first national organization for Indian reform, later called the Women's National Indian Association, which, after allotment became law with the Dawes Act of 1887, channeled its energy into fifty misxxvii

Introduction sions devoted to Christianizing and civilizing the Indians. In the same initial year of 1879 the daughter of an Omaha chief, "Bright Eyes" (Susette La Flesche Tibbies ), speaking on an Eastern lecture tour, made other influential converts to the Indians' cause. Among them were the writer Helen Hunt Jackson, who reached a wide popular audience with A Century of Dishonor, her indictment of the government's handling of Indian affairs, and her novel Ramona; and Alice Cunningham Fletcher, a former teacher who, after personally saving the lands of the Omahas, turned as a pioneer ethnologist to preserving a record of their culture.

% For ambitious girls of the post-Civil War era the great adventure was going to college—at one of the Midwestern state universities just opening their doors to women or, in the East, one of the new women's colleges offering a liberal arts education in the tradition of the established men's colleges. From this first group of college girls would come most of the women leaders of the next generation. Older women found a new educational opportunity in the woman's club movement, once called by its founder, "Jennie June" Croly, "the school of the middle-aged woman." Indeed, the first clubs devoted themselves largely to preparing and delivering papers on literary themes, and their members enjoyed an experience of fellowship much like that of their younger contemporaries attending college. Like college, the woman's club was a place to shape and share individual aspirations, a giant step out of the suffocatingly domestic Victorian home. Mrs. Croly's own club, Sorosis, numbered among its members most of New York City's professional women authors, journalists, and educators, and retained a literary flavor, but most of the clubs shifted gradually into work for community improvement, concentrating on the needs of women and children, with a special interest in education. Teaching was now taken for granted as the most appropriate way for a middle-class woman to earn a living. In one specialized area, the education of the handicapped, women teachers played a key role as advocates of a major innovation, the oral, or vocal, method of teaching the deaf. Meeting opposition from their professional association, the American Instructors of the Deaf and Dumb—whose masculine majority was reluctant both to abandon the manual alphabet and to accept women as teachers in the field—they founded a new professional organization, the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, and saw the oral method become widely accepted. Women were also associated with certain new directions in scholarship. At the Harvard College Observatory they undertook the major work of classifying stars by spectral types. They were also conspicuous among the field ethnologists who first began to study American Indians in their environment. In each case the research area was new and the women's lack of standard acaxxviii

Introduction demie training therefore posed no insurmountable handicap; they also enjoyed positive encouragement from men in key scholarly administrative posts. The profession of writing had always been the easiest one for women to enter, requiring neither advanced education nor financial outlay nor departure from the home. For those who had the knack, it continued to be a highroad to fame and success, though few reputations survived their owners. The vogue of locall-color fiction, at its height in the 1890's, was a boon to the literary woman, who was keenly attuned to her native place—often the only world she knew. A major artist like Sarah Orne Jewett could transcend the limitations of the genre, but the regional stories turned out by most women writers were tradition-bound and colored by a sentimental nostalgia for the past. Women were not able to keep pace with the trend toward realism in the mainstream of American fiction, and it remained for a man, William Dean Howells, to discover the possibilities for realistic treatment of American domestic life, one of the most fertile themes of the day. Women who wrote for the mass market, producing popular novels of romance, melodrama, and sentiment, enjoyed solid financial reward without a shred of literary respectability. A publishing landmark of the day was the appearance of the first children's books of literary quality. These were the work of women like Louisa Alcott who discarded the direct didacticism of earlier works for the young and drew from their own rich childhood experience to invent realistic young characters in familiar home settings, letting the moral emerge as an integral part of the story. St. Nicholas magazine—in which most of the best books for boys and girls first appeared serially—under the editorship of Mary Mapes Dodge did much to maintain the new literary level. Women were no newcomers to the world of journalism, though in the days of Sarah Josepha Hale and Godey's Lady's Book the "editress" had turned out her copy in the sanctuary of her home. In this generation they conducted family and women's magazines and women's departments of metropolitan newspapers from busy downtown offices. A new genre of female journalism was informal commentary on the political and social scene in the nation's capital, and several of its practitioners became something of a fixture in Washington as newsgatherers and hostesses. Women in the practice of medicine now faced the problem of winning professional acceptance. In 1860 none of the schools recognized by the American Medical Association admitted women students (though a few had earlier), but by 1870 three "regular" medical colleges for women were in operation, and the University of Michigan's medical school had also opened its doors. Since the established hospitals likewise refused to admit women as students, interns, or staff members, women physicians in the major cities founded free dispensaries and developed them into hospitals which housed their patients and furnished clinical experience while ministering to the needs of "the respectable poor." Even so, it was almost essential to take some xxix

Introduction further study abroad, and the best-trained women in the profession won degrees in Europe. There was, however, no way around the problem of admittance to medical societies, which for many years were composed of Victorian gentlemen unable to envision ladies as a part of their medical world and convinced that the professional world the women had made for themselves was substandard. The medical societies lowered their bars first in New York, in 1871, then in Chicago, thanks to the gynecologist Dr. William H. Byford; but it was 1884 before Dr. Henry I. Bowditch and other veterans of the antislavery struggle wore down the Massachusetts Medical Society, and 1888 before the Philadelphia County Society gave way. Scores of women nevertheless passed through these barriers into successful practice. Yet few contributed to medical science. Leisure time was more apt to go into the woman's clubs and such reform causes as the W.C.T.U. and the social purity movement. The career of Mary Putnam Jacobi had special significance. Although she was very much a part of the woman's world, deeply committed to raising the status of women through her teaching at the Woman's College of the New York Infirmary and her interest in suffrage and the working woman, her professional qualifications were so outstanding that her acceptance by organized medicine was almost automatic. Entering the practice of law was somewhat easier, though fewer women were attracted to this profession than to medicine. Most of the notable early women lawyers were Midwesterners, the majority of them lawyers' wives who prepared for admission to the bar by reading law with their husbands and then joined them in practice. The law schools' attitude toward women applicants varied, apparently depending upon how the influential members of each local faculty felt about woman's rights. The most distinguished woman lawyer of this generation, Myra Bradwell, instead of entering a regular practice founded and edited the Chicago Legal News, nationally known for a quarter century after 1868 for its coverage of both Illinois and national legal affairs. Mrs. Bradwell and all the other early women lawyers were devoted to the cause of woman's rights, taking a leading part in organizing state suffrage associations and especially in legislative campaigns for removing women's legal disabilities in such areas as the ownership of property and guardianship of children. Women of the bar were also active in the W.C.T.U., several of them organizing successful state campaigns for temperance legislation. The lawyers were the first women, aside from politicians' wives, to become active in party politics—long before women had the vote. As a profession for women, art was quite acceptable, there being no great difference in the popular mind between practicing the ladylike accomplishments of sketching or china painting and a more determined pursuit of excellence. Serious careers in the fine arts, however, were seldom attempted. Not only was special training required, and equipment not easily available at home, but in times of hardship there was small chance of earning any inXXX

Introduction come. The one major American woman artist of the day, Mary Cassatt, discovered her métier exploring European museums as a child. Her family's means permitted her to live in Paris, where, rejecting the traditionalism of the art establishment, she joined in the Impressionists' experiments with color and light, applying these innovative techniques to the painting of her favorite subjects, women and children, usually members of her family. Commercial art, on the other hand, had been a common occupation for women since the 1850's, when "female schools of design" were established in the Eastern cities. After the Civil War, as American cultural ambitions expanded, women stepped into a new role as interpreters of art, writing popular works of art history and guides and commentaries on European travel, and teaching art in the public schools. For a few women of affluence and social position the acquisition of art treasures became an absorbing pursuit. In the musical world American-born women for the first time won distinction as singers; singing was a native musical tradition and, like the theatre, a natural leveler of sex distinctions. Some, sharing the older evangelical Protestant prejudice against the theatre, which extended to opera, chose to confine themselves to concert and oratorio work, but others became prima donnas. Several opera singers, in an effort to attract larger audiences, organized companies which sang in English. Native instrumentalists were slower to appear, though Amy Fay's letters describing her happy years as a piano student in Germany, published as a book in 1881, encouraged hundreds of American girls to study music there. The theatre, growing increasingly respectable, became a flourishing institution. New York City was already the nation's theatre capital, but many cities had resident companies, and other groups toured the country. For the most part the acting remained somewhat stylized and elocutionary, though a freer, more emotional style had come in with a group of actresses who specialized in melodramas of women wronged. The beginnings of a more distinctively American style—madcap yet innocent, more given to comic turns and the exploitation of personality than to the actor's skills—emerged from Gold Rush California in the person of Lotta Crabtree. The popular idolatry which she and a few other actresses aroused forecast the growing role of personal magnetism in the theatre.

y

The Progressive Era

1890-1920

The decade of the 1890's saw a sharp upswing in women's participation in public life. Their historic concern with social welfare now, for a generation, became a national concern—their faith in reform once again a national faith —and they joined in an attempt to bring new concepts of democracy to bear on social ills. Of these, one of the most important was the settlement house. Although the idea originated in England, the social settlement in the United States developed its own distinct characteristics, including a close identification with women. It ministered, in fact, to a double need. On the one hand xxxi

Introduction were the great city slums, swelling during these years with a new wave of immigrants—Italians, Greeks, Bohemians, Russian and Polish Jews—seemingly poorer, more alien, and more easily exploited than any who had come before; on the other, as Jane Addams candidly admitted, were the first American women college graduates, in search of a challenging way to do good. Higher education had made them somewhat formidable as prospective spouses, and yet the prospect of returning to paternal authority and an aimless leisure was hardly bearable. Their parents may have been appalled at the idea of close association with the foreign-born poor, but to the young settlement workers alien ways seemed fascinating, and an opportunity to live and work in the slums was an adventure something like going as a missionary to China. The settlement began, in fact, as an organized form of neighborliness, full of opportunities for feminine sociability, sympathy, and resourcefulness in immediate practical situations. For these single women it became a new and very satisfying kind of home. ("Probably no young matron," wrote Jane Addams, "ever placed her own things in her own house with more pleasure than that with which we first furnished Hull-House.") From this lively base, full of the neighborhood children, enthusiastic co-workers, and visiting reformers and intellectuals, they reached outward. They began with familiar activities—the first Hull House project was a kindergarten, and day nurseries and cooking and sewing classes followed. To enrich the drab lives of the poor, the young women offered classes in literature and handicrafts. But the human misery on every side soon compelled attention to more fundamental problems: the exploitation of labor, and the prevalence of crime, disease, and corruption. At a time when public opinion had hardly begun to accept the idea of regulating terms of employment, the settlement workers came to the aid of the most helpless members of the labor force: women and children. They led the way in a movement for child labor laws and protective wage and hour legislation for women, developing in the process a range of new techniques for securing reform legislation. From the Hull House workers' insights into the problem of juvenile delinquency—sharpened by Jane Addams' sensitivity to the conflict of generations in immigrant families—grew the juvenile court idea, realized through a campaign for enabling legislation in which the Chicago Woman's Club and the Chicago Bar Association joined. Efforts to improve neighborhood health focused first on primitive municipal garbage and sewage disposal systems, and quickly involved the settlement workers in city politics. Through hard experience—Jane Addams fought the ward boss in three aldermanic elections and lost—they learned how a corrupt system dispensing jobs and favors commanded the loyalty of an immigrant population struggling to live in strange and often hostile surroundings. (They also became aware of the prejudice of immigrant men—always more reluctant participants in settlement activities than their womenfolk and children—against women in politics. ) Lillian Wald's introduction of public xxxii

Introduction health nursing and Dr. Alice Hamilton's research into industrial disease were to prove easier achievements than efficient garbage collection. No one lived long in a settlement before, as Alice Hamilton said, she saw "the working world through the workers' eyes" and became a firm believer in labor organization. As strikes took place over the years, settlement residents braved public hostility to stand in picket lines, collected money for strike relief, and made speeches and wrote articles to bring the facts to public attention. The unions, however, took little responsibility for women workers. The official policy of the American Federation of Labor was to welcome members regardless of sex, and in 1892 Samuel Gompers appointed Mary Kenney (O'Sullivan) its first woman national organizer. But most A.F. of L. locals, highly craft-oriented, were not inclined to risk what security they had won by organizing the unskilled. Their attitudes toward women were more reflective of middle-class aspirations than of working-class solidarity ("Just in proportion as woman is transferred from the home to the workshop, is her refining and elevating influence in the domestic circle destroyed . . ."). The labor movement nevertheless gave token support to two new organizations dedicated to meeting the working woman's needs. The Consumers' League, founded by Josephine Shaw Lowell and directed at the national level by Florence Kelley, a veteran of Hull House, put pressure on employers, through use of the boycott, to improve women's wages, hours, and working conditions, worked for protective legislation, and served in general as an agency for educating the public. The Women's Trade Union League, founded by settlement house leaders during the A.F. of L. national convention in 1903, had as its goal both protective legislation and unionization for women. Its most remarkable achievement, however, was the uniting, under the leadership of Margaret Dreier Robins, of working- and middle-class women in a cooperative endeavor infused by a democratic spirit remarkably free of condescension or hostility. The climactic event of its history was its substantial aid in the New York City garment workers' strikes of 1909-11, which marked the beginning of the end of the sweatshop and opened the way to large-scale organization of women workers. Between them the settlements and the two leagues did much to make middle-class America aware of the human cost of an industrial society directed solely by the profit motive, and of the uncomfortable necessity for the states (and eventually the federal government) to interpose controls. But to secure even the limited, strongly humanitarian measures characteristic of the period required an immense amount of political action: mobilizing public opinion in every state and community, framing reform bills and ordinances, lobbying for their adoption, and watching over their enforcement. In this work countless women took an essential part. Most of them, unlike the settlement and labor leaders, had family obligations and began civic work in their hometowns on a small scale, expanding their commitments as they gained experience and more leisure. In causes like the mothers' pension movement, housing reform, child labor and juvenile courts, protective legisxxxiii

Introduction lation for women workers and control of the "white slave" traffic, municipal government and civil service reform, public sanitation and pure food laws, they enlisted in a pressure group as it was getting started and supplied most of the driving force. Some worked as individuals, others through the woman's clubs. So pervasive was the reform spirit that society leaders like Chicago's Mrs. Potter Palmer, hitherto distinguished only as conspicuous consumers and social arbiters, took a diligent interest in the public welfare and used their family and social connections to great advantage in rounding up support for reform. Women of social standing had served since the 1870's on the boards of state charities aid associations and of state-supported charitable and correctional institutions for women and children. Several now acquired near-professional expertise and were appointed to welfare posts in the state governments. The dynamic Kate Barnard in 1907 became Oklahoma's first Commissioner of Charities and Corrections, the first woman elected to state office in the United States. Among professionals in the welfare field, a group of women's prison superintendents, of whom Katharine Bement Davis was perhaps the best known, put their institutions in the forefront of penal reform. Meanwhile the older perfectionist reform movements continued to draw support—perhaps their chief support—from women. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union enjoyed a rapid growth in membership, and its Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, under the direction of Mary Hunt, scored a major victory in securing, by 1901, laws in every state requiring the public schools to teach the evils of alcohol. Women also wrote most of the temperance texts and pamphlets distributed not only by the W.C.T.U. but by the Anti-Saloon League, which after 1900 marshaled the temperance forces in drives for state and national prohibition. The W.C.T.U. embraced the pacifist cause as well. Its Department of Peace and Arbitration, led by the Quaker Hannah Bailey, carried on a massive propaganda campaign after 1887, urging through leaflets and lecturers the use of arbitration in international disputes and the abandonment of warlike toys and games for children. Fannie Fern Andrews' influential American School Peace League exerted pressure and supplied materials for peace instruction in the public schools. The outbreak of World War I in Europe drew Jane Addams and many other settlement leaders into the movement. The year 1915 saw the organization of the Woman's Peace Party, the holding of an International Congress of Women at The Hague, and the sailing of Henry Ford's "Peace Ship," a project proposed by the Hungarian-American pacifist Rosika Schwimmer. All expressed a revulsion against war at least partly tinged with feminism, and a longing to believe that mass testimony for peace would somehow bring mankind to its senses and end the fighting, clearing the way for a return to the social progress that war had so shockingly interrupted. The years after 1890 also saw a new surge of support for an older moral xxxiv

Introduction reform, the fight against prostitution. Taking cover behind a screen of euphemisms like "the fallen woman," "the white slave traffic," and "social purity," ladies found they could agitate the subject with a minimum of embarrassment. They were further fortified by the example of the English feminist crusade against government regulation of vice. In the United States the W.C.T.U.'s social purity department worked with considerable success against this legal countenancing of an acknowledged evil, and also to raise the legal age of consent—a reform for which Helen Hamilton Gardener s popular novel of 1890, Is This Your Son, My Lord? had helped prepare the public mind. Along with these attacks on commercial vice went a more realistic understanding of its operations and a more humane attitude toward its victims, which prompted the rehabilitation program of the National Florence Crittenton Mission. By 1910, when public concern over the white slave traffic had set off a wave of municipal campaigns against "the social evil" and brought about passage of the Mann Act, Ellen Henrotin in Chicago and others elsewhere were advocating "sex hygiene" training in the public schools as a long-range solution. The limited doses of legislation and education prescribed by most reformers of the day seemed to some, however, a mere palliative. In the small towns and on the farms of the Midwest, women shared in a rising resentment directed against the whole economic system, apparently rigged to make others wealthy at the farmer's expense. When the farm belt opted for a radical political solution and poured its energies into third-party movements, Sarah Emery, Annie Diggs, Mary Lease, and other women, even though voteless, were welcome recruits, proving expert party organizers, stump speakers, and writers of campaign literature. After Populism had run its course, the leftwing doctrines of Socialism attracted adherents, both in the Middle West, where Kate O'Hare (Cunningham) gathered converts at Socialist camp meetings, and in the Eastern cities. The concept of a benevolent collective state was especially appealing to certain sensitive women of the seaboard aristocracy who felt a personal responsibility for social injustice; fortified by social position and Socialist conviction, Elizabeth Glendower Evans and Elisabeth Gilman became legendary for their defense of unpopular causes. With so many calls to political action, the case for woman suffrage became steadily stronger. The suffrage movement meanwhile adjusted to the changing times. With the passing of its veteran leaders at the turn of the century, the movement lost much of its aura of feminism, becoming acceptable to many more women and less offensive to men, on whose votes this change in constitutional law depended. To be sure, the feminist mantle of Susan B. Anthony descended to Anna Howard Shaw, but the dominant figure in the movement after 1890 was Carrie Chapman Catt. Mrs. Catt was a good Progressive and a committed pacifist, but her mission was not exhortation. To the suffrage cause she contributed a sophisticated political sense, a concentrated personal drive, and an administrative skill which built an efficient and disciplined organization. Proceeding steadily after 1911 toward the pasXXXV

Introduction sage of a federal amendment, the movement was swelled by a stream of new adherents, to whom the vote meant many things: strength for maintaining the white middle-class Protestant establishment or for realizing the social ideals of the settlements or for advancing the specific goals of working women or Negroes. A younger generation of feminist intellectuals like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elsie Clews Parsons, applying liberating insights from the new fields of sociology and anthropology, shook loose popular stereotypes of woman's role; college girls were converted, then society leaders, and finally the woman's clubs. Mrs. Catt's achievement was to meld this disparate body of support into an effective political force.

t

Even with the outpouring of energy into reform work, probably the majority of middle-class women still centered their activity outside the home in church or temple. A reflection of their major role, through Sunday school and mission work, in the life of the Protestant churches was their acceptance soon after the turn of the century as delegates to the annual denominational conferences. The Northern Baptists were the first to elect a woman president of one of these legislative bodies, in 1921. The Christian Science Church, which postulated a "Father-Mother God," had given women theological equality, and this found further expression in the New Thought movement, in which several of Mary Baker Eddy's disinherited or disaffected women students played a conspicuous part. The healing through faith offered by these mother figures made a strong appeal to middle-class people who, buffeted by the waves of social change, longed for personal deliverance from malaise of mind and body as well as from the older enemies, sin and death. Most people, however, sought redemption more directly through good works, carried out by organized effort. For greater effectiveness, the women's home and foreign missionary societies of the Northern churches consolidated their organizations. The regional societies, usually centering in Boston or Chicago, united into denomination-wide groups and then took enthusiastic steps toward interdenominational cooperation. In 1890 an annual day of united prayer for missions was designated. In 1900 a women's ecumenical conference established a Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions, which supplied literature for women's groups and promoted summer schools for mission study. By 1913 the denominational women's boards of home and foreign missions had been united in two federations. The home mission movement, historically concerned with the religious life of the uncivilized West, sponsored work among Indians, Alaskans, and migrant workers. City missions, however, gave way to newer, semireligious organizations. The Y.W.C.A., its competing factions united by Grace Dodge in 1906, grew rapidly as it provided a welcome haven for girls in the cities and came to feel a sense of responsibility for labor conditions and race relations. Meanwhile society's outcast poor, including the prostitute and the xxxvi

Introduction prisoner, gained a militantly evangelical friend in the Salvation Army, under whose pattern of leadership, as set by the Booth family, women preached and administered interchangeably with men. In foreign fields women missionaries came increasingly to regard Christianity not only as the promise of salvation but as an agency for social change, particularly in the status of women. The girls' boarding schools of the preceding generation were now developed into colleges, which, it was felt, would complete the Westernization of Oriental women, liberating them to play the educational and humanitarian roles which American idealism expected. The introduction of medical training for women in India and China was conceived of as a reinforcement of Christian and humanitarian values, saving lives for this world as well as souls for the next. For the Catholic Church the United States was itself a mission field until 1908. Mother ( now Saint ) Frances Cabrini was the most remarkable of the missionaries who came from Europe to minister to the needs of Italian and other Catholic immigrants in the American cities, founding schools, hospitals, orphanages, and other institutions for the newcomers. Such educational and charitable efforts had traditionally been the responsibility of women who chose a celibate life in the religious orders; other middle-class girls were prepared in convent schools for a domestic life enriched by strong cultural interests. A wider role for laywomen, however, was foreshadowed by the opening in 1900 of Trinity, the first Catholic college for girls, modeled in part on institutions like Wellesley and Vassar, and in 1920 the National Council of Catholic Women, under the direction of Agnes Regan, began its work of fostering and coordinating social welfare activities. "In days gone by," Hannah Einstein wrote in 1899, "the Jewish woman's sphere was pre-eminently the home." The typical matron belonged to an association providing limited relief for needy women and children, but the Jewish community was small and men assumed the charitable obligations traditionally prescribed by the Hebrew faith. The mass immigration of Jews following the Russian pogroms of 1881, however, imposed heavy new obligations. To meet this emergency, the Jewish community adopted many of the social service techniques recently worked out in American cities, including a more active role for women, who in the process moved into the life of the urban society at large. Hannah Solomon, who in 1876 had been the first Jewish member of the Chicago Woman's Club, founded the National Council of Jewish Women in 1893, as an organization through which those concerned with social issues could work together. She herself established a bureau to give legal aid to Russian Jews arriving in Chicago, while taking an active part with Chicagoans of other faiths in the establishment of the country's first juvenile court. At the same time, the pogroms revived a sense of Jewish unity among many religious liberals who, like Emma Lazarus, had almost laid aside formal observance. Many women found a focus for their lives in Zionism, the movement for establishing a Jewish national homeland, most often through xxxvii

Introduction work in Hadassah, a national women's group founded by Henrietta Szold in 1912 to meet medical and health needs in Palestine. Miss Szold's own life became an epic of service in spreading the Zionist message in America and, in Palestine during her last years, organizing social services and caring for refugee children from Nazi Germany. Although it was possible for a middle-class woman to earn a living by religious work—as a nun, a Christian Science practitioner, a missionary, or a Y.W.C.A. worker—most women who needed an assured means of self-support or had ambitions for a structured career turned to the educational world. This was primarily the world of the single woman. A girl with a strong intellectual bent, after attending college, could continue with study toward an advanced degree. Most of the graduate schools of arts and sciences admitted women by 1900, though without enthusiasm; encouragement and fellowship aid came from the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (later the American Association of University Women) and some local women's groups. A few of the early women Ph.D.'s found positions in universities, but generally they joined the faculties of women's colleges, where they put their energies into teaching and college life rather than into scholarly work, becoming intellectual aunts to generations of students. Heading these colleges was a remarkable group of female presidents of whom M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr was perhaps the archetype: powerful builders and administrators who firmly established the status of their institutions and of women's higher education in general. The Eastern colleges, strongholds of educational feminism, maintained the same demanding liberal arts curriculum as the men's institutions, determined to offer equality of opportunity and prove equality of intellect. Women's colleges in coeducational territory ( the Middle and Far West), always under the necessity of justifying their existence, tended to experiment with a mixture of liberal arts and training for some of the vocations opening to women, such as secretarial work, home economics, and nursing. To offer this type of education in the East, new institutions were founded, of which Simmons College, an outgrowth of vocational courses at the Woman's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, was the first. In primary and secondary education women made up the great majority of teachers, underpaid and, as a professional group, largely inert. It was not until 1909, when Ella Flagg Young became superintendent of the Chicago schools, that a woman held a major educational post. As an associate of John Dewey, Mrs. Young had done much to work out the practical applications of his educational philosophy; as superintendent in Chicago she made strong efforts to give teachers a larger voice in school administration. She became the first woman president of the National Education Association in 1910. By 1890 fifteen years of enthusiastic effort had implanted the kindergarten idea in the public mind. School systems were widely adopting this introduction to education, and most of the early kindergarten training schools would xxxviii

Introduction soon be incorporated into local colleges. The next step in early childhood education, the nursery school, an innovation of the 1920's, was also initiated by women. Meanwhile middle-class mothers began to take a strong interest in the new theories of education, particularly in child psychology as developed by G. Stanley Hall. To encourage the founding of mothers' study clubs and to work for more cooperation between parents and teachers, Alice Birney organized the National Mothers' Congress in 1895, the beginning of the P.T.A. movement. For one small group of women, widows or daughters of the men who made the great industrial fortunes of the era, philanthropy became an exacting calling, in which conscientious study and imaginative insight, often in an area of personal interest, led to benefactions establishing institutions and foundations of long-range significance. In the area of social relations these included the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Jeanes Foundation, the Southern Sociological Congress, and the Russell Sage Foundation; in medicine and public health the Commonwealth Fund, the Milbank Memorial Fund, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center; in education the Johns Hopkins Medical School, Barnard College, Scripps College, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the Institute for Advanced Study. For women in medicine, with their weak professional connections, establishing a private practice was now perhaps even more difficult than before. This condition seems, however, to have worked to society's advantage by turning the energies of many able women physicians into public health work at a time of dire need in the spreading city slums. Dr. S. Josephine Baker, pioneering founder of New York City's Bureau of Child Hygiene, led the way in introducing measures to reduce infant mortality and techniques of public health education. Other women were among the first doctors to institute health programs in schools and colleges. Nearly all the major medical schools and their associated hospitals began at least token admissions of women graduate and postgraduate students, and a very few women, distinguished in fields like gynecology and pediatrics, were appointed to their faculties. By 1918 the women's medical colleges had closed their doors, except for the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, which continued a precarious existence in an effort to maintain wider professional opportunity. The profession of nursing played a major part in the history of this first generation of women to elect a single life and plan a career outside the home. For the middle-class girl with her living to earn it provided an attractive alternative to teaching. Moreover, as a profession in an early stage of development it offered a splendid outlet for the administrative talents of Mary Adelaide Nutting and other personalities of the same strong fiber as the female college presidents and settlement leaders of the period. These women founded nursing schools in the great teaching hospitals, organized professional associations and journals, campaigned state-by-state for licensing standards, established Red Cross and army nursing corps, and finally sexxxix

Introduction cured the affiliation of nursing schools with colleges and the provision of graduate education in nursing. In charitable and welfare work the age of the volunteer gave way to that of the professional, usually also a woman. The profession of social work derived not from the settlements, which always retained an improvised and enthusiastic air of voluntarism, but from the charity organization societies of the previous period. The casework method was developed by Mary Richmond, executive secretary of the Baltimore society, who early saw the need for professional training schools and, as these were founded in the early 1900s, did much to shape their distinctive educational pattern. Women were also the leaders—or first followers—in the establishment of the subspecialties of school and medical social work. Another traditional female occupation became a profession around the turn of the century when a number of separate efforts to improve living standards coalesced into the home economics movement. American women had produced cookbooks and other manuals to assist housewives since 1796. Before the Civil War, Catharine Beecher had called for a reorientation of women's education around a "science" of "domestic economy," but her broad concept was never realized. In the 1870's women in the big industrial cities had set up cooking schools, intending to train working-class women for employment as cooks, and had seen to it that "industrial" training was introduced into the public schools; both these innovations became popular with the middle class. About the same time, the coeducational land-grant colleges in the Midwest began to offer cooking and sewing courses for women students. Meanwhile modern research in food chemistry and physiology had created a new scientific base for popular instruction in the planning and preparation of meals, not only in homes but in hospitals. The idea of an educational discipline which would unite all these elements came from Ellen Richards, a chemist working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the new field of "sanitary science," concerned with problems of pure water, sewage disposal, and ventilation. Mrs. Richards had a lifetime interest in opening career opportunities for women in science and a vision of applying science to the home, not only to make a more healthful environment but to reduce meaningless labor for women, thus freeing them for other pursuits more socially useful. It was on her initiative that a series of annual meetings was begun, leading to the establishment of the American Home Economics Association in 1908. The new profession, undertaking to correlate all studies relating to home and family, was inaugurated with high expectations that it would prove a means of social regeneration, and the strong women leaders of this generation like Isabel Bevier built up flourishing departments in the state universities. But most of the research in food, textiles, and household products and appliances which Ellen Richards had envisioned as a great opportunity for women scientists was in the end performed by men in the laboratories of industry. As time passed, moreover, university sociology and education dexl

Introduction partments tended to reclaim courses in their areas. Thus somewhat shrunken, the movement was further split by specialization, as the dietitians formed a professional association of their own, leaving home economics a firmly established branch of practical education but no longer a favored instrument for social uplift. Though library work, which officially became a profession in 1876, was never entirely a woman's field, women from the beginning made up a majority of librarians. In certain kinds of work they took a leading part, founding and heading some of the most important library schools, and pioneering in work with children and in the development of readers' advisory services. Several women like Sarah Askew in New Jersey and Mary Frances Isom in Oregon became inspired missionaries of the public library gospel and did much to extend the movement from the cities to the hinterland. By the turn of the century, research, in the modern sense, had become the basic approach to the complicated intellectual and social problems of the day. For a few women occupying posts in colleges or universities, museums, or government bureaus, research scholarship in the Germanic mode became a way of life. Their contributions were most impressive in the astronomical work of the Harvard College Observatory, in anthropology, and in the newest science, psychology; Ruth Benedict by the 1940's had become the acknowledged leader of the cultural anthropologists. Women who combined a scholarly bent with a strong commitment to social reform might, like the remarkable groups at the University of Chicago and Wellesley College, combine college teaching with active participation in settlement work or the peace movement; more often they found their lifework in social research. This offered the adventure of field investigation in foreign territory: the factories and homes of city slums or company towns. Women investigators of the federal Department of Labor, the Hull House circle, the Consumers' League, the Woman's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston, and the federal Women's and Children's bureaus collected and presented to the public a vast body of information on such matters as working conditions, child labor, juvenile delinquency, housing, and public health, and had the satisfaction of seeing it put to use shaping reform legislation and welfare programs. A scholarly bent combined with nostalgia for times past, before the advent of the industrial age with its factories and hordes of immigrant poor, often produced an antiquarian or amateur historian. Many women descendants of the early English immigrants undertook research in family or local history, though few equaled the scope and output of Alice Morse Earle, whose books about life in colonial days did much to create a popular interest in American history. Others labored for the preservation of historic sites—a work in which Ann Cunningham and her Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union had led the way—often through the Daughters of the American Revolution and other of the new women's patriotic societies. Natural history was another research field which was open to both amaxli

Introduction teur and professional, as well as to the woman somewhere in between, and which at the same time appealed to the preservation instinct. Botany had always been a favorite and favored female study, closely related to the domestic pursuit of gardening ( which Louisa King, a founder in 1913 of the Garden Club of America, was making into both a more artistic and a more sociable avocation). Several women pioneered in the collection of botanical specimens in wilderness areas, as well as in the observation of birdlife. Others were successful writers of books about nature, producing a series of popular bird guides based on exact observation. Anna Comstock became the leading educator in the nature study movement, and other women took a prominent part in the work of the Audubon Society and similar groups for the preservation of wild flowers and California redwoods. By imparting to an increasingly urbanized public a sense of the value of nature as a refuge for the spirit and pointing out the threat posed to wildlife by the spread of mankind and his works, they helped educate their generation to the urgent need for conservation.

I In the world of the arts, a revolution in modes of expression was under way in the early twentieth century. Among those at its center were three woman writers—Harriet Monroe, Amy Lowell, and Gertrude Stein—who are remembered less for their own literary work than for the timely support they gave to other artists on both sides of the Atlantic. On native ground, a few women like Kate Chopin experimented with bold new themes, but their slender output won little recognition. The honors went to stronger and more productive writers of the literary center, notably Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, and Willa Cather, a trio of novelists who through their portrayal of the interplay of social groups in a particular locale expressed their loyalty to the values of an American past they saw displaced by modern-age commercialism. Other women, short-story writers, imitators of the English metaphysical and romantic poets, anthologists, critics, and literary hostesses, built successful but now forgotten careers supplying the literary wants of the majority of the cultivated—the genteel world of the Shakespeare and Browning clubs, of which Boston in these days of its literary decline had become the hub. More significant in the long view were the writers alert to the demands of the mass market: historical novelists who drenched the past in a romantic glow, and the creators, for the newly literate of all ages, of a famous gallery of determined optimists : Pollyanna, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, and the Girl of the Limberlost. In the new sensational journalism associated with Pulitzer and Hearst, women with facile pens won fame as sob sisters, stunt reporters, advisers to the lovelorn, and beauty columnists. Others turned their research talents to the service of the muckraking magazines in exposing the excesses of a free economy. As in previous eras, women artists built successful careers as portrait xlii

Introduction painters, sculptors, and illustrators in the traditional realist style. They took little part, however, in the experiments of the early twentieth century, whether the new realism of the Ashcan school or abstract art in its many manifestations. As patrons and promoters, however, women hold an important place in the history of modern art: Gertrude Stein and other champions of the European masters, and the New Yorkers Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who generously aided struggling artists of the avant-garde and then gave the whole movement an institutional base by founding major museums of contemporary art. Less affluent enthusiasts spread popular knowledge in other ways, helping to introduce the teaching of art history in the colleges and founding art organizations and publications. A distinguished generation of native-born women musicians—American prima donnas like Lillian Nordica and Louise Homer, and a few instrumentalists—now held their own with the glamorous performers imported from Europe, though not until after they had acquired European training and reputations. Many of them, concurrently with their appearances on the operatic or concert stage or following their retirement, carried on a second influential career as teachers of a younger generation of virtuosos. As was the case in the visual arts, essential and timely support to struggling musicians and musical institutions came from women philanthropists. Stage annals of the period record the efforts of a series of notable actresses to raise the intellectual and moral tone of the theatre. The development of a more natural, less mannered style of acting and a turn toward plays of higher caliber and greater realism are both associated with Minnie Maddern Fiske, who did much to introduce Ibsen to American audiences. Julia Marlowe carried the performance of Shakespeare to a new level in the United States, Alia Nazimova brought the traditions of the Moscow Art Theatre, and Bertha Kalich the realism and intensity of the Yiddish theatre of New York's Lower East Side. The need for lighter entertainment was filled by the rise of comic opera, which made Lillian Russell a star, while Florenz Ziegfeld's promotion of Anna Held marked a new stage in the development of musical comedy. The dance, an art long neglected in America, burst into new creative life with the work of Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan.

t Two segments of American society, the white South and the Negro community, North and South, developed somewhat different needs and opportunities for women to be active outside the home. Both societies had a long history of partial isolation. Women in both groups, however, seem to have played a not inconsiderable part in reducing the gap between their own and the larger society, through their endeavors for social betterment and through artistic expressions of each culture which had a wide general appeal. The defeat and destruction suffered in the Civil War altered the expectations of many a white upper-class Southern girl without making any change in Southern society which would have created new occupations for xliii

Introduction women. A lowered standard of living imposed heavy household tasks, and most women put any remaining energy and enterprise into the family effort to rebuild its livelihood. Those left husbandless had the theoretical alternative of teaching, but public school systems in the rural South were rudimentary and opportunities in practice limited to the scattered private schools for girls. Writing, always a lonely pursuit, was more than usually discouraging in a region with only a limited reading public, remote from literary society, publishers, and magazine editors. In the late 1870's, however, the rising national vogue of local-color fiction began to give Southern women a real advantage in the national literary market. The Northern public, eager to erase memories of the war and any sense of responsibility for its aftermath, eagerly absorbed stories of a glamorous antebellum South; this continuing fascination later made epic best sellers of Mary Johnston's turn-of-the-century historical romances and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. A number of Southern literary women went to live for longer or shorter periods in New York City, where they were welcomed into literary society and were influential in restoring cordial relations between the sections. For most Southern women, living in small towns and rural areas, the Protestant churches provided the only theatre of action outside the home. The Southern denominations long before the war had defined their field of responsibility so as to exclude the region's central social problem, and afterward, still cut off from their Northern counterparts, they continued their traditional preoccupation with individual sin and salvation. An opportunity for women to extend this concern to the heathen Chinese came in 1872 when the Baptists sent out the first single Southern women as missionaries. Friends and relatives back home soon grouped into local societies to support them, and other denominations followed suit. By 1890 these societies had combined into church-wide organizations. By this time, however, the social problems endemic in an industrial society were beginning to impinge on the South. The Southern Methodist Women's Board of Home Missions, under the leadership of Belle Bennett, responded by launching a program of education and action, supplying information about immigration and labor to local church groups, and sponsoring the establishment of "settlement houses" (comparable to Northern city missions in the previous generation); Miss Bennett also urged fellow Methodists to support black settlements and other efforts for Negro welfare. Closely related to church activity and enjoying the same sanction was temperance work. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union reinforced the Southern churches' concern with personal morality, and in the static Southern society it further served a social function by opening a broad field of nondomestic activity for women. Older women of the prewar aristocracy were the first to take up the movement, a few years after its launching in the North. The younger generation, born during or after the war, then discovered that under Frances Willard's wide-ranging conception of its responsixliv

Introduction bilities the W.C.T.U. could provide a channel not only for temperance work but also for suffrage agitation, prison reform ( especially the abolition of the notorious convict lease system), child labor reform, and even social work among the Appalachian mountain people. Membership in a vigorous national organization also put Southern women in touch with their counterparts in the North at a time of social ferment there. Other new ties grew from women's involvement in the planning and programs of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, through a Board of Lady Managers, two from each state; the introduction of the woman's club movement into the South followed close upon the fair. The entry of Southern white women into the suffrage movement in the 1890's set in motion a reverse trend which colored the national crusade, now fifty years old, with the hardening racism of their section. In order to win support in the South the Northern suffragists shelved their historic commitment to Negro rights, and even acquiesced, although with disturbed consciences, in Southerners' open use of white supremacy arguments in seeking votes for women. Though women in the South, like those in the North, tended to distribute their energies among a number of related causes, the section's basic problems of health and education were most compelling. In many states women led antituberculosis campaigns. Everywhere in the South, especially after 1900, they were at the center of efforts to expand and improve educational opportunities, at a time when this meant breaching walls of social conservatism. They supported the state universities and defended them against attacks by the denominational colleges; founded voluntary local and statewide associations to stimulate interest in the public schools; and introduced the kindergarten and vocational guidance. A few were counted among the Southern white defenders of the Negro vocational colleges and served on the Southern Education Board, a racially integrated group. A special concern was making wider life choices available to girls. This generation of women leaders had grown up in the 1880's when Northern girls were beginning to go to college, but social convention had crushed their own youthful wishes for higher education. Beginning in the 1890's they conducted campaigns—sometimes successful, sometimes not—to open the state universities to women, and to upgrade or eliminate the Souths many self-styled "female colleges." They mobilized public support for the establishment of state normal schools for women and industrial schools for the vocational education of poor white girls. In these many efforts to achieve social progress through democratic means, Southern women leaders dealt with a body of public opinion which, handicapped by poverty and lack of education, was relatively inert and highly resistant to change. On the other hand, a lady reared in the aristocratic tradition of the South had certain advantages, even when advocating unpopular causes: a sense of social obligation deeply rooted in loyalty to her locality, a habit of command, and an assured social position which guaranteed a hearing and usually disarmed the opposition. It was characteristic of the South xlv

Introduction that the power of a single personality—Cornelia Spencer in North Carolina, Madeline Breckinridge in Kentucky, Martha Berry in Georgia—could sometimes move mountains. Only in a few Southern communities—notably the cosmopolitan port city of New Orleans—were there to be found the influential clusters of women, volunteers and professionals, working together through clubs and other organizations for social welfare goals. Negro women interested in nondomestic activities coped with the same conflicts as white women, plus the bars of race prejudice blocking the way to education, jobs, and the achievement of leisure time for the volunteer work traditional in middle-class America. Though a family with minimal economic security could provide some schooling, education for most girls was a matter of chance, sometimes picked up through working as a domestic in a white household where books were plentiful and reading was encouraged. The expectations of comfortably situated middle-class Negro families for studious daughters included a normal course, perhaps at the state normal school in Salem, Mass., where a black community was well established, or at the Miner Normal School in Washington, D.C., which though segregated was one of the best teacher training institutions in the country. Teaching was the standard occupation for the educated Negro woman. Jobs in the Northern public school systems were hard but not impossible to get, and occasionally a gifted woman like Maria Baldwin would rise to a principal's post. Segregated schools offered more scope for administrative talents like those of Lucy Laney, who through main force of character kept afloat one of the few college preparatory schools for Negroes in the postReconstruction South. The nursing profession was a possible alternative to teaching, but the early Northern training schools, except for the one at Boston's New England Hospital for Women and Children, discriminated against Negro applicants, and by the time of the nationwide expansion of medical services in the 1890's prejudice had hardened to such a degree that segregated nursing schools were founded in both North and South. Segregated professional organization followed with the founding of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1908. Professions requiring prolonged intellectual training, only grudgingly opened to white women, were seldom a real possibility for blacks, handicapped by sex prejudice within their own community as well as by its poverty. The Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania educated a few Negro doctors, but the first Negro woman lawyer, Charlotte Ray, was forced to give up her profession for lack of clients and passed her life obscurely as a teacher. Several businesses run by women within the Negro community prospered and incidentally provided employment for other women: Madame C. J. Walker, the hairdressing entrepreneur, built the largest and most profitable black business in the country. In the churches the development of women's influence seems roughly to have paralleled that in white society; by the mid-1880's the African Methodist Episcopal Church had a Women's Home and Foreign Missionary Socixlvi

Introduction ety. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union extended its spreading reform umbrella to black women when it established a department for work among Negroes headed by the popular poet and lecturer Frances Harper. For Negro women as a whole, the most important event of post-emancipation history was their entry into the woman's club movement. The impetus seems to have come from the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. The Woman's Building, with its exhibits, and the Congress of Representative Women held during the fair dramatized the achievements of individual and organized women, but although Fannie Barrier Williams spoke before the Congress, Negroes, male and female, were pointedly excluded from any real part in the planning or administration of the exposition. Women of the now substantial Negro middle class, already, as one of them declared, "weary of the false impressions sent broadcast over the land about colored women's inferiority, . . . lack of virtue, and other qualities of noble womanhood," determined to start a club movement. A group in Washington, D.C., had already formed a Colored Woman's League, and in 1894 Josephine Ruffin began the movement in New England. From these two nuclei grew the National Association of Colored Women, formed the following year. When the Cotton States Exposition was held at Atlanta in 1896, it featured a Congress of Colored Women of the United States. Victoria Matthews' work for the protection of Negro girls migrating from the South to New York City seems to have grown directly from the Congress' discussion of the problem of prostitution. The clubs were soon involved in a variety of eiïorts for the benefit of Negro women and the Negro people, centering on education (kindergartens, industrial schools, and housekeeping classes to raise standards of domestic service ), prison reform ( the establishment of reform schools for female juvenile offenders and the abolition of the convict lease system), health, and housing. Meanwhile Fannie Barrier Williams, after a year of public controversy, had been accepted as a member of the hitherto all-white Chicago Woman's Club. The General Federation of Women's Clubs, however, at its 1900 convention refused to seat Josephine Ruffin as the representative of her Boston club, in effect sacrificing the Negro clubs for the sake of unity with clubs in the white South. The local suffrage clubs formed by Negro women were given little better welcome by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, for the same reason. For many years after 1890 the Y.W.C.A. was the only important interracial women's group. Within that organization local Negro associations subsisted under semisegregated conditions, but the Y's record compared favorably with that of other social institutions in white America. For Negro women, as often for whites, art was incidental to popular entertainment. The laments of the blues singers, long performed and recorded for unsophisticated black audiences, eventually came to be admired by white devotees of jazz. The great Negro artists who finally reached the concert and operatic stage were sensitive interpreters of both European and Negro music, a fact which owed much to Azalia Hackley's fostering of both traditions xlvii

Introduction through her long career of popular musical education. The literary and artistic society of the "Harlem Renaissance" of the 1920's had its women writers and literary hostesses, and the portrayal of Negro life which became popular on Broadway at the same time made acting a possible profession for black women. In the work of Negro women leaders in many fields, two themes stand out. Despite chronic lack of funds, they were ready to experiment, like Janie Porter Barrett, who made her Virginia reform school for girls one of the leading American institutions of the kind. Often, indeed, they adopted innovations in advance of local white society. And concern for the welfare of their people determined the direction of their lives, often at considerable personal sacrifice. The Negro community had little security, but the woman's clubs found strength through association to make quiet protests against segregated railroad travel, discrimination by labor unions, and lynching. In her crusade against the last evil, Ida Wells-Barnett carried on the militant antislavery tradition. She had little faith in whites, but as a woman and a Chicagoan she found it possible to work for her people with Jane Addams and other white women in the settlement, suffrage, and club movements.

VI

The 1920's and After

The First World War brought to an end a remarkable period of public activity for women, unprecedented in American history before that time and not equaled since. Overnight the war effort replaced the drive for social reform. Pacifists, socialists, and others who protested were harshly criticized— and the more radical of them jailed or deported—without respect to sex. The vast majority of American women, of course, devoted themselves to the war emergency, conserving food and fuel at home, and replacing men in the factories or serving as farmerettes in the Women's Land Army. A Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense was appointed to oversee and coordinate women's efforts, and this structure was reproduced in each of the states, but its functions were mainly symbolic and hortatory. In this war, civilian services were mobilized from the top. Except for the work of the Red Cross in recruiting a small army of trained nurses and that of the Y.W.C.A. in providing housing and recreational facilities for women in industrial centers and military encampments, there was little scope for volunteer leadership by women. Shortly after peace, women finally won the suffrage, yet contrary to all the reformers' expectations there was less reform with their votes in the ballot box than there had been before. The country's mood had changed and women had swung with it. The reform spirit was not wholly dead; women had much to do with the passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act in 1921, providing federal funds for maternity and child health services, and with Congressional approval of the Child Labor Amendment in 1924; later in that decade Catholic and other women's groups helped secure modifications in the new restrictive immigration laws. In race relations there was some cauxlviii

Introduction tious progress: the Y.W.C.A. moved further toward integration; women, black and white, served together on the Southern Commission on Interracial Cooperation; and the General Federation of Women's Clubs, prodded by Gertrude Bonnin, helped rekindle the cause of Indian welfare. But the old Progressive fire was gone. The Child Labor Amendment failed of ratification; the Consumers' League and the National Women's Trade Union League petered out; the settlement houses, though they continued their neighborhood programs, took no new initiatives. The woman's clubs by and large gravitated to noncontroversial causes like the national parks. In the Protestant churches an upsurge of fundamentalism and the defense of prohibition pushed aside the social gospel. The women's mission boards began to amalgamate with the men's, with gains in efficient management but, for women, a net loss in leadership. The missionary spirit, religious as well as secular, had in any case begun to decline. A last expression was the peace movement, which became a refuge for surviving women progressives who, having seen the war bring their work to a halt, had only their dreams left. Women were now free to enter politics, and a few chose to exercise the option, but there was little evidence that they exerted any more influence in public affairs than they had before the Nineteenth Amendment. Most of the women elected to Congress, often widows or daughters of members who had died in office, proved to be only a new kind of party hack. The women members of the national party committees had a somewhat more important role in policy-making and political organization. The most influential figures on the political scene, Belle La Follette and Belle Moskowitz, served in the advisory capacity long familiar in women's history; each was associated with a presidential candidate with a strong social welfare philosophy who went down to defeat. The younger veterans of the suffrage crusade, with active years still ahead, carried on into the 1920's and afterward a schism that had split the organization a few years before victory. The National Woman's Party, militant left wing of the movement, now devoted itself to promoting an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution; this was bitterly opposed by the veterans of the social reform crusades of the Progressive era on the ground that it would nullify all the hard-won protective legislation for women. The sense of social responsibility and middle-of-the-road outlook of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in its last years were perpetuated in the League of Women Voters, a grass-roots organization for political education and selective lobbying. The tone of the 1920's, however, was not political but personal. Young people coming of age were seeking a new kind of emancipation, freedom from restrictive codes of conduct and morality. The feminism of the 1920's, as voiced for her generation by Edna St. Vincent Millay, was Bohemian in feeling—a summons to live boldly, savor life fully. Young women seized the male prerogatives of smoking, drinking, and sexual freedom, and absorbed psychoanalytic theory as popularized for middle-class consumption, which seemed to identify emotional fulfillment through a narrowly sexual role as the single xlix

Introduction key to happiness. No longer did a celibate life dedicated to socially useful work seem liberating, as it had to many of Jane Addams' generation. In a day when contraceptive techniques were still new, however, sexual freedom for women often hastened their progress toward marriage and domesticity. The social effect was a sharp reduction in women's activity outside the home. Working mothers were not part of the middle-class pattern of married life with which this generation was familiar, though childless wives who found domestic routine frustrating might after a time stumble upon a career. The flexible commitment of volunteer work remained the most practical alternative for married women with nondomestic interests, but challenges were fewer in a society turned toward materialistic goals. The new freedom, however, may well have liberated creative impulses in art. In the 1920's women in some numbers were for the first time to be found in the experimental vanguard in literature and painting. Women physicians began to discover a congenial new specialty in psychiatry, and innovative women educators took the lead in applying this science to progressive theory, laying new emphasis on the emotional development of the child. Reacting to popular pressures for conformity, a strong minority launched its own liberal causes, notably the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, of which Elizabeth Glendower Evans was the spiritual center. Mrs. Evans was also a leader in the civil liberties movement. Of this last, the most hard-pressed sector was the birth control crusade, whose prophet had been the anarchist Emma Goldman. In view of the initial identification of the birth control movement with political radicalism, the early hostility to this reform was hardly surprising. The full story of the effect on women's lives of the prolonged economic depression beginning in 1929 and the World War which followed a decade later has still to be explored. Very likely the emotional risks and losses of the war were in part at least responsible for the rise in the birth rate and the concentration of many women on family life, striking features of the postwar period. Nevertheless, labor statistics showed a steady increase in the number of married women employed outside the home—a trend set in motion by wartime shortages of manpower but, significantly, not reversed with the return of peace. After 1960, even many mothers of young families were employed. Clearly the combination of domesticity and its corollary, volunteer activity, though probably still the choice of the majority, was no longer the standard life pattern for the middle-class wife. By the late 1960s these trends appeared to be reinforced by a revival of feminism. The advocates of "Women's Liberation" rejected the traditional definition of woman's role in terms of her biological functions, and called for free access to the world of affairs. At the same time, the development of increasingly reliable methods of birth control and popular concern over the threat to society of unchecked population growth seemed to foreshadow an era of more stringent family limitation. If women's domestic responsibilities were thus to dwindle, the future might well witness a larger, long-term commitment to the world outside the home.

1

NOTABLE AMERICAN W O M E N VOLUME I A-F

A ABBOTT, Emma (Dec. 9, 1850-Jan. 5, 1891), opera singer, was bom into an impecunious, modestly musical family whose roots were in rural New England. Her grandfather, Dyer Abbott, kept a tavern and conducted a church choir in Boscawen, N.H. Her father, Seth, after learning several trades, became an itinerant musician. With his wife, Almira Palmer of Woodstock, Vt., he moved west, living in various towns along the Rock River in northwestern Illinois and in Chicago, where Emma was born, before settling as a music teacher in Peoria. Emma—the first daughter and, apparently, fourth of six children—attended the public schools in Peoria. There she probably also gave her first public performance, singing and playing the guitar. Although her early poverty was perhaps exaggerated by the press in later years, she did during her girlhood supplement the meager family income by singing locally on various occasions, her audiences leaving voluntary contributions. In her teens she began to perform farther afield, gaining some renown; about 1867 the famous CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG heard her sing in Toledo and subsequently encouraged her to go to New York to study with Achille Errani. In New York Emma Abbott sang in the choirs of Henry Ward Beecher's church in Brooklyn and of Edwin H. Chapin's Church of the Divine Paternity. Publicized as Miss Kellogg's protégée, she made her first professional appearance in New York in a benefit concert on Dec. 12, 1871; the Brooklyn Eagle, in reviewing a performance the following March, found her "young and attractive" and "evidently ambitious," but with "a weakness of style . . . and a premature development of voice" (Odell, IX, 235).

she returned to the United States and, after concerts in New York, Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia, made her debut, again as Maria, at the New York Academy of Music on Feb. 23, 1877. Despite a fairly enthusiastic initial reception, however, Emma Abbott never achieved great popularity in New York. Critics objected to her freedom with scores, finding her interpolations—such as "Nearer, My God, to Thee" in the midst of La Sonnambula—in poor taste; her voice, a lyric soprano of considerable carrying power, was of good but not extraordinary quality. With the formation of the Emma Abbott English Opera Company in 1878 the singer found her element. Managed by her husband, Eugene Wetherell, a New York druggist whom she had secretly married while abroad, the company toured the country, primarily in the West, for thirteen consecutive seasons, presenting abridged versions of contemporary operas. The repertory featured Paul and Virginia (made especially popular by the famous and well-advertised "Abbott kiss"), The Chimes of Normandy, Romeo and Juliet, The Bohemian Girl, Martha, Hamlet, The Mikado, Emani, Ruy Blas, Norma, and The Daughter of the Regiment. La Traviata was also included, somewhat altered to please the public morality of her Western audiences. Miss Abbott maintained a good company of up to sixty members, frequently young artists, who received steady employment over a full season. Without in any way relinquishing her position as star, she supervised every department of her business. She began preparing a new work by studying the wardrobe, often commissioning lavishly extravagant costumes from leading Paris designers, and ended with the choice of conductor. The resulting productions were good to look at, interesting to follow, and tolerable to hear. Although in many ways unorthodox, and disdained by sophisticated Eastern operagoers, the Abbott Company gave its less cosmopolitan audiences an introduction to opera, receiving in return affectionate loyalty and profits that reached $10,000 in one week. Rather large of feature and inclined to plumpness, "the peo-

A fund of $10,000 contributed by members of Dr. Chapin's congregation enabled Emma Abbott to go to Europe in 1872 to study with Antonio Sangiovanni in Milan and with Enrico Delle Sedie and Pierre François Wartel in Paris. She made her operatic debut at Covent Garden in London as Maria in The Daughter of the Regiment in 1876; her contract was canceled, however, when she refused to sing La Traviata on the ground that it was immoral. That fall

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pie's prima donna," as Emma Abbott was sometimes called, was amiable in expression and had an appealing manner doubtless enhanced by the fact that she was artlessly American and sang in English. Miss Abbott's company opened thirty-five new opera houses, beginning in Waterloo, Iowa, in 1878 and concluding in Ogden, Utah, in December 1890. In Ogden an unheated dressing room caused the singer to contract pneumonia. She died shortly thereafter in Salt Lake City at the age of forty. Skilled in the handling of funds, investing in bonds and in real estate, she and her husband, who had died in 1889, had amassed an estate estimated at half a million to a million dollars. Her will provided for foundling homes and other charities and left $5,000 each to twelve churches of several denominations which she had enjoyed attending. (She was herself a Congregationalist. ) In a life untouched by scandal, Miss Abbott was an eager defender of the stage professional, sometimes taking issue with clerical critics. After a public funeral in Central Music Hall, Chicago (the boxes were reserved for newspaper reporters, with whom she had always been on friendly terms), her ashes were buried in Oak Grove Cemetery in Gloucester, Mass., her husband's early home. She had no children. A hardworking, dedicated woman in a calling often marked by temperament and instability, Emma Abbott was important primarily as a popularizer rather than as an artist.

disciplined reforming zeal. Her environment, too, left its mark. Her free-ranging childhood on the edge of the prairies near the Overland Trail, with its memories of Pawnee Indians, covered wagons, and endless expanse of buffalo grass, gave her not only an abiding love for the Midwest but also the hearty physical vitality and forthright, almost bluff manner that characterized her for life. After attending Brownell Hall, an Omaha girls' boarding school, for five years, Grace Abbott returned home to graduate from high school. She then enrolled in Grand Island College, from which she received the Ph.B. degree in 1898. From 1899 to 1907 she taught at the Grand Island High School, leaving briefly in the fall of 1902 to enter the University of Nebraska as a graduate student, though she apparently did not complete the year. In 1904, however, her career took a new direction when —following the lead of her older sister, Edith Abbott ( 1 8 7 6 - 1 9 5 7 ) - s h e spent the summer term in graduate work at the University of Chicago. She continued her studies there intermittently, moved to Chicago in 1907, and earned a master's degree in political science in 1909. She also did some work toward a law degree, but found herself more attracted by the life at Hull House, of which she had become a resident in 1908. Under the leadership of JANE ADDAMS, this pioneer social settlement offered not only intellectual stimulus—here, she and her sister later recalled, they first came in contact with the world of ideas—but also an environment informed by social concern. Soon joined by her sister, Grace Abbott for nine years lived the varied life of a settlement-house resident: she was active in the Chicago garment workers' strike of 1 9 1 0 - 1 1 , worked for Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, participated in the successful Illinois woman suffrage campaign of 1913, and accompanied Miss Addams to the International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915. Although not a practicing Quaker, she retained a great affinity for her mother's faith and found this peace venture highly appealing.

[The only biography is Sadie E. Martin, The Life and Professional Career of Emma Abbott (1891), written by a close friend and begun during the singer's lifetime. See also George C. D. Odell, Annals of the N.Y. Stage, vols. IX-XIV (1937-15); Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1893 ). The Martin biography reprints a number of obituary tributes.] H. EARLE JOHNSON

ABBOTT, Grace (Nov. 17, 1878-June 19, 1 9 3 9 ) , social worker, director of the federal Children's Bureau, was born in Grand Island, Nebr., where her parents, originally from Illinois, had settled after their marriage in the early 1870's. She was the younger of two daughters and third of four children of Othman Ali Abbott, a lawyer and Civil War veteran whose English ancestors had settled in Andover, Mass., in 1640, and of Elizabeth (Griffin) Abbott, who was of colonial Quaker stock. From her father, who was active in Nebraska politics and who became the state's first lieutenant governor, Grace Abbott derived a propensity for public affairs; from her mother, an abolitionist, suffragist, and early graduate of Rockford Seminary in Illinois, a

It was, however, as head of the Immigrants' Protective League that she first attracted notice. This organization was founded in 1908 by SOPHONISBA BRECKINRIDGE and other Chicago social workers to combat the hordes of unscrupulous cab drivers, lawyers, travel agents, "white slavers," and operators of fraudulent "savings banks" and "employment agencies" who were preying upon the masses of confused and often frightened immigrants then arriving in Chicago. Miss Abbott's own prairie youth gave her an instinctive sympathy for those thrust from a rural environment into a teeming

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city, and as head of the I.P.L. from its founding she worked to remedy the abuses to which they were subjected. Her vivid articles on the subject appeared in such varied periodicals as the American Journal of Sociology, Survey, and the Chicago Evening Tost, and in 1917 provided the basis for her book The Immigrant and the Community. In addition, she taught a popular course on immigration at the newly founded Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, with which her sister and Miss Breckinridge were affiliated. Not content merely to publicize the problem, she opened a large hall near the principal Chicago railroad station where new arrivals could await their relatives, secured state legislation regulating employment agencies, and persuaded officials at Ellis Island to accept a greater responsibility for the immediate fate of those who passed through their gates. In 1911 she spent four months in eastern Europe studying at first hand the backgrounds and expectations of immigrants. A firm defender of the so-called "new immigration," in 1912 she testified at a Congressional hearing against the proposed literacy test (enacted in 1917) aimed at cutting off the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Now a recognized authority, in 1913-14 she took a nine-month leave of absence from her Chicago post to head an immigration investigation recently authorized by the Massachusetts legislature. Her report, The Immigrant in Massachusetts ( 1915), was highly praised for its mastery of administrative detail and its precise recommendations for legislation to eliminate the exploitation of new arrivals.

dren's Year" conferences held by the Children's Bureau in May 1919, and acting as a consultant to the War Labor Policies Board. In the latter capacity she was influential in the decision to insert child labor clauses into all wartime procurement contracts, a decision which in part offset the adverse effects of the high court's ruling. In the autumn of 1919 Grace Abbott returned to Chicago to become director of the newly created Illinois State Immigrants' Commission. Two years later, however, a new governor, disturbed by her refusal to cooperate in his patronage plans, vetoed the commission's appropriation, and in July 1921 it went out of existence. Miss Abbott at once revived the old Immigrants' Protective League. Within a few weeks, however, she was back in Washington, this time as head of the Children's Bureau, a post she retained for the next thirteen years. While she continued and expanded the program of research and publicity which her predecessor Miss Lathrop had initiated, her principal duty was in administering the SheppardTowner Act of 1921, a pioneering law providing federal grants-in-aid to assist states in developing programs to combat infant and maternal disease and mortality. As the person most closely identified with this unprecedented venture, Miss Abbott faced bitter opposition, including the charge that she was "under direct orders from Moscow" (Social Service Review, September 1939, p. 387). She fought back vigorously but without personal rancor. While capable both of slashing attacks on her critics and of eloquence in the defense of her program, her greatest asset was her careful and painstaking administration of the Children's Bureau and of the Sheppard-Towner Act. Under her leadership some 3,000 child health and prenatal care centers were opened throughout the country, and a pattern of federal-state cooperation for social welfare established that provided many valuable precedents for the larger programs of the future. But in 1929, over Miss Abbott's strenuous opposition, Congress killed the Sheppard-Towner Act. A year later, an administration-backed proposal to transfer the health program of the Children's Bureau to the Public Health Service struck Miss Abbott as a challenge to the bureau's broad concern for the totality of child welfare, and by intensive lobbying and public appeals she defeated it. Amid these responsibilities and distractions, she also served, from 1922 to 1934, as the unofficial United States delegate to the League of Nations Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children—the outgrowth of an inquiry she had suggested at the first International Labor Conference in Wash-

In 1917 Grace Abbott accepted a longstanding invitation from JULIA L A T H R O P , the head of the federal Children's Bureau (and an old Hull House friend), to join the bureau's staff. The offer attracted her not only because the flow of immigrants had fallen off during the war but because the recent enactment of the first federal child labor law (1916) had strengthened the authority of the Children's Bureau. As head of the bureau's child labor division, Miss Abbott supervised the painstaking investigations—verification of birth dates, proof that illegally produced goods had in fact entered interstate commerce, etc.—which effective enforcement of the law demanded. In June 1918, however, the child labor law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States. This discouraging development convinced Miss Abbott of the need for a constitutional amendment abolishing child labor, a cause she championed for the rest of her life. She remained at her post for a year, dismantling the enforcement apparatus she had built up, helping to prepare a series of "Chil-

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ington in 1919—and as president of the National Conference of Social Work (1923-24). Grace Abbott greeted the New Deal with enthusiasm mingled with a certain ironic ruefulness. "I am beginning to feel quite unnecessary," she wrote in April 1933. "During the past years one felt that the few liberals in the federal government who were ready to speak up when necessary could not be spared. Now I have the comfortable feeling that my job will be taken care of if I leave" (Chambers, p. 250). She remained at her post an additional year to assist her friend Frances Perkins, the incoming Secretary of Labor. In October 1933 she organized a Child Health Recovery Conference, and as a member of the President's Council on Economic Security (1934-35) she helped draft the Social Security Act, in which the Sheppard-Towner philosophy found a greatly expanded expression. In 1934, failing in health and eager to return to her native Midwest, Grace Abbott accepted a position as professor of public welfare at the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration (successor to the old School of Civics and Philanthropy), where her sister Edith had become dean. The two women had remained close throughout their related careers, and they now set up housekeeping together in Chicago. They had few outside diversions, although Grace Abbott enjoyed reading and was fond of the theatre. She was editor of the Social Service Review from 1934 to 1939, and her final book, The Child and the State, a two-volume collection of documents with extensive editorial notes, appeared in 1938. Although her cherished child labor amendment was never ratified by the required number of states, she was gratified in 1938 when at least a partial ban on child labor was effected through the Fair Labor Standards Act. In the spring of 1939 she was hospitalized with acute anemia, and that June she died at the age of sixty. Following Quaker services, her ashes were buried at Grand Island.

arine F. Lenroot ( T h e Child, August 1939, p. 30), "the Children's Bureau in that first decade after woman suffrage was achieved represented women's stake in government. Miss Abbott was the hero and the pride of women who were just beginning to find a place in public affairs." [Grace Abbott's personal papers are in the Univ. of Chicago Library; her reports and papers as director of the Children's Bureau are in the Nat. Archives, Washington. The best brief descriptions of her life and personality are to be found in Edith Abbott's "Grace Abbott: A Sister's Memories," Social Service Rev., Sept. 1939, and "Grace Abbott and Hull-House, 1908-21," ibid., Sept. and Dec. 1950. See also memorial issue of The Child, Aug. 1939; Helen C. Baker, "The Abbotts of Nebr.," Survey Graphic, June 1936; Clarke A. Chambers, Seedtime of Reform: Am. Social Service and Social Action, 1918-1933 ( 1 9 6 3 ) ; Durward Howes, ed., Am. Women, 1939-40; and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXIX, 85. Enrollment information from Office of the Registrar, Univ. of Nebr., and Univ. of Chicago Archives. A collection of Miss Abbott's papers on public welfare, From Relief to Social Security, was published posthumously in 1941.] J I L L KER

CONWAY

ABEL, Annie Heloise (Feb. 18, 1873-Mar. 14, 1947), historian, was born at Fernhurst, Sussex, England, the first daughter and third of seven children of George and Amelia Anne (Hogben) Abel. Her father was of Scottish parentage, her mother of English and Welsh descent. Emigrating to the United States, the Abels had preempted land in Kansas in 1871 but had gone back to England dissatisfied with frontier life. They returned to the United States in 1884, however, and Annie joined them the following year at Salina, Kans., where her father was working as a gardener. After graduating from the Salina High School in 1893 and teaching for two years, she entered the University of Kansas, from which she received the B.A. degree three years later, in June 1898. Staying on at the university, she served for a year as manuscript reader in English and then began graduate work in history, taking the M.A. degree in 1900. Her master's thesis, "Indian Reservations in Kansas and the Extinguishment of Their Title," began a long career of research and writing on American Indian affairs. After a year of graduate study at Cornell University (1900-01) and two years of teaching in the Lawrence, Kans., high school, she entered the graduate school at Yale University in 1903; she received her Ph.D. in 1905. Her dissertation, "The History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi," was awarded the Justin Winsor Prize in 1906 and was published in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association.

Working under somewhat trying circumstances, Grace Abbott achieved distinction in two different branches of social work. In a time of rising hostility toward immigrants, she contended steadily for liberal admission standards and against the exploitation of newcomers. Later, in a decade when reformist sentiment was at a low ebb, her strong voice in Washington was a continual reminder that social welfare was a legitimate—indeed an essential—concern of the state. Although her career did not stem from any conscious feminist bias, it encouraged those of her sex who were seeking a larger role in American life. "Above all other Federal bureaus," wrote her successor Kath-

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The marriage was, in the judgment of Henderson's biographer, "slenderly based upon short acquaintance between two people maturely 'set.' " They began domestic life in a remote house with few conveniences. A visitor next spring found Mrs. Henderson "obviously disturbed and unhappy," her husband suffering from renewed attacks of insomnia and depression. That June his illness became so serious that he entered a hospital. He soon insisted that his wife leave him and that the marriage end; it was subsequently "dissolved on the grounds of incompatibility" (Casson, pp. 3 5 37, 50). Returning to the United States, Dr. AbelHenderson, as she now signed herself, made her home in Aberdeen, Wash., where members of her family then lived. She served as acting professor of history at Sweet Briar College for the school year 1924-25, and then devoted herself to extensive research, spending two winters in Canada studying British policy toward the aborigines, and later a year in London. Extensive publication followed, chiefly editions of letters or journals: A Side-light on Anglo-American Relations, 1839-1858 (with Frank J. Klingberg, 1927), an edition of the correspondence of Lewis Tappan; Chardons Journal at Fort Clark, 1834-1839 (1932); and Tabeaus Narrative of Loisel's Expedition to the Upper Missouri (1939). She reviewed regularly for the American Historical Review, the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, and other journals, especially books dealing with Australian history or American Indian affairs. Her reviews were forthright and critical and demanded of the authors the same care and reliance on primary sources that marked her own work. In personality Dr. Abel was inclined to be somewhat formal; she was at her best in small circles of interested friends. During her Goucher years she served as president of the Maryland branch of the College Equal Suffrage League (1913—15). In her later life she was prominent in the Washington State Society of Daughters of the British Empire, becoming president for two years. Despite ill health, she worked actively during World War II with the British-American War Relief Association in Seattle; in September 1946 the British Government decorated her for her services. She died of cancer at Aberdeen, Wash., in 1947, after a long illness, and was buried in Wynooche Cemetery, Montesano, Wash. Her authoritative studies of the treatment of the American Indian placed her in the top rank of American historians of her generation.

This study of Indian removal is a model of intensive research in Indian Office and Congressional records and has remained the standard work on the subject. A career of college teaching followed, first as an instructor in history at Wells College (1905-06), then at the Woman's College of Baltimore (later Goucher College), where she was appointed instructor in history in 1906, associate professor in 1908, and professor and head of the department in 1914. While in Baltimore she also taught English history at the Teachers College of Johns Hopkins University (1910-15). In 1915 she moved to Smith College, where she served as associate professor and then as professor of history until 1922. During these teaching years she carried on an extensive program of research and publication. A paper, "Proposals for an Indian State, 1778— 1878" (published in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1907), continued her study of Indian removal, but her major work was a massive, heavily documented three-volume study, The Slaveholding Indians. The first volume, The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist: An Omitted Chapter in the Diplomatic History of the Southern Confederacy, appeared in 1915; the second, The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War, in 1919; the third, The American Indian under Reconstruction, in 1925. She also found time to edit The Official Correspondence of James S. Calhoun while Indian Agent at Santa Fe and Superintendent of Indian Affairs in New Mexico (1915) and A Report from Natchitoches in 1807 by Dr. John Sibley (1922). Although her writing and editing had been concerned almost entirely with American Indian affairs. Dr. Abel retained from her English background a deep interest in British history, especially the development of the British Empire. In 1921-22 she was given a sabbatical leave from Smith College, during which time she planned to travel in the British dominions, pursuing her research in the history of British colonization. She went first to London, then to New Zealand, and late in 1921 arrived in Australia. Friends there later recalled her as "a tall, attractive brown-haired woman, remarkably young-looking for her forty-nine years" (Casson, p. 35). While working at the University of Adelaide she met Prof. George Cockburn Henderson (1870-1944), a historian in the same field. She returned at the end of the academic year to the United States, but soon afterward, in July 1922, she resigned her position at Smith College and went back to Australia, where, on Oct. 27, she and Henderson were married.

[Obituary notices in Yale Univ., Obituary Record of Graduates, 1946-47, pp. 177-78, and Am. Hist. Rev., July 1947, pp. 833-34; biographical sketch

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lution came on, she became an avid reader of history. Under date of June 24, 1759, the Rev. William Smith recorded in his diary: "My Daughter Abigail reed, into our Church" (MS., Massachusetts Historical Society). She remained an unquestioning adherent of the liberal Congregational faith throughout the rest of her life. Later that same summer, when Abigail was fourteen and her sister Mary seventeen, young John Adams of Braintree appeared at the Weymouth parsonage. He afterward remarked in his Diary (I, 108) that "Polly and Nabby are Wits," and found them quite lacking in the "Tenderness" and "fondness" of Hannah Quincy—with whom he had recently and reluctantly broken off an affair of the heart. But he soon became a frequent visitor, and by early 1762 he and Abigail were exchanging love letters so gay and uninhibited that one rubs one's eyes in reading them and asks if this is rural New England and these the great-grandchildren of the Puritans. They were married on Oct. 25, 1764, when Adams was twenty-nine and Abigail nearing twenty. Benjamin BIyth's portrait of her, painted soon afterward, shows a young woman with regular but bold rather than beautiful features, strongly suggesting poise, resourcefulness, and inner strength. Her husband was just getting a foothold in the highly competitive profession of the law. His own abilities would have carried him far, but he was a worrier and much addicted to depreciating himself as well as others. Abigail's serenity of spirit and total confidence in him strengthened him immeasurably. Their partnership proved as perfect as any recorded in the annals of matrimony, and theirs happens to be particularly well recorded.

by George W. Martin in Transactions of the Kans. State Hist. S oc., Vili (1904), 72; biographical information furnished by her sisters, Lucy E. Abel and Rose Abel Wright, of Aberdeen, Wash., and by Mrs. Eugene Shostrom, of Des Moines, Wash.; tribute written by Herman J. Deutsch; Marjory R. Casson, "George Cockburn Henderson: A Memoir," South Australiana, Mar. 1964; data supplied by librarians or archivists of Wash. State Univ., Yale Univ., Univ. of Kans., Sweet Briar College, Goucher College, Smith College, Univ. of British Columbia, and the Library of Congress. The bulk of Dr. Abel's research notes and her library are at Wash. State Univ., Pullman; a few notes are in the Library of Congress and the library of the Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver.] FRANCIS PAUL

ADAIR, Bethenia Owens. See Bethenia.

PRUCHA

OWENS-ADAIR,

ADAMS, Abigail Smith (Nov. 11, 1744 o.s.Oct. 28, 1818), one of the great letter writers of all time and wife of John Adams, second president of the United States, was born in the parsonage of the First (Congregational) Church of Weymouth, Mass. The Rev. William Smith ( 1 7 0 7 - 1 7 8 3 ) , her father, came from a line of well-to-do merchants and ship captains of Charlestown, Mass., graduated from Harvard in 1725, and served his parish for half a century with credit but no special distinction. Her mother was Elizabeth Quincy (1721— 1775), daughter of Col. John Quincy, the leading citizen of neighboring Braintree and kin by blood and marriage to Nortons, Shepards, Hoars, Hulls, and Winthrops—the bedrock of the Bay Colony's Puritan theocracy. For all this, Abigail Smith was brought up in a simple, rural society and, to her later expressed regret, without formal schooling. What she learned, she "picked up . . . as an eager gatherer" rather than from "systematic instruction" (C. F. Adams, "Memoir," Letters of Mrs. Adams, p. xxiv). But this was a good deal, for conversation in the parsonage was lively and varied, and books were plentiful. Abigail had an older and a younger sister (as well as a younger brother), and the Smith daughters' surviving letters show that they were familiar from girlhood with Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and James Thomson, with the periodical essays and travel literature of the eighteenth century, and with the popular sermon writers and moralists of their own and the preceding age. Abigail taught herself to read French, but she never mastered Latin, later being obliged to have her children translate the Latin phrases in letters written to her by persons who supposed her more of a bluestocking than she really was. After her marriage and as the Revo-

During their first ten years together they alternated between the farmhouse or saltbox "cottage" that Adams inherited in Braintree (and that still stands on Franklin Street in modern Quincy) and various quarters in Boston, to which business and politics, despite his professed wishes, kept drawing the rising lawyer and politician. Five children were born to them during this decade: Abigail ( 1 7 6 5 1813), who in 1786 married Col. William Stephens Smith of New York; John Quincy ( 1 7 6 7 - 1 8 4 8 ) , eventually sixth president of the United States; Susanna ( 1 7 6 8 - 1 7 7 0 ) ; Charles ( 1 7 7 0 - 1 8 0 0 ) , a lawyer; and Thomas Boylston ( 1 7 7 2 - 1 8 3 2 ) , a lawyer and state judge. In August 1774 John Adams set off from Boston for Philadelphia as a delegate to the first Continental Congress. Ten years elapsed before he and Mrs. Adams could again live together, except for very brief intervals, as man and wife. Mrs. Adams continued as the capable

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tous with the intimate—the campaign of Saramistress of her family and household, with added responsibility for "the Education of my toga with the progress of her own pregnancy, little flock," in which, she wrote her friend tart comments on the misbehavior of statesmen and generals with pleas to send her pins from M E R C Y WARREN, "I stand in need of the constant assistance of my Better half" (Apr. 13, Philadelphia because none were to be had in Massachusetts. In a letter touching on such 1776, Adams Family Correspondence, I, 377). miscellaneous topics as the condition of patriShe also became the manager of her husband's ots' houses in Boston after the British evacuafarming and business affairs. These were contion and experiments in household production siderable, and in a time of war and economic of saltpeter, she expressed doubts about the disruption unusually burdensome. "I hope in time to have the Reputation of being as good a "passion for Liberty" among Virginians since Farmeress as my partner has of being a good they "have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs," and injected a Statesman," she told him (letter of Apr. 7-11, pointed plea to her husband and his associates 1776, ibid., p. 375); and before long she had in Congress to "Remember the Ladies, and be acquired the reputation she sought. She bought more generous and favourable to them than farm stock, hired help, coped with fractious your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited tenants when Braintree was overrun with refupower into the hands of the Husbands. Rememgees from wartime Boston, picked up advantageous bits of farm- and timberland, paid bills, ber all Men would be tyrants if they could. If and pursued her policy of "ridged oeconomy" perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Reto such good effect that Adams began, he playfully told her, "to be jealous, that our Neigh- belión, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Reprebours will think Affairs more discreetly conducted in my Absence than at any other Time" sentation" (Mar. 31, 1776, Adams Family Correspondence, I, 369-70). (May 27, 1776, ibid., p. 419). But he was in fact proud of her managerial skills and grew Jocular as her tone might be, this was a subincreasingly dependent on them. From Europe, ject that Abigail Adams viewed seriously. She after she joined her husband there, and from ' spoke often and sometimes sharply in her letNew York and Philadelphia in the 1790's, she ters about the discrimination between boys and directed farming and dairying operations at girls with respect to educational privileges, a home, the laying in of provisions, the repair disparity she could only attribute to men's "unand even the construction of buildings, by corgenerous jealosy of rivals near the Throne" (to respondence which has largely survived. "Mr. John Thaxter, Feb. 15, 1778, ibid., II, 391-92). A. has been so long a Statesman that I cannot Her feelings about racial discrimination were get him to think enough upon his domestick afalso strong. A single short sojourn below the fairs," she told a relative who served as her Mason-Dixon Line ratified her lifelong conlocal agent. "Tho I am very willing to releive viction that slavery was wholly evil in its efhim from every care in my power, yet I think fects on character and society. In a letter to it has too much the appearance of weilding inJohn Adams (Feb. 13, 1797) just before he stead of sharing the Scepter" (to Cotton Tufts, was inaugurated as president, she described Mar. 8, 1785). In his "Memoir" of his grandhow she had sent a black servant boy, at his mother, Charles Francis Adams suggested that own request, to an evening school to learn her prudence and capacity in this role may "cyphering." When a respectable neighbor, the have saved her husband from the financial ruin father of two other boys in the school, came to that overwhelmed so many of John Adams' conreport the serious objections of "some others" temporaries who gave up their lives to public to James' presence, Mrs. Adams warmly deservice. fended the principle of "equality of Rights. The Boy is a Freeman as much as any of the young Another result of the Adamses' lengthy separations was the flowering of Mrs. Adams' Men," she told her neighbor, "and merely because his Face is Black, is he to be denied ingenius as a letter writer. She herself had no struction? How is he to be qualified to procure pride of authorship and refused to take seriously proposals to collect and publish her let- a livelihood? . . . I have not thought it any disgrace to my self to take him into my parlour ters. She knew her handwriting was bad; her and teach him both to read and write." No furstruggles with spelling and "pointing" mortified ther complaints were made. her (though they often amuse later readers); and she considered her letters much too hastily Following the Peace of 1783 Mrs. Adams and carelessly written to merit preservation. spent five years in Europe with her husband, But it is their very spontaneity that brings who, besides serving as American minister at Mrs. Adams and her age to life. In every report The Hague, was also commissioner at Paris to from home she artlessly mingled the momennegotiate treaties of commerce with European

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powers and, from 1785, first American minister to Great Britain. Although she had only part of her family with her, these were happy years for Mrs. Adams. Despite an ingrained tendency to apply a Braintree yardstick and Congregational principles to the scene of Europe and the conduct of Europeans, she got on tolerably in diplomatic society and wrote home vivid accounts of the monuments and pageantry of the Old World and of domestic manners as she observed and experienced them at Auteuil on the outskirts of Paris and in the first American legation in Grosvenor Square, London. But John Adams' English mission proved diplomatically fruitless, and his wife was glad when the time came to go home. On the eve of departure she told Thomas Jefferson, her husband's colleague in Paris, and meant it, that she preferred her Braintree farm to "the court of St. James's where I seldom meet with characters so innofensive as my Hens and chickings, or minds so well improved as my garden" (Feb. 26, 1788, Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, XII, 1955, p. 625). During the twelve years (1789-1801) of John Adams' vice-presidency and presidency, his wife moved back and forth between the country house in Braintree (later Quincy) they had acquired in 1788 (now the Adams National Historic Site) and what Adams' political critics chose to call the "court circles" of the successive capitals of the republic. The same critics endowed Mrs. Adams with an influence over her husband's mind and policies that has since been much and inconclusively debated. That Abigail Adams had a mind of her own is a fact beyond dispute. She exhibited it in her earliest courtship letters and again during the crisis over American separation from England, when she called repeatedly for independence before it was politically feasible. Here her mind ran a course parallel with her husband's, and this became its typical course. At times, as devoted wives tend to be, she was more her husband's partisan than he was himself; and while it is undoubtedly true that in earlier years she softened his asperities of temper, the bitterly contested issues of his term as president, ending in his defeat in the election of 1800, brought out latent asperities in her own character. She was, for instance, a warmer advocate of the Alien and Sedition Acts, and of prosecutions under them, than Adams himself seems to have been, and she tended to equate criticism of her husband's administration with treason against the United States. She thus lent color to Albert Gallatin's charge in 1797 that "she is Mrs. President not of the United States, but of a faction" (Henry Adams, The Life of Albert Gallatin, 1879, p. 185). But the asser-

tion of Timothy Pickering, who as Secretary of State had persistently obstructed the President and had been cashiered by him, that Adams was "under the sovereignty of his wife," was false {Diary of William Bentley, IV, 1914, p. 556). Though she usually reinforced her husband's decisions, there is no good evidence that she made political decisions for him or altered them after he had formed them. Mrs. Adams had the brief and, to her, doubtful distinction of being the first mistress of the new President's House on the Potomac. After getting lost in the woods between Baltimore and Washington en route, she moved into the cavernous and unfinished structure in midNovember 1800, reporting that it was made habitable only "by fires in every part, thirteen of which we are obliged to keep daily, or sleep in wet & damp places" ( N e w Letters, pp. 2 5 9 60 ). Three months later she returned to Massachusetts and entered on what at first both she and her husband feared would be a cheerless retirement. But it did not prove so. Before long there were numerous grandchildren to be cared for; farming and dairying were absorbing occupations; and John Quincy 'Adams' political star began to rise in a manner remarkably reminiscent of his father's. He alone among the Adamses' four children who lived to maturity fulfilled his parents' high hopes. Their daughter Abigail's marriage to a military man who showed poor judgment in business and other ventures gave them constant uneasiness. The early promise shown by both Charles and Thomas as boys and youths was never realized. But John Quincy, who spent his years from eleven to eighteen in European schools and diplomatic circles and who can scarcely be said to have had a youth, was something else again. From 1800 his parents' hopes centered on him. His mother had always given him abundant advice, much of which is on record because it is in letters that are preserved, and she did not cease to do so long after he had entered public life. He had been a United States Senator for more than a year when his mother, distressed about his killing habits of work, wrote his wife: "I wish you would not let him go to congress without a craker in his pocket." He should also "pay more attention to his personal appearence. . . . It is in vain to talk of being above these little decorums—if we live in the world and mean to serve ourselves and it, we must conform to its customs" (Dec. 8, 1804). She did not hesitate to write President Madison when her son was serving as United States minister in Russia, suggesting that, since the minister found his expenses at the court of the Czar ruinous, he ought to be allowed to come

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though selective, edition in letterpress is in course of publication by Harvard Univ. Press as The Adams Papers. (References by date alone to letters in the sketch above are to originals in the family papers, quoted here by permission. ) Charles Francis Adams edited two small volumes of Letters of Mrs. Adams (1840), with an introductory "Memoir"; the fullest edition and the one cited herein is the fourth, 1848. His Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife ( 1876 ), though a deservedly well-known collection, is highly selective and is not textually reliable. A volume of New Letters of Abigail Adams, 1788—1801, was ably edited by Stewart Mitchell (1947). The WarrenAdams Letters (Mass. Hist. Soc., Collections, vols. LXXII-LXXIII, 1917-25) document her friendship with Mercy Warren; and Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (1959), includes her exchanges with Jefferson. The Diary and Autobiog. of John Adams, ed. by L. H. Butterfield and others (4 vols., 1961), the first segment of The Adams Papers to be published, contains Mrs. Adams' fragmentary journals and much information about her and her immediate family. Much of her correspondence is being published in a second series of The Adams Papers entitled Adams Family Correspondence, ed. by L. H. Butterfield and others (1963- ). There have been biographies by Laura E. Richards (1917) and Janet Whitney (1947). Page Smith in his John Adams (1962) treats Abigail Adams as a full partner in her husband's career.]

home. Madison complied by offering young Adams a seat on the Supreme Court, which he politely declined without seeming in any way to resent his mother's interference (J. Q. Adams, Writings, edited by Worthington C. Ford, IV, 1914, pp. 1 8 - 1 9 , 9 3 - 9 8 ) . After 1800 Mrs. Adams was to have seventeen years of quiet, mostly happy, and always useful activity as the matriarch of a large household. The distant members of her family she held together by ceaseless letter writing— "a habit," she pointed out to the delinquent among them, "the pleasure of which increases with practise, but becomes urksome by neglect" (to her daughter, May 8, 1808, Massachusetts Historical Society). She witnessed her husband's reconciliation with his old friend and temporary antagonist Thomas Jefferson, but she was herself less ready to bury old resentments than John Adams was. Best of all, she lived to see her oldest son return in 1817 from a series of diplomatic successes in Europe and take office as Monroe's Secretary of State. Early in October 1818, however, she fell ill with a disorder variously but rather meaninglessly described as typhus and as a "nervous" or "biliary fever," and died three weeks later. The formal tributes were sincere as well as profuse, but a reminiscent entry in the Diary of the Rev. William Bentley, who knew her well, has the priceless quality of verisimilitude: "The first time I ever saw Madam was at her own house shelling her beans for a family dinner to which without any ceremony or apology she invited me. . . . I found a freedom in conversation which took its familiar topics. . . . She was in appearance of middle size, in the dress of the matrons who were in New England in my youth. The black bonnet, the short cloak, the gown open before, & quilted petticoat, & the high heeled shoe, as worn universally in that day. Everything the best but nothing different from our wealthy & modest citizens. She was possessed of the history of our country & of the great occurrences in it. She had a distinct view of our public men & measures & had her opinions which she was free to disclose but not eager to defend in public circles. . . . Mr. Adams always appeared in full confidence, but that of an equal & friend who had lived himself into one with the wife of his bosom" (IV, 5 5 6 - 5 7 ) .

L . H.

BUTTERFIELD

ADAMS, Hannah (Oct. 2, 1 7 5 5 - D e c . 15, 1 8 3 1 ) , compiler of historical data, the first American woman who sought to support herself by her pen, is remembered also as one of the principals in a controversy with the geographer Jedidiah Morse which embittered relations between liberals and orthodox in the Unitarian controversy within the congregational churches of Massachusetts. She was born in Medfield, Mass., the second daughter and second of five children of Thomas and Elizabeth (Clark) Adams. Her mother died when she was twelve; her father promptly remarried and had four children by his second wife. Though lacking in formal education, Thomas Adams had scholarly inclinations, read omnivorously, and possessed a retentive but undiscriminating memory for facts of all sorts. Hannah inherited from both parents a frail constitution. Unable to engage in normal childhood activities, she attended school only occasionally and spent much of her time reading poetry and novels. From her childhood experience she developed an extreme timidity and always felt ill at ease in the presence of strangers. Her father had shifted his capital from the prosperous farm he had inherited to a store for the sale of books and "English goods" in Medfield. The failure of this enterprise, when Han-

Abigail Adams is buried in a plain but massive table tomb beside her husband's in a crypt under the portico of the First Church of Quincy. [Most of Abigail Adams' voluminous correspondence that survives is in the Adams Papers, Mass. Hist. Soc. This immense family archive has been published on microfilm, and a comprehensive,

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nah was in her teens, left the family in straitened circumstances. They took in boarders, some of whom taught Hannah Latin and Greek. One of them aroused her curiosity by showing her excerpts from An Historical Dictionary of All Religions by the English clergyman Thomas Broughton. For her own satisfaction she began reading and compiling notes about the various denominations. Meanwhile she struggled to make money, weaving bobbin lace and doing some tutoring of young men preparing for college. Finally it occurred to her to print the manuscript on which she had been working with no thought of publication. Entitled An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects (1784), it stood out among similar compilations because of the wide range of sources used and the author's scrupulous attempt at impartiality. Though her hopes of financial gain were not at first realized, the book was a useful one, and later editions appeared in 1791, 1801, and 1817. There were also three London editions (1805, 1814, 1823). The second edition, entitled A View of Religions, was sufficiently profitable for the author to pay off accumulated debts and set some money aside. Miss Adams next began work on A Summary History of New-England (1799). Her eyesight suffered from intense concentration on manuscript materials, and the financial returns proved less than anticipated, but she counted on the profits from a shorter edition for schools. In 1804, while preparing this abridgment, she learned that the Rev. Jedidiah Morse and the Rev. Elijah Parish were also about to publish a school history. In a timid and indirect way she sought assurances from Morse that his publication would not interfere with hers. Since he encouraged her to proceed, she was much perturbed when he soon wrote her that his collaborator was displeased with her plans for a school history, which would "look too much like rivalship." By this time Miss Adams had acquired some influential friends. James Freeman, minister of King's Chapel, Boston, had helped her in business dealings with printers; William S. Shaw had given her access to the Boston Athenaeum, of which he was director; the Rev. Joseph Stevens Buckminster had allowed her to use his 3,000-volume collection of theology and Biblical criticism. These men were members of the coterie of Boston intellectuals who dominated the cultural life of the town. They were liberal in their religious sympathies and already disliked Morse for a variety of reasons, not least of which was his intensely partisan championship of orthodox Calvinism. It soon became the fixed opinion within this circle of liberals that Miss Adams had laboriously tilled the soil of

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New England history, at great hazard to her eyesight, for the sake of a meager income, only to have Morse exploit her market; in short that he had behaved in an ungentlemanly manner toward a dependent and delicate female. In 1809, realizing that his reputation was at stake, Morse sought to clear up the matter. The issue was placed before three referees, who declared in guarded phrases that Morse had done nothing for which he was legally liable, but that since Miss Adams had suffered financially by his publication he should act accordingly. Their failure to say specifically that he should pay her money damages led him to consider an apology sufficient, thus adding to his original ill-defined fault in interfering with her publication the very specific fault of seeming to evade the award of arbitrators. In a final, stubborn effort to clear himself he opened the matter to the public in 1814, publishing a 190page book replete with transcripts of all the documents of ten years of fitful controversy. Miss Adams had long since withdrawn from the discussion. Her financial needs were provided for by an annuity granted by friends, among them Shaw, Stephen Higginson, Jr., and Josiah Quincy. ("They have bought the woman!" Morse is said to have exclaimed.) Continuing her literary work, she published The Truth and Excellence of the Christian Religion Exhibited (1804), a compilation of biographical sketches and extracts from the writings of Christian apologists. The market was saturated, however, and she realized little profit. Resolved to find a subject no one had touched, she turned to the preparation of a History of the Jews (1812; London, 1818; Leipzig, 1819-20). Her final publications were Letters on the Gospels (1824), which reflected the interest of the liberals in Jewish antiquities, and her posthumous Memoir (1832), written partly to raise money for her ailing younger sister. Although her writings are of no lasting consequence, it is clear from the patronage Miss Adams received that she was regarded by her contemporaries as an able and industrious author. She herself made only modest claims for her achievement and was persistently and painfully conscious of the fact that a literary career ill befitted a timid and unworldly female. Those who remembered her as an elderly woman recalled chiefly her eccentricities: her habit of talking to herself, the report that she had seen a ghost, her intense concentration on her studies, and her conversation, each sentence punctuated with a pinch of snuff. A portrait of her late in life, wearing cap and kerchief, done by Chester Harding, is in the Boston Athenaeum. She died in Brookline, and was one of the

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Adams

almost every important linguistic aboriginal group in North and South America, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Ranging the world, she traveled to every land that was ever under the dominion of Spain or Portugal, following the trails of Columbus and the conquistadors. She later compared cultures in North Africa, Asia, the South Sea islands, and Mediterranean lands. In all, she covered more than 100,000 miles, and this, for the most part, before the days of air transport. Although many of her explorations were made in company with her husband, some of the most hazardous she made alone. On horse- or muleback, in primitive wheeled vehicles or dugout canoes, she followed the lonely courses of rivers through deep jungles or made her way through high mountain passes, as when she crossed the Peruvian Andes at 19,200 feet. During World War I, in 1916, she spent three months as a correspondent at the French front, and for two years thereafter she lectured widely in the United States on behalf of the American Fund for the French Wounded. A broken back, the result of a fall off a seawall in the Balearic Islands in 1927, brought two years of invalidism, during which she lay strapped upon a stiff board. But as soon as she was again on her feet, she was off, this time alone, on a seven months' journey through Spain, North Africa, and the Near East. Occasional articles by Harriet Chalmers Adams appeared in such magazines as the Ladies' Home Journal and the Review of Reviews, but she was most closely identified with the National Geographic Magazine, in which, over a period of more than twenty-eight years, beginning in 1907, the products of her pen and her camera were a regular feature. Remarkable for their accuracy, her statements were rarely challenged. During this period also her lectures were included in the yearly programs of the National Geographic Society. A small woman, with sparkling brown eyes and a ready smile, dressed often in an evening gown of her favorite shade of ruby red, she made a charming picture on the lecture platform, her femininity contrasting strongly with the story of rugged adventure which she had to tell. Mrs. Adams was noted for her vivacity, her zest for living, and her talent for making friends in all parts of the world. She was an ardent believer in the ability of women to achieve distinction in many fields, and she was generous in giving time and encouragement to other writers and travelers. One of her chief interests during her later years was bringing together widely traveled women who had distinguished themselves in the fields of geography and its allied sciences. From this grew, in 1925, the Society of Woman

first persons to be buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, where a monument was erected by private subscription. [The chief source of information is A Memoir of Miss Hannah Adams, Written by Herself (1832); the book includes additional notices by Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee. The documents in the Adams-Morse controversy were printed at length in Jedidiah Morse, An Appeal to the Public (1814); Hannah Adams, A Narrative of the Controversy between the Rev. Jedidiah Morse, D.D., and the Author (1814); and Sidney E. Morse, Remarks on the Controversy between Doctor Morse and Miss Adams (1814). Some manuscript material may be found in the Mass. Hist. Soc. and in the Morse Papers at Yale and the N.Y. Public Library, and there are two Hannah Adams letters in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. For family data, see Andrew N. Adams, A Genealogical Hist, of Henry Adams, of Braintree, Mass., and His Descendants (1898); for anecdotal material, see Elizabeth Porter Gould in New England Mag., May 1894; and Olive M. Tilden in Dedham Hist. Register, July 1896.] C. CONRAD

WRIGHT

ADAMS, Harriet Chalmers (Oct. 22, 1 8 7 5 July 17, 1937), explorer and traveler, writer and lecturer on Latin America and Hispanic culture, was born in Stockton, Calif., the daughter of Alexander and Frances Melissa (Wilkins) Chalmers. Her love of exploring little known parts of the world was fostered in her early life by camping trips with her father, a gold prospector and mining engineer. Her special interest in Spanish culture was a heritage from her pioneering ancestors, who crossed the Western plains in 1842 to settle in California when it was still a province of Mexico. She attended public school in Stockton until the age of eleven; thereafter, during years of constant travel with her parents, she was instructed by private tutors. On Oct. 5, 1899, she was married to Franklin Pierce Adams, a Stockton electrical engineer; they had no children. Next year she accompanied her husband on an engineering survey of Mexico, the first of a series of tours that was to take them through Central and South America. For her husband these travels laid the foundation for his later work in the Pan American Union; joining its staff in 1908, he was for eleven years editor of its Bulletin and thereafter ( 1 9 2 0 - 3 4 ) its counselor. For Mrs. Adams these journeys—which took her to many regions never before penetrated by a white woman—stirred a lifelong interest in Spanishspeaking lands and primitive peoples. Becoming a professional lecturer and writer, Mrs. Adams, during the ensuing years, visited

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Geographers, an international group, still active, of which Harriet Chalmers Adams was the organizer and first president. She was, in addition, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of London and a member of the National Institute of Social Sciences of New York City. Upon the retirement of Franklin Pierce Adams from the Pan American Union in 1934, he and his wife spent several years in southern Europe. Harriet Adams died in 1937 on the French Riviera, at Nice. Her husband survived her by three years; they were buried in Stockton, Calif.

consul in London and the growing number of pretty and fashionably accomplished Johnson girls drew American travelers and diplomats. A visitor late in 1795 was the minister resident of the United States at The Hague, John Quincy Adams, then on an interim mission to London which gave him little to do. He was only twenty-eight and handsome-featured, but morbidly earnest in temperament and owlish in demeanor and habits. At a ball in February 1796 he paid "decidedly publick" attention to Louisa; and when he left London in May, they were engaged. The courtship letters exchanged between The Hague and London must be among the most remarkable of their kind. Louisa did not know, when they parted, whether they would meet again "in one year or in seven," and John Quincy did nothing whatever to relieve her suspense for a year, observing that he had frittered away too much time in London and must now apply himself not only to his public duties but to his interrupted private studies. He doubted that his promotion to the post of minister plenipotentiary at Lisbon made marriage economically feasible for them, and decided it would be best anyway if Louisa were not exposed to the glittering but empty splendors of court life. She should, instead, accompany her family on their voyage to America, where some day after Adams left public life they would marry and settle down in true republican simplicity. He rejected as pointless and even improper her and her father's suggestion that the Johnson family sail home by way of Holland so that the engaged couple could see each other once more before so indefinite a separation. She must learn, he said, to accept such "untoward Events, as a test of character" (letter of Jan. 7, 1797). As it dawned on her that he actually welcomed such tests of character as self-improving, Louisa, who had always followed her impulses wherever they led and been encouraged by her indulgent parents in so doing, protested sharply that he had no right to assume so "commanding" a tone with her and that his "boasted philosophy" was to her "a dreadful thing" (letters of Jan. 17 and 31, 1797). In such exchanges, and they were numerous, may be read by anticipation some of the terrible strains in Adams family relationships recurrent during the next half-century. The marriage actually followed fairly quickly: in London on July 26, 1797, in the parish church of Allhallows Barking in Great Tower Street. The total collapse of Joshua Johnson's business occurred immediately afterward, imposing on Louisa a load of guilt that she never threw off. Although in her eyes her father was as faultless in this

[in Memory of Harriet Chalmers Adams ( 1 9 3 8 ) , a memorial brochure published by the Soc. of Woman Geographers; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15; Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1 9 4 2 ) , on Mrs. Adams and her husband; Woman's Jour., Jan. 1930, pp. 12-14; N.Y. Times, July 18, 1937. The manuscripts, photographs, and scrapbooks, and the voluminous library of Harriet Chalmers Adams were presented by her husband to the Stockton ( Calif. ) Public Library.] FRANCES

CARPENTER

HUNTINGTON

ADAMS, Louisa Catherine Johnson (Feb. 12, 1775-May 15, 1852), wife of John Quincy Adams, sixth president of the United States, was born in London. Her father, Joshua Johnson ( 1 7 4 2 - 1 8 0 2 ) , a well-connected Marylander (his elder brother Thomas became in 1777 the first elected governor of Maryland), had gone to England in 1771 to manage the transatlantic business of an Annapolis mercantile firm. There he married an English girl, Catherine Nuth (1757P-1811). Louisa was the second of their eight children, all girls but the youngest. On the outbreak of war between France and England in 1778, Johnson took his family to Paris in the hope of finding passage home, but instead reestablished his commission business and served as a commercial agent for Maryland in the French port city of Nantes. Louisa's earliest recollections were of a great house where her family lived "in a handsome style" perhaps beyond Johnson's means and station and at any rate "enough to turn the head of a beautiful and much admired young Woman like my Mother" (letter to Abigail Brooks Adams, Mar. 2, 1834). Having attended a convent school and been captivated by the religious services, Louisa was more French than English when the Johnsons returned to London in 1783. Her father maintained a large house, staffed by eleven servants, in Cooper's Row on Tower Hill, to which his hospitality as first American

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Adams as in everything else, appearances suggested that he had lured a promising young man into marrying a penniless daughter in the very nick of time and that he had then fled to America to escape his European creditors. Her humiliation led to mental depression, which in turn led to physical illness, in a pattern that was to recur over and over again in later years. She was frequently ill during the next four years in Berlin, where Adams served as minister instead of in Portugal, but she also made a variety of friends, enjoyed the great court functions, and won applause for her beauty and social graces. Her portraits attest that she was beautiful as a young woman and remained so through middle age; Stuart's likeness of 1818 is an exquisite study in femininity and high fashion. How her liking for such frivolities suited her husband can be deduced from his silence. Aware of their profound differences in temperament and taste, he did not censure hers even in the privacy of his diary—surely a tribute to that "philosophy" his fiancée had found so repellent. Jefferson's election ended Adams' mission. In July 1801 he and Louisa sailed home with a three-month-old son, born in Berlin in agonizing circumstances (as all of her children were to be) and named George Washington. That fall the young mother for the first time faced her husband's redoubtable family. The country relatives and neighbors who crowded in to see John Quincy's London-bred wife, their odd dress and dinner hours, and all the rest that was so strange, dismayed her. "Had I step[p]ed into Noah's Ark," she later wrote, "I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished." "Do what I would there was a conviction on the part of others that I could not suit. . . . I was literally and without knowing it a fine Lady"—destitute of the abilities that rendered her famous mother-in-law, ABIGAIL ADAMS, "the equal of every occasion in life" and the measure of womanly excellence in Quincy, if not the whole United States (L. C. Adams, "Adventures of a Nobody"). During her husband's term in the United States Senate, 1803-08, Mrs. Adams was able to spend much of her time with her mother (now a widow) and sisters, in whose already crowded Washington house the Adamses lived during sessions of Congress. In 1803 they had a second son, whom they named for his grandfather the ex-President (whose immediate and warm affection had lightened Louisa's otherwise total misery in Quincy); another son died within a few days of birth at Washington in 1806; their last, Charles Francis, was born in Boston in 1807. Adams' next post, beginning in

1809, as American minister plenipotentiary to Russia, entailed for Louisa a "most terrible and tedious voyage," separation from her two oldest boys, and all the privations and embarrassments, too familiar to her, springing from "the meanness of an American Ministers position at a European Court" (ibid.). She was to remember Russia primarily for two things: the loss of a year-old daughter, bom, named for her mother, and buried in that "inhospitable clime"; and her own carriage journey across the wintry wastes and recent battlefields of eastern Europe in 1815 to join her husband after his mission to Ghent, a forty-day ordeal in company with seven-year-old Charles and a set of rascally servants ("Narrative of a Journey from St. Petersburg to Paris in February, 1815," edited by Brooks Adams, Scribner's, October 1903). While the campaign that ended at Waterloo was in progress, the Adamses left Paris for London, where the American minister and his now reunited family passed two comparatively serene years. Then Monroe's choice of Adams as his Secretary of State plunged them back into what Mrs. Adams witheringly called the "Bull Bait" of political life. With the Secretary's strong support, she won the Washington "etiquette war," which reached the level of cabinet discussion in 1819, over whether cabinet wives or Congressmen's wives should pay first calls on each other. (See J. Q. Adams, Memoirs, IV, 479-91.) Criticized for assuming the airs of royalty, she pursued what she thought was a truly "republican" course by throwing open her commodious house on F Street on Tuesday evenings and offering such good company and entertainment that even the disaffected could not bear to stay away. "Mrs. Adams' Ball" for General Jackson on the anniversary of the battle of New Orleans in January 1824 was long remembered. A year later the partisans of Adams and Jackson were pitted against each other in the presidential vote-off in the House of Representatives. Adams won, but his victory doomed him, as a minority president, to a single futile and intensely unhappy term. Evidence survives of Mrs. Adams' efforts to lighten the general gloom at the White House: collections of printed and manuscript music for voice, harp, and pianoforte; poetical exercises of the kind then beginning to fill illustrated gift annuals; and, of rather more interest, manuscript comedies and melodramas obviously written for amateur production. Hard on the blow of her husband's defeat in 1828 came another crueler still. George Washington Adams had inherited his mother's social

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Adams and literary gifts, and although he had been educated at Harvard and in the law, he would or could not fit the mold his father had shaped for him as a dynastic heir. George neglected the family's business concerns in Boston and got a servant girl with child. Summoned to Washington in the spring of 1829, he could not face his parents; after exhibiting "some decided symptoms of mental alienation," he jumped or fell overboard to his death as the steamer approached New York City. Both parents were overwhelmed with remorse. Louisa was so prostrated that she could not attend Charles Francis' wedding to Abigail Brooks in September, and gave way to fears about her own sanity. When, a year later, a delegation of local political leaders called on the ex-President in Quincy to ask if he would accept a nomination to Congress, Adams and his wife responded with diametrically opposed feelings. Adams lusted to return to the field where he had lately been so badly beaten. But Mrs. Adams thought that to go back to Washington and renew all her old "mortification and agony" in order to gratify her husband's "insatiable passion" for public office was more than he had a right to ask or she could bear (letter to John Adams, 2d, Nov. 14, 1830). Adams neither reproached her for her outbursts nor relented in his purpose, and they returned to Washington. Throughout his unparalleled "second career" as a tribune of the people, she stood with him on all the great issues for which he fought— and which he sometimes won—against hopeless odds. As she watched the strength and health of this driving and driven man ebb away, she could not help exclaiming at times over the pain he and his family would be spared if he could "only bring his mind to the calm of retirement. . . . But I feel that it cannot be without risking a total extinction of life" ("Diary, &c„" 1835-41). In this she was incontestably right. John Quincy Adams was in the end struck down at his post of duty in February 1848 and died under the dome of the Capitol two days later. In the spring of the following year Mrs. Adams suffered a stroke and spent her last three years in a state of "quiet and contented infirmity" on F Street tended by her widowed daughter-inlaw, Mrs. John Adams, 2d. Congress "adjourned over" to attend her funeral. Her burial in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington was temporary; before the end of 1852 Charles Francis had her remains brought north and placed in one of the four massive granite table tombs in the crypt of the First Church of Quincy, where two Adams presidents and their wives have since reposed.

Adams Louisa Catherine Adams' later years were more tranquil than those that preceded. Having had no choice but to accept her husband's course, she at length learned how to endure adversity quietly. She found comfort in her books, among which was the Bible, and her writing materials. She had given up the idea that life, to be tolerable at all, as she once told her firstborn and most-loved son, must be an "agrément," spiced with "les folies brilliantes, which give a playful varnish to the sombre colouring of real life" (to G. W. Adams, June 25, 1825). Yet, tried—perhaps even broken—as her spirit had been, there clung about her in old age a charm and elegance that were wholly exotic in Quincy and captivated that most sensitive of observers, her grandson Henry Adams. Many years later, in his Education, he sketched an affectionate and unforgettable portrait of her as a "remote," "fragile," and "decorative" figure, from whom, along with her Maryland blood, he supposed he could have inherited his impulses of rebellion against the sobrieties of New England life and character. [Hundreds of Louisa Catherine Adams' letters and other writings survive in the Mass. Hist. Soc. and are available in its microfilm edition of the Adams Papers. (The originals of letters and other MSS. cited above or listed below without further reference are in this collection and are quoted by permission.) Her correspondence and journals will be substantially published in the Adams Family Correspondence, being edited by L. H. Butterfield and others ( 1 9 6 3 ). Her principal autobiographical writings include "Records of a Life, or My Story," written in 1825, and "The Adventures of a Nobody," begun in 1840. The Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, ed. by Charles Francis Adams ( 1 2 vols., 1 8 7 4 - 7 7 ) , though invaluable, largely excludes material relating to domestic history, which will, however, be included in the complete edition of J. Q. Adams' Diary to be issued as part of The Adams Papers. The Diary of Charles Francis Adams, now in course of publication (vols. I—II, ed. by Aida and David Donald, 1964; vols. III-IV, ed. by Marc Friedlaender and L. H. Butterfield, 1968), is a source of great value for the life and character of the diarist's mother. Nothing approaching an adequate biography has yet been written, but Samuel Flagg Bemis' magisterial John Quincy Adams ( 2 vols., 1 9 4 9 - 5 6 ) deals more than incidentally with Mrs. Adams. Charles Francis Adams contributed the sketch of his mother in James B. Longacre and James Herring, eds., The Nat. Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans, vol. IV (1839; enlarged 1853). A fascinating and important collection of portraits, costumes, jewelry, music, laces, china, and other memorabilia of Louisa C. Adams and members of her family is preserved, and some of it is on permanent exhibition, in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington.

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Adams The Adamses' home in Quincy is now the Adams National Historie Site.] L. H. BUTTEHFIELD

ADAMS, Marian Hooper (Sept. 13, 1843-Dec. 6, 1885), Washington hostess and social arbiter, pioneer woman photographer, and wife of the historian Henry Adams, was born in Boston of Massachusetts forebears. She was the second daughter and youngest of three children of the prominent physician-oculist Robert William Hooper, descendant of Marblehead Puritans, and his wife, E L L E N STURGIS HOOPER, a lesser Transcendentalist poet, who came of the influential Sturgis family originating on Cape Cod. When she was five her mother died. A man of independent means, Dr. Hooper early retired from practice and dedicated himself to the education of his children and to philanthropy and art. Marian received her formal education at a school for girls in Cambridge established by E L I Z A B E T H CARY AGASSIZ, wife of the distinguished Harvard professor of natural history. During the Civil War Marian Hooper was active in aiding the United States Sanitary Commission. In 1866 she traveled abroad with her father and met for the first time the young man who was to become her husband, Henry Adams, then serving as private secretary to his father, the American minister to England. As a charming "bluestocking" who read German and Latin and even a little Greek, she was much at home in Cambridge academic circles after her sister's marriage in 1868 to Prof. Ephraim Whitman Gurney of the department of history. Her brother Edward was treasurer of Harvard and noted as an art connoisseur. In this environment Marian Hooper became intimate with William and Henry James and their circle of writers and artists. Vivacious, quick-witted, and sharp of tongue, "Clover," as her intimates called her, impressed the young Henry James as the embodiment of "intellectual grace," the complement of the "moral spontaneity" of his beloved cousin, Minnie Temple. Her marriage to Henry Adams, assistant professor of history at Harvard and editor of the North American Review, on June 27, 1872, united her to a Boston family of even more impressive connections than her own, in effect a presidential dynasty. Her drawing room in Marlborough Street became an intellectual center of the Back Bay, where her fame grew as (in Henry James' phrase) a "perfect Voltaire in petticoats." Becoming restive under the weight of inbred Boston associations, the couple removed to Washington in 1877 when the opportunity arose for Adams to pursue his his-

torical researches in the national archives. In the capital Marian Adams found a congenial theatre for her talents. From time to time she helped in the collation of manuscripts, but chiefly she presided over the salon in Lafayette Square where the twelve o'clock breakfasts in the Continental style and five o'clock teas provided a rendezvous for the political and intellectual elite. Entrée to that salon became a deeply coveted distinction. Their home was richly furnished with the spoil of paintings and objets d'art gathered on their wedding tour of Europe in 1872-73 and on a second year abroad of scholarship and society in 1879-80. The charmed center of their circle was the famous "Five of Hearts," which included the geologist Clarence King, the poet-diplomatist John Hay, and the latter's heiress wife. From her vantage point opposite the White House, Mrs. Adams sent long weekly reports to her father. Written with a fine eye for drama and filled with lively vignettes of Washington dignitaries, the gossipy letters—published, in part, in 1936 as The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adamsgive a unique picture of Washington society. Marian Adams, who had been brought up as a Unitarian, was a rather thorough skeptic in religious matters but very much a moralist and a severe critic of political and social irregularity. Something of her character is reflected in Madeleine Lee, the heroine of her husband's anonymous novel Democracy (1880), but her complex intellectual and emotional traits are much more fully intimated in Adams' second novel, also anonymous, Esther (1884), which recreates under a thin veil of fiction the artistic and intellectual preoccupations of their group. Henry James' fictional comment in his story "Pandora" on the Adams salon has been much quoted: "'Hang it,' said Bonnycastle, 'let us be vulgar and have some fun—let us invite the President.' " James also deftly touched off Marian's energetic patriotism in "The Point of View" in the character of Marcellus Cockerel. With her husband's encouragement Mrs. Adams became one of the first women to take a serious interest in photography. Her portraits of the historian George Bancroft and John Hay won her much acclaim. In person she was small, not more than five feet two inches, darkhaired, with rather strongly marked features, her face plain in repose but expressive of intelligence and sympathy, as Adams informed an English friend. She was an excellent horsewoman in the era of the sidesaddle. She learned to appreciate Worth's dressmaking but insisted on subdued colors. Early in 1884 she and her husband completed the plans for the Lafayette Square resi-

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ately after his marriage, Addams became a prosperous miller, banker, and community leader. He served eight terms as state senator, first as a Whig and later as a Republican. A friend and admirer of Lincoln, he was a vigorous abolitionist. When Jane Addams was two, her mother died. She grew up an introspective child, deeply devoted to her father, influenced by his integrity and by the moral fervor of the abolitionist movement. When she was seven her father married Anna H. Haldeman, a widow with two sons. Although Jane felt no deep warmth for her stepmother, this vigorous and intelligent woman did contribute to her education, especially in the areas of music and literature. Jane's stepbrother George Haldeman was the playmate and constant companion of her early years. Following the path of her older sisters, Jane entered the Rockford (111.) Female Seminary in 1877. Her heart had been set upon the newly opened Smith College, but her father's wishes prevailed. In Rockford's atmosphere of plain living and high thinking she became a leader among the students and a favorite of the teachers. Rockford's indomitable head, ANNA P E C K SILL, was dedicated to producing missionaries, but in Jane Addams she encountered a vein of iron. In later years Miss Addams speculated that the experience of resisting the "genuine zeal and affectionate solicitude" which would have turned her into a Christian missionary was the best possible training for independent thought. High-minded idealism and earnest discussion of future careers characterized the Rockford girls. Ruskin was a favorite author. "It was quite settled in my mind," Jane Addams later wrote, "that I should study medicine and 'live with the poor' " ( Twenty Years at Hull-House, pp. 60-61). She was determined to be a college graduate, and it was in part through her exertions that Rockford became a degree-granting institution. In 1882, having graduated at the head of her class the year before, she received her coveted degree. The ensuing eight years were, at least to outward appearances, the most difficult and undirected of Jane Addams' life. Her father's sudden death in 1881 at the age of fifty-nine was a shattering blow. She enrolled that fall in the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, but poor health and the realization that medicine was not her forte caused her withdrawal the following May. Shortly thereafter she underwent surgery for a disabling spinal condition; the next winter she was bedridden for six months at the home of a married sister in Des Moines.

dence that their friend Henry H. Richardson was building as part of the famous Romanesque twin structure known as the Hay-Adams houses. Work progressed with many delays and changes. In April 1885 her devoted father, whom she had been nursing in Cambridge, died. The shock brought to the surface in her a long-buried mental illness. On Dec. 6, 1885, in a moment of profound depression, Marian Adams ended her life, using a deadly photographic chemical. The newspaper accounts of her death paid tribute to her as the leading Washington hostess of her day; a few regretted her penchant for satire. The tragedy was an overwhelming blow to Henry Adams and colored much of his later writing. The deliberate silence of The Education of Henry Adams (1907, 1918) was eloquent of his grief. For her grave in Rock Creek Cemetery Adams commissioned an impressive cowled and seated figure by his friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the bronze masterpiece known to art lovers around the world. In 1918 Henry Adams was also laid to rest beneath the "Nirvana figure," no other identification marking the secluded spot. The finest epitaph on Marian Adams was uttered in a letter to Adams by John Hay a few days after her death: "Is it any consolation to remember her as she was? that bright, intrepid spirit, that keen, fine intellect, that lofty scorn of all that was mean, that social charm which made your house such a one as Washington never knew before, and made hundreds of people love her as much as they admired her" (Thoron, p. v). [ W a r d Thoron, ed., The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865-1883 ( 1 9 3 6 ) ; Worthington C. Ford, ed., Letters of Henry Adams (1859-1891 ) ( 1930 ) ; Harold D. Cater, ed., Henry Adams and His Friends ( 1 9 4 7 ) ; Ernest Samuels, The Young Henry Adams ( 1 9 4 8 ) and Henry Adams: The Middle Years ( 1 9 5 8 ) . See also Katharine Simonds, " T h e Tragedy of Mrs. Henry Adams," New England Quart., Dec. 1 9 3 6 . The bulk of Marian Adams' papers, including many letters to her father, are in the Adams Papers at the Mass. Hist. Soc.] ERNEST SAMUELS

ADDAMS, Jane (Sept. 6, 1860-May 21, 1935), settlement founder, social reformer, and peace worker, was bom at Cedarville in north central Illinois. She was the eighth of nine children, but only she, two older sisters, and an older brother lived to maturity. Her parents, Sarah (Weber) and John Huy Addams, were from Pennsylvania: John Addams' ancestors had been granted land there by William Penn in the seventeenth century; the original Webers had landed at Philadelphia from Germany in 1727. Emigrating to Illinois in 1844 immedi-

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Addams By 1883 she was sufficiently recovered to embark with her stepmother for Europe. Here she made the conventional tour, pursued some studies in early Christian art, and in her journal made occasional brief references to the poor of London's East End and other large European cities. In her autobiography, published many years later, she suggests that this first exposure to urban poverty made a great impression upon her. She returned to the United States early in 1885. That summer she was baptized and joined the little Presbyterian church in Cedarville, not because of any sudden conversion, but out of weariness over the "piteous failures" of her efforts at "self-dependence" and longing for "an outward symbol of fellowship, . . . some blessed spot where unity of spirit might claim right of way over all differences" (ibid., pp. 7 8 - 7 9 ) . Much of the next two years was passed in Baltimore with her stepmother and George Haldeman, who was studying at Johns Hopkins. She attended lectures at the university, undertook some charity work among the city's Negroes, and endured Mrs. Addams' efforts to make her more "social" and to promote a romance between the two young people. During this period, Jane Addams later testified, she reached "the nadir of my nervous depression" (ibid., p. 7 7 ) . In her old age, to friends who took an interest in spiritualism, she reported that her only spirit messages came from her stepmother, who endlessly berated her for failing to marry George Haldeman. Still aimless and troubled, she returned in 1887 to Europe. In London she witnessed a match-girls' strike, and this further "impression of human misery," she recorded, "was added to the others which were already making me so wretched" (ibid., p. 8 1 ) . She also encountered Frederic Harrison, a British disciple of Comte, and became interested in the Positivist philosophy, which she felt might lead to some grand synthesis of the religious hopes and struggles of all ages. In Rome she spent some time studying the catacombs, hoping to increase her understanding of primitive Christianity. But a severe attack of sciatic rheumatism reduced her again to invalidism for many weeks and renewed her depression. She was nevertheless on the threshold of a career which she herself was to invent. Her vision had been long in the making. "I gradually became convinced that it would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive and actual needs are found, in which young women who have been given over too exclusively to study, might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines and

learn of life from life itself; where they might try out some of the things they had been taught . . ." (ibid., p. 8 5 ) . In April 1888 an afternoon at a Madrid bullfight brought a revulsion, as she later described it, against her "self-deception" in thinking that all her study and travel was "preparation" for the future, and she determined to take a first step toward carrying out her plan by confiding it to her traveling companion E L L E N GATES STARR, a close friend and former Rockford classmate. Miss Starr's enthusiastic response and willingness to take part in the experiment convinced Jane Addams that her idea was worth trying. A month later she visited Toynbee Hall in London's East End, the university settlement opened in 1884 by a group of Oxford men seeking, under the influence of men like Ruskin and Tolstoi, to alleviate the bitter human consequences of rapid industrialization. Here she observed in actual operation an institution of the type she had envisioned and began a long association from which both sides were to gain much. By February 1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Starr were in Chicago, explaining their idea and looking for a house to rent. The enthusiasm they encountered surprised them. "The truth is," Miss Starr wrote to a friend, "the thing is in the air. People are coming to the conclusion that if anything is to be done towards tearing down these walls . . . between classes, that are making anarchists and strikers the order of the day it must be done by actual contact and done voluntarily from the top" (letter to Mary Blaisdell, Feb. 23, 1889, Sophia Smith Collection) . The result of their search was the decaying Hull mansion on the corner of Polk and Halstead streets, originally built by a Chicago businessman as a country residence but now in the heart of the crowded Nineteenth Ward with its 5,000 Greek, Italian, Russian, German, Sicilian, and other immigrants—part of the foreign population which made up three-fourths of Chicago's million inhabitants. In September 1889 the two young women moved in and declared themselves "at home" to the neighbors. For the remaining forty-six years of her life, though Jane Addams traveled all over the United States and in many parts of the world, Hull House remained her home and the reflection of her thought and personality. An important part of her early concern was with overprivileged young people, especially young women like herself, who needed to connect with the real life of the world. "Jane's idea," wrote Ellen Starr in 1889, "which she puts very much to the front . . . is that it [settlement work] is more for the benefit of the

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Addams people who do it than for the other class. . . . Jane feels that it is not the Christian spirit to go among these people as if you were bringing them a great boon: that one gets as much as she gives" (ibid.). Miss Addams elaborated this theme in "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements," an address at the Summer School of Applied Ethics in Plymouth, Mass., in 1892. "In time," she wrote years later, "we came to define a settlement as an institution attempting to learn from life itself . . (Second Twenty Years, p. 408). This meant, in the beginning, simply responding to immediate community needs. By 1893 Hull House was the center of some forty clubs, functions, and activities, including a day nursery, gymnasium, dispensary, and playground, cooking and sewing courses, and a cooperative boardinghouse for working girls; and 2,000 people each week were crossing its threshold. Like Ruskin and William Morris, Jane Addams saw an intimate relationship between art and social justice, and Hull House also became a center for artistic expression. The first addition was the Butler Art Gallery; the Hull House players pioneered in little theatre, with a repertoire ranging from Galsworthy to Greek tragedy with an all-Greek cast; and the Music School under Eleanor Smith gave popular concerts and offered young immigrants an opportunity to develop musical talent. One secret of the success of Hull House was Miss Addams' talent for attracting able people and putting them to work. Probably no more remarkable group of women could have been assembled in the country than the quartet composed of Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton, JULIA LATHROP, and F L O R E N C E K E L L E Y . Part-time residents SOPHONISBA BRECKINRIDGE and the gifted Edith and GRACE ABBOTT were hardly less notable. Among the younger residents were Gerard Swope, later president of the General Electric Company, and such literary and editorial figures as Robert Morss Lovett of the University of Chicago, Francis Hackett, William L. Chenery, and HARRIET MONROE—an eager group longing, as Miss Addams put it, "to construct the world anew and to conform it to their own ideas." Not in residence, but important in many Hull House ventures, were such Chicago reformers and social leaders as Lyman Gage and Henry Demarest Lloyd. At first Jane Addams paid the expenses from her own pocket, but rapid growth and the depression of 1893 strained her comparatively modest income and forced her to turn to the public. She proved gifted at this task, and by the late 1920's the annual Hull House budget

was nearly $100,000. Wealthy Chicago women were a chief source of support, among them Helen Culver, heir of the original Mr. Hull, whose gifts of land made possible the expansion of Hull House far beyond its original bounds; and Louise de Koven Bowen (Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen, 1859-1953), who became a leader in Chicago social welfare work. Gradually it became apparent that social clubs and neighborhood services alone were insufficient to meet the deep-seated problems afflicting the Hull House neighborhood. The publication in 1895 of Hull-House Maps and Papers reflected the changing outlook. This pioneer collaborative study of social conditions in the Nineteenth Ward (issued at a time when academic departments of sociology had hardly been born) dealt extensively with tenement conditions, sweatshops, and child labor. Hull House pressure had already influenced the passage of Illinois' first factory inspection act in 1893, and the succeeding years saw Hull House influence increasingly exerted in political battles for child labor laws, limitation on working hours of women, improvement in welfare procedures, recognition of labor unions, protection of immigrants, compulsory school attendance, and industrial safety. The establishment in Chicago of the nation's first juvenile court (1899) was largely a result of Hull House efforts. Most Hull House projects were group endeavors, with one or another of the residents taking the lead depending on special training or interest. Thus Florence Kelley spearheaded the sweatshop investigations, Grace Abbott worked for newly arrived immigrants, Alice Hamilton investigated the dangerous trades, Julia Lathrop made public welfare her specialty, Mrs. Bowen, the juvenile court, and Ellen Starr, the settlement's cultural activities. It was Jane Addams, however, who remained the center and focus of the undertaking. She served as a common bond uniting the strong personalities around her and helped them understand the broader significance of their varied activities. A protracted Hull House effort to defeat a notoriously corrupt alderman, for example, led Miss Addams to write a perceptive article, "Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption" (International Journal of Ethics, April 1898), contrasting the alderman's deep neighborhood roots with the moral abstractions of the reformers. She quickly became a sought-after lecturer, and her articles in the Atlantic, North American Review, and other periodicals were widely read. Her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), a collection of these lectures and articles, sums up the central concerns of

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Addams gerous was to drive it underground. Hull House accordingly opened its doors to every sort of doctrine, and discussions in the Working People's Social Science Club covered the ideological spectrum. Such visitors as Prince Kropotkin and William T. Stead (who wrote If Christ Came to Chicago!) contributed their own brands of social criticism. It was a heady experience for the residents—one later described it as the "most democratic exchange of ideas in all history"—but it alarmed a city still jittery from the Haymarket Riot and the Pullman Strike. What was Jane Addams' own political and social philosophy? Traces of her old interest in Comte, as well as something of the Oxford idealist philosopher Thomas H. Green, may be found in her constant emphasis on human solidarity. Echoes of Ruskin, of Mazzini (her father's hero), of Tolstoi (whom she visited in 1895), of her childhood brush with abolitionism and her girlhood exposure to the missionary atmosphere of Rockford Seminary—all these can be found. Perhaps her closest intellectual affinity was with the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. "We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results," she wrote, "and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims." Democracy, she added, must be "a rule of living as well as a test of faith" (Democracy and Social Ethics, p. 6). But her relationship with pragmatism was reciprocal. William James was a warm admirer—"You utter instinctively the truth we others vainly seek," he told her (Linn, p. 438)—and John Dewey during his University of Chicago days worked at Hull House. Jane Addams was the embodiment of Dewey's belief in learning by doing. On one occasion, to discover why the garbage was not being adequately collected in the neighborhood, she secured appointment as garbage inspector and for some time rose each morning at six to follow the irate collector on his rounds.

this period of her life: the interdependence of modern industrial society, and the consequent need for a new social ethic transcending the old code of personal morality and based upon actual grappling with the problems of urban life. Her unusual capacity to act as a bridge between disparate groups was nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in her writings about immigrants. At a time when many viewed the newcomers with fear, she welcomed the cultural diversity they brought to American life. In The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909) she feelingly described the heightened conflict between the generations experienced by immigrant families—a conflict she knew well from her own youth. By far her most successful book was Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). Eighty thousand copies of this sensitive and revealing work were published during her lifetime, many for school use, and it ranks among the great American autobiographies. Although New York's Neighborhood Guild had preceded it by three years, Hull House captured the popular imagination and came to be considered the pioneer American settlement. In 1909 Jane Addams was elected the first woman president of the National Conference of Charities and Correction (later the National Conference of Social Work); in 1910 she became the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale; and in 1911 she became first head of the National Federation of Settlements, a post she retained until her death. Celebrities from at home and abroad came to feel that no visit to Chicago was complete without a stop at Hull House. Theodore Roosevelt made several whirlwind tours, and the British socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb found it one of the few American institutions worthy of favorable mention. (Their visit was long remembered at Hull House as the occasion when Miss Addams, wishing to put the chain-smoking Mrs. Webb at ease, smoked the only cigarette of her life. ) Jane Addams' Chicago reputation long lagged behind her international fame. In its infancy Hull House was commended as a worthy exercise in Christian benevolence, but its emergence as a champion of the labor movement strained the enthusiasm of the city's wealthy citizens, many of whom came to view Miss Addams as a dangerous radical. Her visit to a Chicago anarchist friend imprisoned illegally after the McKinley assassination in 1901 aroused widespread denunciation and caused B E R T H A HONORÉ P A L M E R (Mrs. Potter Palmer) to withdraw her support. These difficulties stemmed in part from Jane Addams* belief that every opinion had a right to a hearing and that the surest way to make any idea dan-

In her personal relations, Jane Addams remained curiously remote. Friends testified to her benevolence, modesty, and good nature, but few professed to have penetrated the surface of her personality. "There was, despite her affectionate warmth and sympathy and understanding," wrote one shortly after her death, "something impersonal. . . ." To have known her was "akin to sharing in some blessing of nature, that like the sunlight, shone alike on the just and the unjust. One shared the gift gladly and gratefully, and without a personal stake in it exactly" (quoted in Conway, p. 763). Her nephew and biographer similarly acknowl-

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Addams edged that even her closest associates "sometimes felt her love as a radiation rather than as a direct and individual beam. They adored her, but they felt her sometimes to be a little withdrawn . . ." (Linn, p. 433). In striking contrast to this undifferentiated goodwill was her early relationship with Ellen Starr and her friendship with Mary Rozet Smith, an attractive woman several years her junior who, though a nonresident, was active in the Hull House circle. It was Mary Smith, of a wealthy Chicago family, who supplied the funds for many of Miss Addams' personal needs and who bore the major cost of the house near Bar Harbor where they spent a part of almost every summer from 1905 on. The two women toured Europe together in 1895, and over the years, until Miss Smith's death in 1933, exchanged a long series of deeply affectionate letters. The problems of the Nineteenth Ward which had drawn Hull House into the legislative arena inevitably led Jane Addams into a still wider world of political action. In 1912 she seconded Theodore Roosevelt's nomination at the Progressive party convention and campaigned vigorously for him all over the country. Her reply to friends who thought partisan political activity no place for a woman was revealing: "When a great party pledges itself to the protection of children, to the care of the aged, to the relief of overworked girls, to the safeguarding of burdened men, it is inevitable that it should appeal to women, and should seek to draw upon the great reservoir of their moral energy so long undesired and unutilized in practical politics . . ." ( Second Twenty Years, pp. 33-34). There was an additional appropriateness, which she did not mention, in the fact that Hull House had been the seedbed for many of the ideas embodied in the Progressive platform. Her work for woman suffrage, too, grew from her social concern. Rockford was an early center of suffrage sentiment, and her father had believed in it, but her active work for the cause came about in much the same way as did her work for the Progressives. There were things that needed doing, and the "moral energy of women" should be brought to bear upon them. Prostitution, for example, which she discussed in A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), was only one of many social problems that could be attacked more vigorously if women had the vote. She joined in the Chicago municipal suffrage campaign of 1907, and as first vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1911-14) she spoke widely for the cause. In 1913 she was a leading figure among those who attended the

Addams Budapest convention of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. As early as 1907 Jane Addams had published a book called Newer Ideals of Peace (in which she viewed the enforced "internationalism" of polyglot neighborhoods like the Nineteenth Ward as a potential force for peace), and when war broke out in 1914 her whole attention turned to this issue. In January 1915 she was elected chairman of the newly organized Woman's Peace Party in the United States, and that April she was chosen president of the International Congress of Women at The Hague. The Congress voted to urge the warring powers to call a conference of neutral nations to offer "continuous mediation" in the hope of ending the war, and with Dr. Aletta Jacobs of Holland, Jane Addams presented the proposal to leading European statesmen. Convinced that the belligerents genuinely desired a face-saving way to end the war, she made a serious effort to persuade President Wilson to initiate a conference of mediation, but without success. Despite her reservations about Henry Ford's famous "Peace Ship," only a severe attack of pneumonia prevented her from joining the would-be mediators who sailed for Europe in December 1915. When the United States entered the conflict in 1917, Jane Addams found herself, in company with others who had held out against the war, vilified on all sides. The Daughters of the American Revolution expelled her (she remarked that she had supposed herself to be a life member, but had discovered that it was only during good behavior). Few social workers, even among those at Hull House, shared her point of view; even John Dewey supported the war. Nevertheless, and although she valued the good opinion of her fellow citizens, on this issue no compromise was possible. She did find a wartime niche, however, with Herbert Hoover's Food Administration, and lectured throughout the country in the interests of increased food production to aid victims of the war. (Her respect for Hoover, whose efforts to relieve Belgian starvation she had observed and admired in 1915, was enduring: she supported him for president in 1928 and again in 1932.) Jane Addams reviewed this trying period in her Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922). The war's end brought no slackening in her work for peace. In 1919 she was elected first president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, an outgrowth of the 1915 Hague gathering. She held this post until her death, faithfully presiding over the league's conferences in Zurich, Vienna, Dub-

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Addams House, the neighbors filed by, sometimes as many as two thousand an hour. After funeral services at Hull House, she was buried in her native Cedarville. No summary of Jane Addams' achievement can be comprehensive. She is one of those rare figures whose popular appeal remains largely unaffected by the continuing process of scholarly scrutiny and reinterpretation. Her apotheosis, begun well before her death, caused her some uneasiness. At a dinner in 1927, after several particularly effulgent tributes, she said: "I sat here wondering what kind of person I was that you should be seeing not me, but this mirage you have described. I assure you it is not there. I am a very simple person . . ." (Linn, p. 436). Like many of the first generation of college women, she remained single, yet no one ever called her unfeminine. Beautiful as a girl, she had an arresting magnetism that transcended feature or dress. People who saw her once remembered it as an event years later. She spoke and thought much about woman's "long historical role of ministration to basic human needs," and she strove to fill this role, whether it meant acting as a midwife for an illegitimate baby whom the scandalized immigrant housewives around Hull House would not touch or standing firm against a popular war. Although Jane Addams had clear convictions which she never hesitated to express, her influence did not stem from the mere assertion of abstract ideas. Her mind was not the skilled instrument of the scholar or the logician, but one of intuitive wisdom. She was a mystic possessed of a devastating common sense who viewed everyday experience from a new angle of vision, distilling from it compelling insights into the human and social cost of industrial capitalism and international conflict. One could well apply to Jane Addams a phrase she liked to quote in describing Lincoln, that he had dug "the channels through which the moral life of his countrymen might flow."

lin, Prague, and elsewhere. She strongly supported C A R R I E C H A P M A N C A T T ' S National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, organized in 1925. Her long search for what William James had called a moral equivalent of war was recognized in 1931 when she shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University. She at once gave her half of the prize, some $16,000, to the Women's International League. Miss Addams was profoundly disturbed by the drift of American life in the 1920s. The failure of the United States to join the League of Nations dismayed her; prohibition seemed a mixed blessing at best; communication with young people of the postwar generation was difficult; and the widespread pressure for intellectual and political conformity affronted her deep-seated belief in tolerance and free expression. In 1920 she helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union, and she served on its national committee throughout the decade. By the time she wrote her second autobiographical volume, The Second Twenty Years at HullHouse (1930), the optimism which had characterized the first was somewhat dimmed. People commented now upon the sadness in her eyes; the remote quality beyond her warmth and open friendliness became more pronounced. Even Hull House lost some of the spark and vitality of its pioneering days. But if Jane Addams had seen too much and felt too much for easy optimism, she still preserved the saving grace of a sense of humor. The D.A.R., the American Legion, and other groups continued their sporadic attacks in the 1920's, but Jane Addams was increasingly given a place of honor which ultimately verged on adulation. A world trip in 1923 resembled a regal procession, and a 1928 visit to Hawaii to preside over the conference of the PanPacific Women's Union was a similar personal triumph. The year 1931 brought not only the Nobel award but also the $5,000 M. Carey Thomas Prize from Bryn Mawr College. In her final years honors came thick and fast. Her birthdays were widely celebrated. She was regularly ranked first on lists of "America's greatest women," and even, at long last, accepted as Chicago's leading citizen. The depression brought Hull House and its head resident new tasks and new responsibilities, but Jane Addams' health, never buoyant, was failing rapidly. She underwent major surgery in 1931 and two years later suffered a severe heart attack. She remained active until 1935, however, when she was stricken with intestinal cancer. On May 21, at seventy-four, she died. For two days, as her body lay in Hull

[The principal manuscript sources are the Jane Addams Papers in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection and the Ellen Gates Starr Papers in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. Jane Addams' books also include The Long Road of Woman's Memory ( 1 9 1 6 ) ; The Excellent Becomes the Permanent ( 1 9 3 2 ) , a collection of memorial essays; My Friend, Jtdia Lathrop ( 1 9 3 5 ) ; and, with Emily Balch and Alice Hamilton, Women at The Hague: The Internat. Congress of Women and Its Results ( 1 9 1 5 ) . F o r a partial listing of her many articles, essays, and published addresses, see M. Helen Perkins, A Preliminary Checklist for a Bibliog. on Jane Addams ( 1 9 6 0 ) , which also cites useful secondary sources. The basic biography is

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Agassiz

T h e wealth of Grandfather Perkins provided the Carys with a home in Temple Place, Boston, where their neighbors were Perkins, Cabot, and Gardiner relatives. In this lively extended family Lizzie passed her later childhood, a "gay and enthusiastic" youngster who excelled in the family pastimes of music and amateur theatricals. Like her brothers and sisters, she was trained by a governess, but she alone of the children was not sent to school, for her health was considered delicate. Save for brief attendance at E L I Z A B E T H PEABODY'S informal history class, she stayed home, studying languages, drawing, and music, and reading rather indiscriminately. Sociable like her mother, Lizzie passed easily from the family circle into upper-class Boston society, and her older sister's marriage in 1 8 4 6 to Cornelius C. Felton, professor of Greek at Harvard, brought Lizzie into a circle of Cambridge intellectuals. At a Felton supper party she met Louis Agassiz, the renowned Swiss naturalist, who had come to America on a scientific mission but remained to accept the first professorship in Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School. In May 1849 she came to live with the Feltons, thereafter spending much time with Agassiz, whose wife had died the year before. On Apr. 25, 1850, the two were married in King's Chapel, Boston. Although Lizzie had written her fiancé that she longed to give up "the responsibility of all important decisions," she proved the stabilizing partner in the marriage. She guarded the health of this "erratic genius," answered much of his mail, took care of family (and sometimes scientific) finances, and superbly mothered the three children of his first marriage—Alexander, Ida, and Pauline (see P A U L I N E AGASSIZ S H A W ) , whose ages in 1 8 5 0 ranged from fourteen to nine. She had no children of her own. Mrs. Agassiz took notes on nearly all her husband's lectures, thereby providing him with much of what he published. Although she insisted on her lack of scientific competence and sometimes feared that her own concern for the "picturesque" might weaken Agassiz's thought, she developed a remarkable ability for "presenting second-hand knowledge accurately and with . . . animation and authority" (Paton, p. 6 4 ) . In 1859 and 1 8 6 5 she published introductory guides to marine zoology, the second in collaboration with her son Alexander. In 1854, after the Agassizs built a large house at 3 6 Quincy Street, Cambridge (Mrs. Agassiz's home thereafter), she conjured up the idea of founding a school for girls, utilizing the third floor. She could thus meet household expenses strained by her husband's insatiable col-

James Weber Linn, Jane Addams (1935). The centennial of her birth gave rise to many articles, some of them perceptive; see especially Georgia Harkness in Christian Century, Jan. 13, 1960. Anne F. Scott, "Saint Jane and the Ward Boss," Am. Heritage, Dec. 1960, and Allen F. Davis, "Jane Addams vs. the Ward Boss," Jour. III. State Hist. S oc., Autumn 1960, recount her campaign against the corrupt alderman. Recent interpretive essays include Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (1889-1963): The Intellectual as a Social Type ( 1 9 6 5 ) , chap, i; Jill Conway, "Jane Addams: An Am. Heroine," Daedalus, Spring 1964; Daniel Levine, Varieties of Reform Thought ( 1 9 6 4 ) , chap, i; Merle Curti, "Jane Addams on Human Nature," Jour, of the Hist, of Ideas, Apr.-June 1961; Anne F. Scott's introduction to the John Harvard Library edition of Democracy and Social Ethics ( 1964 ) ; and John C. Farrell, Reloved Lady: A Hist, of Jane Addams' Ideas on Reform and Peace (1967). See also Edwin B. Yeich, "Jane Addams," Hist. Rev. of Berks County (Pa.), Oct.-Dec. 1951 (on her ancestry); Edith Abbott, "The Hull House of Jane Addams," S oc. Service Rev., Sept. 1952; Ida H. Harper, ed., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, vols. V and VI ( 1 9 2 2 ) ; Marie L. Degen, Hist, of the Woman's Peace Party (1939); Gertrude Bussey and Margaret Tims, Women's Internat. League for Peace and Freedom (1965). Useful references to Jane Addams may be found in autobiographies of her associates, such as Alice Hamilton and Robert Morss Lovett, and in such biographies as Josephine Goldmark's Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelley's Life S tory (1953), Mercedes M. Randall, Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Batch ( 1 9 6 4 ) , and Louise C. Wade, Graham Taylor (1964).] ANNE FIROR SCOTT

AGASSIZ, Elizabeth Cabot Cary ( D e c . 5, 1 8 2 2 - J u n e 27, 1 9 0 7 ) , first president of Radcliffe College, was born in Boston, Mass., at the home of her maternal grandparents. She was the second of five daughters and of the seven children of Thomas Graves Cary and Mary Ann Cushing (Perkins) Cary. Although both the Cary and Perkins families had come to Massachusetts from England in the early seventeenth century and had grown wealthy, Thomas Cary's father had lost his fortune, invested in West Indian plantations. Thomas, a Harvard graduate of 1811, had little success in a law practice in Brattleboro, Vt. ( 1 8 2 0 - 2 2 ) , or in business with brothers in New York City, where he lived for the following decade. In 1832 he brought his family to Boston and joined the mercantile firm of his father-in-law, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, benefactor of the Perkins Institution for the Blind. From 1 8 3 8 until his death in 1859 Cary was treasurer of the Hamilton and Appleton mills of Lowell. "A quiet business man, never brilliantly successful," his daughter "Lizzie" called him.

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tional Anderson School of Natural History on Penikese Island in Buzzard's Bay, a pioneer achievement both as a summer school and as a marine laboratory. "I can never tell anyone how delightful it was to live by the side of a mind so fresh and original, so prodigal of its intellectual capital. . . . It seems to me now that I am in danger of mental starvation," Mrs. Agassiz wrote after her husband's death, Dec. 14, 1873. She had little time for self-pity, however, for Alexander's wife died eight days later, leaving three young sons, and once again Mrs. Agassiz showed herself a devoted foster mother. Alexander, who called Mrs. Agassiz "my mother, my sister, my companion and friend, all in one," made his winter home with her (she summered at Nahant, he at Newport), and his copper-mining fortune brought her financial ease. A second consoling task was her preparation of Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence (1885). Perceptive and unsentimental, the book won contemporary acclaim that has been echoed by a more recent Agassiz biographer (Lurie, p. 4 2 2 ) .

lecting and spare him the distraction of extended public lecturing. Although she originally envisaged only the two older children helping her, her husband took up the idea as his own and extended it. Various Harvard professors helped in the program of the "Agassiz school," which opened in 1855, but Agassiz himself remained the star teacher. Mrs. Agassiz supervised, handled finances, and by her mere presence could quell unruliness. Although she taught little, if at all, she counseled the eighty students, aged fifteen to eighteen, and joined them at her husband's lectures. Family finances improved by 1863, and the school then closed. An unusually devoted couple, the Agassizs dreaded separations. Mrs. Agassiz accompanied her husband when he filled a professorship in the Charleston, S.C., medical school during the winters of 1851-52 and 1852-53, and in 1859 they visited Europe together. It was in keeping for her to join Agassiz on the Thayer Expedition to Brazil (April 1865-August 1866), especially since it was undertaken partly because of his ill health. She made herself scribe of the expedition, recording Agassiz's lectures and daily observations and keeping a general travel account. In Rio de Janeiro the Agassizs were warmly received by Dom Pedro II and his family, and largely because of Mrs. Agassiz's insistence, the Emperor allowed women to attend Agassiz's lectures. In more primitive regions, her humor and resourcefulness stood her in good stead. In answer to some Indians' request to see her native dance, she joined a companion in a waltz. A major literary and scientific result of the expedition was A Journey in Brazil (1867), by "Professor and Mrs. Louis Agassiz." The volume's voice was that of her journal, though the scientific observations and signed footnotes were Agassiz's. Readably combining scientific matters and observations of Brazilian society, the book was a popular success.

Widowed at fifty-one, Mrs. Agassiz was to find an absorbing interest in the establishment of Radcliffe College. The idea of a program of higher education for women taught by Harvard faculty originated, however, not with her, but with Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Gilman, Cambridge residents who had a daughter nearing college age. To promote the idea, seven women, none of them feminist crusaders or advocates of coeducation, were co-opted in the winter of 1878-79; Mrs. Agassiz was the sixth chosen. With few formalities, classes at the "Harvard Annex" began in September 1879 for twenty-seven young women. When in 1882 it became a corporation under the name "The Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women," Mrs. Agassiz filled the new office of president. Gilman, retaining his title of "secretary," performed many executive functions, and Prof. William E. Byerly, a Harvard mathematician, led the program of instruction. Work was done informally by a group of friends with little attention to hierarchy. Mrs. Agassiz's duties included fund raising and delicate missions to Harvard officials, such as President Charles W. Eliot. Although all classes were taught by Harvard faculty, there was no institutional link, and not until 1893 would the Harvard Corporation agree to one. It was then decided that this body, acting as "Visitors," would approve all faculty appointments, but organization, business affairs, and discipline would be left to the new institution's own Corporation. Diplomas, countersigned by

The postwar years found her husband's popularity at a new height, and on a visit to Washington in 1868 the Agassizs met the leading generals and politicians, though not President Johnson, whom Mrs. Agassiz judged to have "the spit-fire element" of Mount Vesuvius with "none of the grandeur." On Sept. 14, 1869, Agassiz suffered a cerebral hemorrhage which incapacitated him until November 1870. In the two great ventures remaining for him, Mrs. Agassiz shared fully. As scribe of the Hassler Expedition through the Strait of Magellan (December 1871-August 1872), she produced the only published account of her husband's further discoveries concerning glaciation (Lurie, p. 375). In 1873 she aided him in the planning and administration of the coeduca-

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Agassiz

the president of Harvard, would bear the Harvard seal, and the Annex would take the name "Radcliffe College," honoring Harvard's first woman benefactor. To Mrs. Agassiz's dismay, "sudden and startling protest" arose. Some former Annex students felt that Harvard had granted too little and that Mrs. Agassiz had not been aggressive enough. Although admission of Radcliffe students to graduate courses at Harvard was added to the agreement, a drive to obtain Harvard degrees for the women students failed. From another quarter, representatives of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae objected that the institution had little endowment and that Harvard had made no permanent commitment, thus opening the possibility of an inferior woman's college. When these latter critics appeared as challengers at legislative hearings on a bill to charter Radcliffe as a degree-granting institution, their threat was forestalled by President Eliot's assurances of good faith and by Mrs. Agassiz's remarks: "If our endowment is small, the active and cordial cooperation of the professors . . . of Harvard is better than money for us." According to Eliot, Mrs. Agassiz's dignity and integrity carried the day. The objectors withdrew, and the bill was signed Mar. 23, 1894. In the internal reorganization that followed, Mrs. Agassiz remained president, but two new offices—regent (Arthur Gilman) and dean (AGNES IRWIN)—were created. Mrs. Agassiz's attempt in 1899 to resign brought such protests from her associates that she agreed to remain as "honorary president." This modification simply continued the gradual process by which she was yielding responsibilities to Miss Irwin. In 1903 Mrs. Agassiz insisted on giving up even this office. To her delight, the new president, LeBaron R. Briggs, came from the Harvard faculty, and through her characteristic talent for forestalling friction, in good part from a ruffled Miss Irwin, his election was unanimous. Mrs. Agassiz stressed Radclifie's value in training teachers, but she also justified women's education "purely for its own sake." Although she believed that natural laws barred women from certain careers, she would allow no "ladies' degree" to be created for Radcliffe and denied that even "the largest liberty of instruction" could "impair true womanhood." She took virtually no part in curricular decisions; however, she constantly favored full equality with Harvard's standards, judging that without the Harvard connection the creation of another woman's college would be "undesirable and superfluous."

To the students she was often held up as an ideal. She met them at weekly teas and (in an affair which she dreaded) annually presented diplomas and a commencement address. Her insight aided such decisions as committee assignments and location and design of buildings. Gifts made in her honor included a scholarship fund in 1895 and a student activities building bearing her name, given on her eightieth birthday. As one associate (Henry L. Higginson) said, "She would not like to hear that she had founded the college," but no one was better suited to represent the institution when its only prospects lay in its largely intangible relations with Harvard. The policy of coordinate women's colleges, in which the founders of Radcliffe led the way in America, proved only a halfway house on the road to coeducation, but it was the most feasible step at the time to give women access to the educational resources of the older Eastern universities. Radcliffe did not dominate Mrs. Agassiz's daily life. "A born homemaker," she continued to care most about her family, including a fourth generation of American Agassizs. She visited California in 1892 and Europe, where she examined the English women's colleges, in 1894-95. Slender and delicate-featured as a young woman, in later years Mrs. Agassiz grew portly, and her heavy old-fashioned gowns and white lace widow's caps made her an imposing figure. Her full cheeks and drooping eyelids gave her in photographs a drowsy appearance, quite inappropriate for a woman William James called "wide awake." Her love of music lasted throughout her life: she enjoyed opera, belonged to choral groups, and felt the need of a piano wherever she lived. Her favorite novelist was Charlotte Brontë, and her reading included travel accounts, the classics, and theology ("Yet still the mysteries remain," she wrote). Brought up a Unitarian, Mrs. Agassiz was a churchgoer but not a member in later life. Never outspoken on public issues, she joked about prohibitionists in family letters and in her diary condemned the Spanish-American War as "unholy." In the summer of 1904, at eighty-one, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, followed by a trying invalidism. A second stroke three years later caused her death, in Arlington Heights, Mass. She was buried beside her husband in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge. [Lucy Allen Paton, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz: A Biog. ( 1 9 1 9 ) , includes many letters and documents and is especially strong on Radcliffe history. Concerning Mrs. Agassiz's ancestry and domestic

24

Ahem

Aliern concerns, more can be learned from Louise Hall Tharp, Adventurous Alliance: The Story of the Agassiz Family of Boston ( 1959 ). Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science ( I 9 6 0 ) , indicates the importance of her role in her husband's life and work. Of her own writings, A First Lesson in Natural History ( 1859 ), and, with Alexander Agassiz, Seaside Studies in Natural History ( 1865) are able guides to observation and classification. A Journal in Brazil (1867), co-authored by her husband, and Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence (2 vols., 1885) show her considerable skill as a writer, but also her disinclination to write about herself. Her papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, include a small part of her outgoing letters and her diaries for 1877-80 and 1892-1906. The Radcliffe College Archives contain clippings about her, a very small collection of her presidential correspondence, and such fugitive items as Henry L. Higginson's MS. address, "Mrs. Agassiz." A list of articles on early Radcliffe history appears in Paton, p. 193; of these, Arthur Gilman, "Elizabeth Cary Agassiz: First President of Radcliffe College," Harvard Graduates' Mag., Sept. 1907, is especially valuable. Mrs. Agassiz's commencement addresses from 1894 on appeared in the Harvard Graduates' Mag.] HUGH

Miss Ahern infused the journal with a teacher's enthusiasm; she undertook to answer questions, and many young library workers benefited from her helpful advice. At a time when trained librarians were few in number, Miss Ahem's periodical did much to transmit the best current practices (such as the Dewey decimal system) to the many new libraries springing up under the stimulus of Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy. One of her early interests was the school librarian, As secretary of the library section of the National Education Association ( 1 8 9 6 - 1 9 0 7 ) she secured the attendance of library delegates at N.E.A. meetings, to plan cooperative work between schools and libraries. Forceful and vivacious, Miss Ahern was a 'librarian militant." In the words of Melvil Dewey, library leader and advocate of simplified spelling, "Her keen mind & fasil pen wer enlisted promptli in everi good librari cauz" (Libraries, December 1931, p. 4 3 8 ) . During the first two decades of the twentieth century, as standards for library training evolved, Miss Ahem's forthright criticism proved a significant shaping force. The scope of her periodical having broadened, she changed its title in 1926 to Libraries.

HAWKINS

AHERN, Mary Eileen (Oct. 1, 1860-May 22, 1 9 3 8 ) , librarian, was born on a farm in Marion County, Ind., southwest of Indianapolis, the second daughter and second of three children of William and Mary (O'Neill) Ahem. Both parents were natives of Ireland, the father of County Cork, the mother of County Clare. Her father was a Catholic, but Miss Ahem apparently attended a Presbyterian church in later years. She was educated in the public schools of Spencer, Ind., to which the family moved in 1870, and the Central Normal College of Indiana. After graduating in 1881, she taught for several years in Bloomfield, Spencer, and Peru, Ind.

Mary Eileen Ahern held office in many professional societies. She organized the Indiana Library Association and acted as its secretary ( 1 8 8 9 - 9 6 ) . She was a life member of the American Library Association and served on its council for fifteen years; she was also a member of the American Library Institute (limited to 100) and at one time its secretary. Although a member of the Chicago Woman's Club and Women's City Club, she opposed woman suffrage. Having served in France for six months in 1919 in charge of publicity for the War Library Service of the American Library Association, Miss Ahern became interested in developing international library cooperation. She went abroad again in 1927 to study the organization and administration of French and British libraries, which she later described in journal articles. Because of failing eyesight, she relinquished her editorial work in 1931 at the age of seventy-one. So closely had her periodical been associated with her that, by general consent, it came to an end with her retirement. Stricken with arteriosclerotic heart disease, she died seven years later near Atlanta, Ga., while on her way back to Chicago from Florida; her body was cremated. In summing up her life, Library Occurrent emphasized Miss Ahem's encouragement of young librarians, the attention she gave to the role of library trustees, and her

Miss Ahern first entered library work in 1889 as assistant state librarian of Indiana. In 1893, having catalogued all the material for the State Library, she was chosen by the legislature as state librarian. Believing that this post should be removed from politics, she led a successful campaign to have it placed under the State Board of Education, at the same time ruling herself out for reelection when her two-year term expired. In September 1895 she enrolled as a student in the department of library economy at Armour Institute in Chicago, from which she graduated in April 1896. She was at once appointed editor of a new monthly periodical, Public Libraries, established by a Chicago firm, the Library Bureau, and designed especially for the needs of the smaller library. From its first issue (May 1896)

25

Aitken

Aitken

these are known from the period 1802 to 1812, among them Charles Willson Peale's An Epistle . . . on the Means of Preserving Health (1803); the constitution of the Philadelphia Female Association (1803); Part I of Volume VI of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (1804); Volumes I and II of the Memoirs of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture (1808 and 1811); the Philadelphia Census Directory (1811); various catechisms and religious works; official records of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America; and a novel, Kelroy, by "A Lady of Pennsylvania" [Rebecca Rush] (1812). Her most important publication, and the one which gained Jane Aitken the reputation for excellence noted by the contemporary historian of printing Isaiah Thomas, was the four-volume Thomson Bible of 1808; a new translation prepared by Charles Thomson, former secretary of the Continental Congress, this was the first English translation of the Septuagint (the Greek version of the Old Testament) and perhaps the only Bible ever printed by a woman in America.

furtherance of businesslike administration of libraries. [The facts of Miss Ahern's life have been drawn chiefly from her own periodical, particularly the Dec. 1931 issue. Her unpublished letter to William E. Henry, Nov. 28, 1932, in the files of the Ind. State Library gives a detailed account of her campaign to take that library out of politics. See also: Pictorial and Biog. Memoirs, Indianapolis and Marion County, Ind. ( 1 8 9 3 ) , pp. 1 2 0 - 2 1 ; Sarah K. Vann, Training for Librarianship before 1923 ( 1 9 6 1 ) ; Library Occurrent, Apr. 1919, pp. 1 6 5 - 6 8 , and July-Sept. 1938, pp. 3 3 5 - 3 6 ; Bull, of Bibliog., May-Aug. 1925, p. 125; Library Jour., June 1938, p. 4 5 5 ; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1 9 1 4 - 1 5 ; Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1 9 4 2 ) ; Indianapolis News and Indianapolis Star, May 24, 1938. Other information from transcript of record of Mary Eileen Ahern at Armour Institute, 1 8 9 5 - 9 6 , now on file in the Univ. of 111. Graduate School of Library Science; from the Spencer ( Ind. ) Public Library; and from the Ind. State Lib.] HARRIET D. MAC PHERSON

AITKEN, Jane (July 11, 1764-Aug. 29, 1832), printer, bookseller, and bookbinder, the first of four children of Robert and Janet (Skeoch) Aitken, was born in Paisley, Scotland, where her father ran a stationer's shop and circulating library. In 1771 the Aitkens joined the Scottish emigration to the New World, arriving in Philadelphia on May 10. Jane's early life is unknown save for the appearance of her handwriting in her father's records. Her later career would certainly suggest that she took an active part in his business, which combined a bindery and printing press with a book and stationer's shop. At his death in 1802 Robert Aitken left a family "carefully brought up in the paths of industry and virtue" and well trained in the book trades. He also left to Jane the responsibility for $3,000 in debts and the care of two younger sisters, Margaret and Mary Ann (or Marion), the latter recently widowed. The debts ( as documents in the Aitken-Vaughan Papers reveal) were largely those of Mary Ann's late husband, Charles Campbell, a clock- and watchmaker, for whom Aitken had signed a number of notes; they were not, as was long believed, incurred in his printing of the Aitken Bible of 1782—the first English Bible printed in America. Whether Jane's invalid mother was still living is unknown, for she is not mentioned in her husband's will. The only son, Robert Aitken, Jr., had been disowned by his father and was in any case unable to assist them financially. At thirty-eight years of age, a spinster as she would remain, Jane Aitken thus took over her father's business and began to issue publications over her own imprint. At least sixty of

Despite this continual work as a printer, Jane sometimes had to depend entirely on her bookbinding for support (letter to Ebenezer Hazard, Nov. 5, 1804). The existing bindings known as her work—some 400 volumes bound for the American Philosophical Society, a number of author's presentation copies of her imprints, and the first receipt ledger of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia—show remarkable skill and taste. Their similarity to the bindings which issued from her father's shop from the 1780's to 1802 raises the possibility that Jane was responsible for much of this output, in design if not in execution. The evidence of her bindings entitles Jane Aitken to a high place in the history of American bookbinding; she is, in fact, the only woman binder of such skill known to us from this period. Proven skill and hard work were not, however, enough to overcome the handicap of inherited debt. Her good friend John Vaughan, librarian of the American Philosophical Society, helped her in every way possible, with commissions for binding, loans, and advice—but to no avail. Jane failed once and then again; in 1813 her equipment was sold at sheriff's sale and bought in large part by Vaughan, who then leased it back to her on advantageous terms; but in 1814, it is said, Jane "sponged her debts [i.e., was imprisoned for debt, the only recourse before the development of bankruptcy laws] in Norristown Jail, 20 miles from Philadelphia" (McCulloch, p. 104). She appears very seldom from this time on: her last known

26

Akers

Aleott beth Sewall ( 1 8 3 5 - 1 8 5 8 ) , and Abbie May ( 1 8 4 0 - 1 8 7 9 , married Ernst Nieriker, 1 8 7 8 ) . Their father, Amos Bronson Alcott ( 1 7 9 9 1 8 8 8 ), was destined for a career as schoolmaster, educational innovator, Transcendentalist, traveling lecturer, and, in his later days, the celebrated "Father of Little W o m e n . " Louisa's mother, Abigail ( " A b b a " ) May ( 1 8 0 0 - 1 8 7 7 ) , was of old-line Boston stock, descended on her mother's side from Judge Samuel Sewall, and daughter of a prominent warden of King's Chapel, Col. Joseph May. Her brother was the Rev. Samuel J. May, noted Unitarian clergyman and abolitionist.

binding was executed in 1 8 1 5 ; her listing in the city directory ends in 1819, as "late printer." She then disappears entirely until 1832, when her obituary appeared in the Germantown ( P a . ) Telegraph for Sept. 5: "In this village . . . the 29th ult., after a long and painful illness, Miss Jane Aitken, in the 69th year of her age, for many years a printer and bookseller of Philadelphia." Her burial place is unknown, but presumed to b e the now destroyed cemetery of the Associate Reformed (Presbyterian) Church in Philadelphia, of which she had long been a member. Her brother, Robert, an undistinguished printer, had died in 1826. One nephew, James MacLaren Campbell, carried on the family tradition as a Philadelphia bookseller in the 1830's.

Bronson Alcott was born and reared on a substantial farm in Wolcott, Conn., that was also the birthplace of his father. His career, in its many shifts and new starts, had unusually powerful effects upon the children, and especially upon the talented second daughter. His startling educational innovations in the Temple School in Boston, where Louisa was to recall a schoolroom celebration of her third birthday at which there was plumcake for everyone but herself, her early and continued moral instruction under her father's tutelage, the moves from one pinched set of rented rooms to another, the unrelieved vegetarian diet of plain boiled rice without sugar and graham meal without butter, the relentless pressure of a barely genteel poverty: these left an indelible impression. Louisa's literary career was literally an effort to provide an improvident family with a few of life's comforts. Through her writing she became the breadwinner.

[Manuscript sources: Archives of the Am. Philosophical Soc., Phila., in particular the AitkenVaughan Papers and the Librarian's binding account, 1803-23; Robert Aitken's Waste Book, 1771-1802, Library Company of Phila.; misc. correspondence, Hist. Soc. of Pa. Printed sources: Isaiah Thomas, Hist, of Printing in America (1810), pp. 77-78; William McCulloch, "Additions to Thomas's Hist, of Printing," in Am. Antiquarian Soc. Proc., Apr. 13, 1921; H. Glenn and Maude O. Brown, A Directory of the Book-Arts and Book Trade in Phila. to 1820 ( 1 9 5 0 ) ; Willman and Carol Spawn, "The Aitken Shop: Identification of an Eighteenth-Century Bindery and Its Tools," Papers of the Bibliographical Soc. of America, Fourth Quarter, 1963.] CAROL M. SPAWN

A K E R S , Elizabeth Chase. See beth Anne Chase Akers. ALBERTINA, Ann.

Sister. See

ALLEN, Eliza-

Yet if Alcott's unlucrative schoolmastering and his unorthodox "conversations" with children took their toll on the family's patience and physical fortune, his idealism and his special insistence that the child was a blessed rather than a damned creature of God led to an active encouragement of creativity and play in the children which provided the subject for Louisa's work. Equally important, through his associations the children were on familiar terms with leading New England intellectuals of the day, including Theodore Parker, Emerson, and Thoreau. Strongly influential, too, were the ministrations of the mother, a woman of incredible stamina, wisdom, and capacity for love. Possessed of a necessary patience, married as she was to an improvident, abstracted idealist, it was Abba Alcott who kept the family together, encouraged the failing husband in his moments of depression, made ends meet by accepting menial work, and exerted a profound, steadying impression on her daughters. At one crisis in the family fortunes, Mrs. Alcott worked for two

ROGERS, Elizabeth

A L C O T T , Louisa May (Nov. 29, 1 8 3 2 - M a r . 6, 1 8 8 8 ) , associated in the minds of thousands of youthful readers with J o March, the tomboy heroine of Little Women, was a prolific author of American juveniles, her published works numbering at least 2 7 0 items. Miss Alcott's chief contribution to American literature was in her charming and straightforward pictures of nineteenth-century domesticity, seen through the sensibility of the virginal adolescent girl of the day. T h e American home with its teapots and curtains, its centripetal and protective femininity, appears in her works with the vividness and detail of a Currier & Ives print. Of the influences upon her work, that of her family was foremost. T h e second of four girls, she was born in Germantown, Pa., on her father's birthday. Her sisters were Anna Bronson (born 1831, married John Pratt, 1 8 6 0 ) , Eliza-

27

Aleott years (1848-50) as a city missionary to the poor in Boston's South End, employed by a ladies' charitable society to dispense money, clothing, Bibles, and tracts. Her reports record an effort to bring order into the haphazard relief work of the day and a probing for the root causes of large-scale urban poverty which were well in advance of her time, as was her plea for greater respect and understanding in treatment of the poor. It was to Abba Alcott that Louisa dedicated her own books, the inscription of Work (1873) being characteristic: "To My Mother, whose life has been a long labor of love, this book is gratefully inscribed by her daughter." It was a bittersweet bringing up, this movement from failure to failure in an ever-hopeful father's career: the closing of the Temple School (1840) as a result of dwindling enrollment; the house in Concord, Mass., where Bronson Alcott's own children served his educational experimentation; his frequent absences from home on walking and lecturing tours; his short-lived, incredibly naive Utopian community named Fruitlands, at Harvard, Mass. (1843). A youthful diary entry of Louisa's for this period records: "December 10th—I did my lessons, and walked in the afternoon. Father read to us in dear Pilgrim's Progress. Mr. L. [the English reformer and faddist Charles Lane, co-sponsor of Fruitlands] was in Boston, and we were glad. In the eve father and mother and Anna and I had a long talk. I was very unhappy, and we all cried. Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed to God to keep us all together" (Cheney, pp. 38-39). Years later Louisa was to remember that the child "never forgot this experience, and her little cross began to grow heavier from this hour." That cross was her necessary but somewhat self-imposed role as family breadwinner. At eighteen, "schoolmarming" in Boston, she said of her mother in a diary entry: "I often think what a hard life she has had since she married,—so full of wandering and all sorts of worry! so different from her early easy days, the youngest and most petted of her family. I think she is a very brave, good woman; and my dream is to have a lovely, quiet home for her, with no debts or troubles to burden her. But I'm afraid she will be in heaven before I can do it" (ibid., p. 62). Having set for herself this life's task, Louisa early placed herself in many forms of service in order to eke out an income for the family. She worked as a seamstress, domestic servant, governess, teacher, and companion, experiences upon which she drew later for episodes in her fiction. In December 1862 she was accepted

Aleott for service as an army nurse and reported for duty in Georgetown, D.C. The poignant, sometimes overwhelming experiences in the Washington hospitals crowded an intense period of her life before she was invalided home in January with typhoid fever, and were recorded in her absorbing Hospital Sketches, appearing first in the Commonwealth (May-June 1863) and in book form in August of the same year. The favorable reception of Hospital Sketches confirmed Miss Alcott's serious intentions as a professional writer, a career she had been obscurely pursuing in any case for some dozen years. Beginning with the publication of the poem "Sunlight" by "Flora Fairfield" in Peterson's Magazine (September 1851), Louisa poured forth a variety of thrillers, poems, and potboilers and an occasional juvenile tale, mostly anonymous and pseudonymous, in the Saturday Evening Gazette, the Liberator, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Commonwealth. Her work ranged from the story "Mark Field's Mistake" and its sequel "Mark Field's Success" to the poem "With a Rose, That Bloomed on the Day of John Brown's Martyrdom," to a series of tales of violence for James Elliot's Flag of Our Union under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. She usually received sixty-five dollars for a novelette of 125 pages and five dollars for a poem. It is clear that by the time of the writing of Hospital Sketches the author's apprenticeship to her craft was over. In this series of deft and poignant sketches she was able to substitute the realities of an intense, personal experience of the war for the crude fantasies of her anonymous authors. If Samuel Clemens created an alter ego as an embodiment of his emergent American style, Louisa May Alcott, the authoress, emerges into a style of her own as "A. M. Barnard" suffers a lingering demise. The full confidence of the writer grew in the 1860's as she continued to grind out hack work while laboring on the manuscript of a lengthy romantic novel. In the meantime, "A. M. Barnard" went on supplying the Flag of Our Union with serials such as "V. V.; or, Plots and Counterplots" and "A Marble Woman." The novel, Moods (the title page quoted a passage from Emerson: "Life is a train of moods like a string of beads . . ."), was written in the attic of Orchard House, in Concord, in a period of comparative tranquillity in Louisa's life, the winter of 1860 when her father was for once earning a small living as the town's superintendent of schools. Bronson Alcott attempted unsuccessfully to peddle the manuscript for the next three years; it was

28

Aleott

Aleott

taken up in the end by Aaron Loring of Boston and, considerably reduced by the author, was published in December 1864. Sylvia Yule, eighteen, is forced to an unfortunate choice between two lovers, the one a fatherly Geoffrey Moor, the other a masterful Adam Warwick. Showing the influence of Hawthorne and Goethe, the novel had a flurry of sales, which then diminished. In a review the young Henry James offered excellent advice. "Miss Alcott doubtless knows men and women well enough to deal successfully with their every-day virtues and temptations, but not well enough to handle great dramatic passions. . . . With these qualities, there is no reason why . . . [she] should not write a very good novel, provided she will be satisfied to describe only that which she has seen" (North American Review, July 1865, pp. 280-81). A trip to Europe as the companion of Miss Anna Weld occupied Louisa in 1865, furnishing her with material for subsequent travel pieces. Upon her return to Concord in July of the following year, she was compelled to her writing table once again to pay off debts and support the family in its ever-present need. Turning seriously for the first time to the juvenile field, she now accepted the editorship of Merry's Museum, a girls' magazine, beginning her duties with the issue of January 1868 and taking a room at 6 Hayward Place in Boston. In May, Thomas Niles, Jr., of the Roberts Brothers publishing firm urged, as he had done earlier, that the market was ripe for a popular girls' book in a narrative vein similar to that of the highly successful boys' books by "Oliver Optic." Niles was confident of Louisa's ability. Mightn't she combine her powers of observation and sensitivity to adolescence in a domestic novel about youthful girls? With her family's encouragement, Louisa set to work. Her method of writing had evolved by this time: she would let stories work themselves out in her mind in such detail that the writing was virtually automatic and normally accomplished with a minimum of revision or alteration. For the story she now composed she had had a lifetime of thirty-five years to prepare. The cast of characters—her own family—needed merely to be brought into focus through a plain style, and for the plot, what better line than that of the most familiar and beloved family book, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. The essential theme of Little Women is that the four March girls, who "played" at Pilgrim's Progress when they were very little, must make Christian's journey an actuality in their own lives. "We are never too old for this . . . ," says Mrs. March, "because it is a

play we are playing all the time in one way or another. Our burdens are here, our road is before us, and the longing for goodness and happiness is the guide that leads us through many troubles and mistakes to the peace which is a true Celestial City. Now, my little pilgrims, suppose you begin again, not in play, but in earnest, and see how far on you can get before father comes home." For the March girls, the play world is the real world, and life is best approached at its most serious level as though it were a game. Three things unify Little Women in a way which Miss Alcott was never to achieve in later novels: the passing of the months of the year, from Christmastime to Christmas; the controlling image of a "Marmee"-dominated home, with father absent; and the game of Pilgrim's Progress. Each girl's "burden" is her special moral failing (paradoxically also the source of her charm ) : Jo's sharp tongue and quick temper, Meg's longing for worldly things, Beth's shyness, Amy's selfishness. But whereas Bunyan's Christian left home to go on pilgrimage, the March girls view home as their world and conduct their pilgrimage within its confines. The garret is more than a "play" Celestial City: it is where Jo fulfills her own pilgrimage, entering into the fullness of her own identity through the symbolic act of imaginatively re-creating her family in her books. Louisa Alcott did precisely the same thing in writing Little Women. The created image defined once and for all the values of the American middle-class home of that period, and this may help to explain the book's perennial charm. The success of the novel surprised everyone, including the publishers. Letters poured in from every source, especially from thousands of young ladies affected by Jo's moods, disappointments, and successes, and tearful over Beth's lingering demise. The first part, which had appeared separately on Sept. 30, 1868, was shortly followed by a second part on Apr. 14, 1869. Both parts had been written in brief periods of six weeks, with little revision. Six thousand copies of the first part had already been sold, and four thousand advance copies of the second part were ordered. These figures, large as they are, do not suggest the story's enormous popularity. The publisher was always behind in filling his orders. Thirteen thousand copies of the combined book were sold out in two weeks, and by the end of the year, thirty-eight thousand. In 1870, on her second European tour, this time in the grand style, Louisa received reports from the publisher that her follow-up story, An Old-Fashioned Girl ( 1870), had sold twenty-seven thou-

29

Aleott sand, that Moods was being reissued, and that fifty thousand copies of Little Women were now in print. For twenty years following the publication of Little Women until her death in 1888, Louisa was to find herself recognized as a celebrity, and her Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy familiar to every American household with children in it. A new mass readership had come upon the scene, a middle class of twelve- to sixteenyear-olds able to purchase inexpensively printed books. The demand for Miss Alcott's stories was incessant, and she obliged by producing them at a pace tiring to herself if not to her waiting public. Nearly every year saw at least one new volume, including seven more novels for girls and two, now forgotten, for adults, besides sixteen collections of her stories and sketches for children and adolescents first published in magazines like the Youth's Companion, St. Nicholas, and the Independent. Of these, Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag (6 vols., 1872-82), Silver Pitchers (1876), and Lulus Library (3 vols., 1886-89) are perhaps best remembered. Finding it hard to write in Concord, the author usually wintered in Boston, returning to Concord for summers of helping her widowed sister Anna care for an aged and ailing Abba Alcott. In most of her stories she deliberately strove for a simplicity of style and for a didactic and even moral effect. She had little talent for development of character or complication of plot; some of the later novels, written for serial publication, were completely episodic. Miss Alcott's power was not in the art of fiction as James had understood that term, but in observation of domestic detail. An Old-Fashioned Girl had recounted wholesome fourteen-year-old Polly's visit to the Shaw household in the city, where money and fashion ruled in place of love and duty. Little Men (1871), written in Rome, returned to Jo March and her husband, the fatherly Mr. Bhaer, now the proprietors of Plumfield, a lively boys' school based in good part on Bronson Alcott's educational theories. Miss Alcott next picked up an autobiographical tale begun ten years earlier. Work (1873), her second "adult" novel, attempts to record the progress of an American working girl. Events are strung together through the organizing principle of the particular service the heroine, Christie, is engaged in. The early chapters vividly portray the indignities Christie suffers as maidservant to a Boston suburban parvenu family, as governess to a pair of brats, fending off seduction attempts by a decadent uncle in the family, as a companion to a congenially insane young lady, as a seamstress in a sweatshop, and as an actress. The novel is at

Aleott its best when it conveys the sense of underpaid, undignified, groveling, dirty work that thousands of young girls economically trapped in a rapidly developing urban industrial society were commonly forced into, as Louisa had been herself. It degenerates rapidly, however, into a rural love story between its heroine and an unlikely Quaker farmer-florist named David Sterling whose original was possibly Henry Thoreau. Purged of these memories, the author could produce one of her best books for girls. Eight Cousins (1875) introduces orphaned, sickly Rose Campbell to an extended family of rollicking boy cousins and a delightful bachelor uncleguardian, Dr. Alec, who with a motherly greataunt in the background proceeds to rear her according to the dress reform and health foods ideas then popular in avant-garde Boston. The inevitable sequel, Rose in Bloom (1876), is more somber in tone, showing Rose searching for a meaningful adult role and meeting setbacks, both in her experiment in constructive philanthropy ( a housing project for respectable poor women) and in her attempt to save her dashing cousin Charlie from the evils of drink and other fashionably "fast" behavior. In the end, having learned "the gift of living for others," she is happily married to a cousin cast in an Emersonian mold. In 1877 Miss Alcott, "tired of providing moral pap for the young" (Cheney, p. 296), lapsed into her old sensational style in A Modern Mephistopheles, a novel, not for children, written incognito for Roberts Brothers' No Name Series. That summer, during her mother's final illness, she wrote Under the Lilacs (1878), a rather pallid story in which circus runaway Ben and his performing poodle find a new home. Jack and Jill (1880), beginning as a St. Nicholas serial with "no plan but . . . a boy, a girl, and a sled, with an upset to start with," immortalized "Concord young folks and their doings." In Jo's Boys (1886), her last novel, written by painful stages, a middle-aged Mrs. Jo, still the moral guardian of grown-up Little Men, sees them married off in a patchwork plot alternating melodrama with arguments for woman's rights and other reforms. The famous authoress enjoyed some of the fruits of fame. On a winter's visit in 1875 in New York she saw the sights with S A L L I E HOLLEY, a fellow boarder, attended the receptions of

M A R Y LOUISE

BOOTH,

ANNE L Y N C H

BOTTA,

and JANE CHOLY, and toured the city prisons with A B B Y H O P P E R GIBBONS. At the New England Woman's Club she mingled as one of the advanced women of the day with JULIA WARD HOWE,

30

CAROLINE SEVERANCE,

ABBY

MAY,

and

Aleott EDNAH C H E N E Y , later to be her biographer. Louisa Alcott was the first woman to register in Concord when Massachusetts gave women school, tax, and bond suffrage in 1879, and tried sporadically to "stir up" her fellow townswomen about voting; she did persuade Thomas Niles to publish HARRIET HANSON ROBINSON'S Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement in 1881. ( " I can remember when Antislavery was in just the same state that Suffrage is now, and take more pride in the very small help we Alcotts could give than in all the books I ever wrote. . . .") In 1882 she helped to start a temperance society in Concord. When Bronson Alcott in his eightieth year surprised Concord with the success of his Summer School of Philosophy, his practical daughter's rebellious spirit rose up again. " T h e town swarms with budding philosophers, and they roost on our steps like hens waiting for corn. Father revels in it, so we keep the hotel going, and try to look as if we liked it. If they were philanthropists, I should enjoy it; but speculation seems a waste of time when there is so much real work crying to be done. W h y discuss the 'unknowable' till our poor are fed and the wicked saved?" ( Cheney, p. 3 2 1 ).

Alden to cheer. Her last years were painful and bleak: refuge in Dr. Rhoda Lawrence's rest home on Dunreath Place in the Roxbury section of Boston, brief excursions to visit an incoherent father on Louisburg Square and an aging sister Anna, and a never-ending sense of obligation to her readers to embroider ever more tales, to meet the continuing demand for her work. Her last days were full of sickness, loneliness, and sorrow. Wasted and fragile, she paid a last visit to her dying father on Mar. 4, 1 8 8 8 . Complaining the next morning of severe headaches, she fell unconscious. Her affliction was fatal and was variously diagnosed as spinal meningitis or apoplexy or both. She died in Boston on Mar. 6, the day of her father's funeral, at the age of fifty-five. She was buried beside her parents at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord. [The chief manuscript collections are in the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Concord Public Library, the Louisa May Alcott Assoc. (Orchard House, Concord), the N.-Y. Hist. Soc., the N.Y. Public Library, and the Fruitlands restoration at Harvard, Mass. For further details on source materials, and for a full bibliography of her published writings, see Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott (1950). This biography—scholarly, absorbing, detailed, and extensively documented— marks the beginning of serious modern study of the subject and overshadows the excellent and sensitive, but partial and incomplete, biography by Katharine Anthony ( 1 9 3 8 ) , as well as earlier biographies, like Cornelia Meigs' The Story of the Author of Little Women: Invincible Louisa ( 1933 ), aimed at the insatiable juvenile market. Also of basic biographical importance is Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals ( 1889 ), edited by her friend and admirer Ednah D. Cheney. On Abba Alcott, see Sandford Salyer, Marmee: The Mother of Little Women ( 1 9 4 9 ) , and Elizabeth B. Schlesinger, "The Philosopher's Wife and the Wolf at the Door," Am. Heritage, Aug. 1957; on Bronson Alcott: Odell Shepard, Pedlar's Progress (1937).]

Altogether, success brought her little contentment. Periods of elation alternated with depression and exhaustion. T h e "impertinent curiosity" of reporters and tourists she found a torment, and the adulation of her readers was hard to accept. ( " I asked for bread, and got a stone,—in the shape of a pedestal.") Personal losses were hard; the death of her beloved mother in 1877, the death of her sister May in Paris late in 1879, her father's crippling stroke, the passing of the Concord sage and personal friend, Emerson, in 1 8 8 2 : these blows diminished the pleasure that she could take in financial security, her participation in reform causes, and her private charitable kindnesses both near and far away from home. Always father to her father, she now saw him a feeble, childlike invalid; always "Aunt L o u y " to adoring nephews, in 1880 she took over in earnest the bringing up of her dead sister's infant.

DAVID E. SMITH

A L D E N , Isabella Macdonald (Nov. 3, 1 8 4 1 Aug. 5, 1 9 3 0 ) , popular author of religious literature and church worker, was born in Rochester, N.Y., the fifth daughter and sixth child in a family of seven. Her father, Isaac Macdonald, was a merchant, well educated and a devout Presbyterian. Her mother, Myra (Spafford) Macdonald, was descended from John Spofford, a Yorkshireman who had settled in Rowley, Mass., in 1643. During Isabella's early childhood her family moved to Johnstown, N.Y., and then to nearby Gloversville. Because of the predominantly immigrant population at the public schools there her father thought it necessary to tutor her himself. When

A restlessness which increased with age was reflected in her continually placing herself under the care of physicians. She sought relief from her headaches, rheumatism, insomnia, vertigo, dyspepsia, and nervous prostration in a variety of healers and remedies: Dr. Eli Peck Miller and his friction gloves, Frigidarium, and Suditorium; Mrs. MARY BAKER EDDY and Christian Science; Dr. Conrad Wesselhoeft and homeopathy; Dr. Milbrey Green and his milk cure. And through it all Louisa ground out her stories, following the formulas that never failed

31

Alden

Alden placement, poverty, slums, and tenement life. The standard formula involved a young child who, encountering suffering and misery, met the evils of society with a strong individualistic pietism. Although pathos dominated, a strict poetic justice always ensured that material success would follow the patient practice of Christian love. Besides writing books, Mrs. Alden edited for twenty-two years (1874-96) the popular children's Sunday school weekly the Pansy, issued by the same Boston firm that published most of her books; her husband assisted her with the editing and in answering the letters of her many readers. From the magazine stemmed the Pansy Society, which enrolled young readers who pledged themselves to work to overcome faults of conduct. Within her denomination, Mrs. Alden for many years contributed Sunday school lessons to the Westminster Teacher and edited the Presbyterian Primary Quarterly; for thirty years she furnished an annual serial to the Herald and Presbyter of Cincinnati. She also taught Sunday school and took part in Presbyterian missionary societies. She avoided all doctrinal issues in her fiction, however, seeking to promote instead a united Christian front for evangelical work. She thus gave her aid to the interdenominational Young People's Society for Christian Endeavor, serving on the staff of its publication, the Christian Endeavor World, and writing two novels to popularize it; and for many summers she taught normal classes at Sunday school assemblies. When John H. Vincent began the Chautauqua movement in 1874, Mrs. Alden immediately offered her services as speaker and organizer. Her story Four Girls at Chautauqua (1876) is said to have given an important impetus to the success of that experiment. A friend and admirer of FRANCÉS W I L LARD, Mrs. Alden early joined the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and she lectured on behalf of temperance and woman suffrage. A "sweet-faced," motherly woman, she spoke with a "rich, pleasant voice" (Bolton, p. 74).

she grew old enough to leave home, she continued her education at three upstate New York boarding schools: the Oneida Seminary, the Seneca Collegiate Institute at Ovid, and the Young Ladies Institute at Auburn. Her interest in creative writing appeared at an early age, her first story, it is said, being published in a local newspaper when she was ten. As a girl she seems to have done a good deal of writing within the family circle. After finishing her education, she returned to the Oneida Seminary to teach in the primary grades. Here a friend, who had seen some of her work, submitted one of her novels without her knowledge in a contest which called for an explanation, suitable for children, of God's plan for salvation. She won first prize, and the novel, Helen Lester, was published in 1866. A slim volume with a child heroine, it had the narrative form, the didactic purpose, and the simplicity that were to remain characteristic of her literary work. On May 30, 1866, Isabella Macdonald became the second wife of Gustavus Rosinbury Alden (1832-1924), a native of Maine who had recently completed his preparation for the Presbyterian ministry at the Auburn Theological Seminary. The marriage confirmed her in her life's purpose, to "win souls for Jesus Christ." Her duties as a minister's wife took her to a succession of pastorates in New York state (1866—76), Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, with sojourns also as far afield as Winter Park, Fla. She gave close attention to the upbringing and education of her only child, Raymond Macdonald (born 1873). For a time, at least, she was "a constant sufferer from headache," limited by her physician to three hours of literary work a day (Willard and Livermore, p. 14). Yet for over four decades she carried on, along with her domestic duties, a remarkable program of religious writing, editing, and organizing. It was as author and editor that she was best known. Writing under the pseudonym "Pansy," a childhood nickname which she used to preserve her privacy, she turned out over seventyfive books in the course of five decades, from Ester Ried (1870) to An Interrupted Night (1929), nearly all of them through the Boston publishing house of Daniel Lothrop. Though a few were aimed at adult readers, the great majority were for children. Popular favorites in public and Sunday school libraries, her wholesome but lively tales for a time sold over a hundred thousand copies annually, and a number were translated into foreign languages. Some of the stories emphasized the dangers of alcohol in the home; others dealt with social dis-

Mrs. Alden's son, Raymond Macdonald Alden, became a professor of English literature at Stanford University and a noted Shakespeare scholar. Following his death and that of her husband in 1924, Mrs. Alden made her home with her daughter-in-law at Palo Alto, Calif., where she died of cancer at the age of eightyeight. At the time of her death she was writing her autobiography; this was completed by her niece GRACE LIVINGSTON H I L L and published as Memories of Yesterdays (1931). [Besides Mrs. Alden's own Memories, see Sarah K. Bolton, Successful Women (1888); Nat. Cyc.

32

Alden

Alden

legendary account of the unsuccessful suit for Priscilla's hand by the redoubtable (although pint-sized and middle-aged) Capt. Miles Standish, himself recently widowed, the romance of John and Priscilla Alden later became firmly established as part of the Pilgrim story and American folklore. That story, with its triumph of romantic love, was first told to the general public by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1858 with publication of his poem "The Courtship of Miles Standish." Longfellow based his account on several paragraphs written by the Rev. Timothy Alden, a descendant of John and Priscilla, and published in 1814 in a five-volume work titled Collections of American Epitaphs and Inscriptions with Original Notes. In his third volume Timothy Alden recounted an "anecdote, which has been carefully handed down by tradition." This was in substance, although not in detail, the story which Longfellow later told, and included the phrase "John, why do you not speak for yourself?" Priscilla's question framed the moral lesson of the poem: if you wish a thing to be well done, "You must do it yourself, you must not leave it to others!" As a setting for his story, Longfellow described an elysian world far removed from the harsh realities of life in seventeenthcentury Plymouth. He also added a number of embellishments to Timothy Alden's rendering of the event, including a reconciliation between John and Miles Standish. Timothy Alden had stated that "What report he [John] made to his constituent [Standish], after the first interview [between John and Priscilla], tradition does not unfold; but it is said, how true the writer knows not, that the captain never forgave him to the day of his death."

Am. Biog., X, 4 0 5 ; Frances E . Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) ; foreword by Grace Livingston Hill in Mrs. Alden's An Interrupted Night ( 1929 ) ; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1 9 1 4 - 1 5 ; N.Y. Times, Aug. 6, 1930, and editorial, Aug. 7. Helpful but uncritical material is available in Jean Karr, Grace Livingston Hill ( 1 9 4 8 ) . See also Jeremiah Spofford, A Genealogical Record . . . of Families, Spelling Their Name Spofford, Spafford . . . ( 1 8 8 8 ) , p. 2 8 7 ; and, for Gustavus Alden, General Biog. Catalogue of Auburn Theological Seminary, 1818-1918 (1918).] P A U L R.

MESSBABGER

ALDEN, Priscilla Mullins (b. 1602?), Pilgrim heroine of American folklore, was born in Dorking, Surrey, England, the daughter of William Mullins or Molines, a shoemaker. Mullins and his family, like the majority of passengers aboard the Mayflower, were not members of the original Separatist group that had settled in Holland but had joined the Pilgrims in England. Possibly he was recruited for the attempt at settlement because of his knowledge of a trade, as were others, including John Alden (a cooper); but it is more likely that he decided to leave England for religious reasons. An entry in the Acts of the Privy Council for April 1616 ordered a warrant "to apprehend and bring one William Mollins" before the Council, and a later entry continued Mollins in the custody of a Council official "until dismissed by their Lordships." If Mullins and Mollins were the same individual, the entries may be evidence that William Mullins was a Puritan whose religious beliefs brought him into difficulty with the Crown. Mullins took with him to America his wife, Mary, his daughter, Priscilla, a son, who was younger, and one servant. Only Priscilla survived the sickness and mortality of the terrible first winter, in which nearly half of the settlers perished. Her father's will directed Gov. John Carver, as one of Mullins' two overseers, "to have an eye on my wife and children and to be as fathers and friends to them," but before spring came, Carver too was dead. Orphaned for the second time, in a hostile environment where survival itself was much in doubt, Priscilla became a member of yet a third household. Her stay with that family was short, for some time between 1621 and 1623, she and John Alden were married in a civil ceremony. Their marriage was one of the first in Plymouth and probably the first between two young people not previously married. In part because it occurred in the early and heroic years of the Pilgrim settlement, and in part because of the

That there is any substance whatever to the story told by Timothy Alden and Longfellow is very unlikely. If Standish was in fact the victim of unrequited love, he speedily recovered, for he married a woman who had arrived in Plymouth aboard the Ann in 1623 and who very possibly had come to America at his request and invitation. And if relations between him and John Alden were strained, life for the two must have brought many awkward moments. Both were first settlers in the town of Duxbury; both served as magistrates on the central governing council of the colony; they worked closely together in adjudicating land disputes; and Sarah, the Aldens' second daughter, married Standish's eldest son, Alexander. Little is known of Priscilla's life after her marriage to Alden. She bore him eleven children, according to Gov. William Bradford's notation in 1650, but the names of only eight

33

Alexander

Alexander are known: John, Joseph, David, Jonathan, Elizabeth, Sarah, Ruth, and Mary. At least two of the children were b o m in Plymouth; others were born in Duxbury, to which John and Priscilla moved about 1631. By 1 6 3 3 Priscilla's husband had become a leader in the colony. He was elected annually to the colony Court of Assistants, its highest governing body, and twice served as deputy governor. He was also one of the eight bondsmen who in 1627 accepted responsibility for paying off the debt to the English investment company which had financed the settlement at Plymouth. T h e Aldens seem not to have been consistently prosperous; in 1 6 6 0 John was so "low in his estate" that the colony voted him a grant of £ 1 0 since he had spent "much time at the courts on the country's occasions and so hath done this many years." When John Alden died in September 1687, he left approximately £ 5 0 , not including real estate which he had apparently given away before his death.

Mass., the only child of Francis and Lucia Gray ( S w e t t ) Alexander. Her father was a largely self-taught painter who, after working as a portraitist in New England, journeyed to Italy in 1831. In Florence he met and painted a portrait of a Massachusetts girl, eighteenyear-old Lucia Swett; they were married in Boston in 1836. Mrs. Alexander, granddaughter of a prosperous Salem merchant, was known as a witty conversationalist, often rather eccentric in her behavior, but she was a deeply religious person who felt a sincere obligation to assist the poor. Her daughter Fanny spent a serene but sheltered childhood in Boston. Kept close under her mother's eye, she had no formal schooling and few playmates; her mother selected her reading matter and tried to protect her from all knowledge of evil. T h e young girl early evinced talent for drawing, singing, and poetry. Her father, to whom she was devoted, guided her in art but did not provide her with systematic instruction.

T h e date of Priscilla Alden's death is not known. Since she was not mentioned in her husband's will and is not among the persons who signed affidavits because of a personal interest in his estate, she probably predeceased him. W i t h most of her life and her death unrecorded, she is important only for what she later came to represent. Alone among the women who came to America on the Mayflower, she is familiar. Like the men aboard who survived and about whom by comparison much is known, she endured, winning the trial for life in a new settlement on the edge of the civilized world. In her survival and in the story of her marriage to John Alden, she symbolizes what Americans of her time and since have believed was the promise of their new world: a place where stories about people like herself and John Alden have happy endings.

When Fanny was sixteen, the Alexanders went to Europe, where they eventually settled in Florence. Fanny enjoyed her life in Italy, though her parents sometimes regretted their expatriation. Mrs. Alexander clearly dominated the household, and Fanny throughout her life unquestioningly obeyed her mother's will. Her friends and correspondence were carefully scrutinized, and even when she was elderly she was sometimes sent from the room when Mrs. Alexander anticipated that a matter unsuitable for her daughter was to be discussed. Simple and trusting, innocent of the ways of the world, Fanny was plain in appearance and plainly dressed, but she surrounded herself with beauty—old pictures, her drawings, and flowers. She held to an intense and unquestioning religious faith and attended the Christian Evangelical Church in Florence, which she considered the most appropriate to her Congregational background.

[Timothy Alden, A Collection of Am. Epitaphs and Inscriptions (1814), III, 264-74; William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. by S. E. Morison ( 1 9 5 2 ) ; Thomas Prince, A Chronological Hist, of New England (2 vols., 17365 5 ) ; Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, Nathaniel B. Shurtleff and David Pulsifer, eds. (12 vols., 1855-61); James Savage, ed., A Genealogical Diet, of the First Settlers of New England, I ( 1 8 6 0 ) , 23; file of the Mayflower Descendant, a quarterly magazine of Pilgrim genealogy and history, 1899-1937.] GEORGE

D.

LANGDON,

Her interests were twofold: her charities and her art. Having early acquired her mother's concern for charity, she made it her lifelong duty to aid the poor and unfortunate, providing them with food, clothing, and rent money, and helping also at the bedsides of the sick. Though unfriendly priests sometimes objected to her distributing Protestant hymnbooks and New Testaments, many Italian peasants accounted her a saint. T h e Alexanders, themselves comfortably situated, encouraged prosperous American friends to contribute to their charities, and Fanny in return often provided the donors with biographical sketches and drawings of the recipient. She also painted portraits and drew sketches specifically to earn

JR.

A L E X A N D E R , Francesca ( F e b . 27, 1 8 3 7 - J a n . 21, 1 9 1 7 ) , artist, author, and dispenser of charity in Italy, christened Esther Frances but better known by the name John Ruskin bestowed upon her in middle life, was born in Boston,

34

Alexander

Alexander

some elements of Tuscani and North Italian folk culture, and she produced a small and unique body of art, deep in its religious feeling and recreating something of the spirit of the Middle Ages.

money for her benefactions. Her letters to friends were filled with stories of the peasants, whose songs, folktales, and customs she closely observed. By the 1870's Fanny Alexander was becoming known in Tuscany and New England for her good deeds, but it was her contact with John Ruskin that catapulted her to international celebrity. In the fall of 1882 she was introduced to the English art critic by Henry Newman, an American artist and friend of the Alexanders, who thought that Ruskin would be interested in her illustrated manuscript of a collection of "Roadside Songs of Tuscany." Ruskin was fascinated by her precise, finely detailed, yet archaically simple drawings, which exemplified what he had been stressing in his own critical studies—simplicity, sincerity, and religious feeling. He bought the manuscript of "Roadside Songs" and one of a second book, the latter of which he published in 1883 as The Story of Ida under the single name Francesca. Subtitled Epitaph on an Etrurian Tomb, it went through several editions in both England and America and inspired poems by Lowell and Whittier. As Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford Ruskin lectured on Francesca's drawings; he introduced and edited Roadside Songs, published in 1884-85, and Christ's Folk in the Apennines (1887-89), a collection of biographical sketches and stories gleaned primarily from Francesca's letters to him. Her simple life and work seemed to be restoratives to Ruskin; she became his "Sorella" and Mrs. Alexander his "Mammina," and for ten years the Britisher and the two women corresponded frequently and intimately. The public demand for Francesca's work continued long after Ruskin's illness and death. Tuscan Songs (1897) was an elaborate and profusely illustrated reproduction of her earlier work, and The Hidden Servants and Other Very Old Stories Told Over (1900) went through five editions.

[The principal biography, sentimental and overeffusive, is Constance Grosvenor Alexander, Francesca Alexander: A "Hidden Servant" ( 1927 ). For a filli account of the relations between Ruskin and the Alexanders, see Lucia Gray Swett, John Ruskin's Letters to Francesca and Memoirs of the Alexanders ( 1931 ). Van Wyck Brooks, The Dream of Arcadia ( 1 9 5 8 ) , develops (pp. 1 8 1 - 8 8 ) an interesting account of Francesca's life in Florence. See also Marion H. Spielmann, "Francesca Alexander, and 'The Roadside Songs of Tuscany,' " Mag. of Art, XVIII ( 1 8 9 5 ) , 2 9 5 - 9 9 . ] PAUL

R.

BAKER

ALEXANDER, Mary Spratt Provoost (Apr. 17, 1693-Apr. 18, 1760), colonial businesswoman, was born in New York City, the third child and younger of two daughters of John Spratt and Maria (DePeyster) Schrick Spratt. Her father was a Scotch Covenanter born in a town about fifty miles south of Glasgow; a merchant and alderman in New York, he acted as speaker for the irregular assembly during "Leisler's Rebellion" (1689-91). Her mother came from a respected Dutch family of goldsmiths who had in the New World become noted merchants and political figures. After an apparently short and childless marriage to Paulus Schrick, Maria DePeyster had married John Spratt in 1687, and after his death in 1697 she became the wife of David Provoost (Provost), a merchant of Huguenot-Dutch ancestry whose smuggling activities won him the name of "Ready-money Provoost." After the deaths of her first two husbands she is said to have carried on their business affairs, a common Dutch custom. She herself died in 1700, after which her Spratt children went to live with their DePeyster grandmother. Under the indulgence of her grandmother and uncles Mary (known also as Maria and nicknamed "Polly") grew up a mischievous hoyden. She had dark, sparkling eyes, ruddy cheeks, and black curly hair, together with a pride that in later life would exhibit itself in a touch of snobbishness. On Oct. 15, 1711, she was married to Samuel Provoost, a younger brother of her mother's third husband and also a merchant. The erstwhile tomboy settled down as a model wife and business partner, investing her inheritance in Provoost's trading ventures. During the course of this marriage she bore three children, Maria, John, and David. Her son John became the father of Samuel Pro-

Francesca's last years were difficult. Her eyesight had begun to fail as early as 1885, and by the end of her life she was almost totally blind. Her refusal—out of modesty—to let a doctor properly set a broken hip left her incapacitated for many months and afterward very lame. After the death of her mother in 1916 at the age of 102, Francesca took to her bed and remained there until her own death, at seventynine, the following January. She was buried at the Cimitero degli Allori outside Florence. Even to her contemporaries Francesca Alexander seemed like a figure from another time. She lived far outside the mainstream of American life. She did, however, help keep alive

35

Allen

Alexander voost, later the first Protestant Episcopal bishop of New York. Some time between July 1719 and February 1 7 2 0 Mary Provoost's first husband died. On Jan. 5, 1721, she was married to James Alexander, a descendant of the Scottish Earls of Stirling, who had emigrated to America in 1715, becoming one of the leading lawyers and political figures in New York and New Jersey. T h e estate of her Provoost children was protected by a prénuptial agreement. During the ensuing thirty-nine years, Mary Alexander's life was divided between caring for her growing family, continuing the Provoost mercantile enterprises, and supporting her husband's public career. T h e Alexanders built and furnished a magnificent mansion on the east side of Broad Street; the family fortune in 1 7 4 3 was estimated at £ 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 .

Philadelphia to serve as Zenger's counsel in the famous trial of 1 7 3 5 in which he was acquitted of libel charges. James Alexander died in 1756. His wife administered his estate until her own death from pleurisy four years later, in New York City. Shortly after their marriage they had become Anglicans, she abandoning the Dutch Reformed faith and he the Presbyterian. She was buried next to Alexander in a vault he had purchased near the front of Trinity Church; this is now located outside the southwest corner of the present church building. [The most extensive account of Mary Alexander's life is in Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, The Qoede Vrouw of Mana-ha-ta ( 1898 ), a book professedly based on family traditions and records. Some corroborative materials appear in Livingston Rutherfurd, Family Records and Events (1894). For genealogical information see: David Provoost, "A Hist, of the Provoost Family" (MS., N.Y. Genealogical and Biog. Soc.; typescript copy at N.Y. Public Library); Andrew J. Provost, Biog. and Genealogical Notes of the Provost Family (1895); Waldron P. Belknap, The De Peyster Genealogy (1956). Other references: George J. Miller, "James Alexander and the Jews," Am. Jewish Hist. Soc., Publications, XXXV (1939), 171-88; Theodore Thayer, "The Army Contractors for the Niagara Campaign, 1755-1756," William and Mary Quart., Jan. 1957; William A. Duer, The Life of William Alexander, Earl of Stirling (1847), pp. 6-7, 48; Theodore Sedgwick, A Memoir of the Life of William Livingston (1833), pp. 58-59; abstracts of N.Y. wills in N.-Y. Hist. Soc., Collections, 1893, 1895, 1896 (for Mrs. Alexander's will see 1896, pp. 3 8 6 - 8 9 ) . There is no corpus of personal correspondence from or to Mary Alexander. Her business records and those of her husband are divided between the N.-Y. Hist. Soc. and the N.J. Hist. Soc.]

By her second husband Mrs. Alexander had seven children: Mary, James, William, Elizabeth, Catherine, Anne, and Susanna, of whom five reached maturity. T h e surviving son, William, became his mother's business partner and for a time, during the French and Indian War, aide and secretary to Gen. William Shirley. After his father's death, he unsuccessfully asserted his claim to be the sixth Earl of Stirling; as "Lord Stirling" he later gained fame as a general during the American Revolution, serving under Washington. Mrs. Alexander's four daughters married well; the eldest, Mary, became the wife of Peter Van Brugh Livingston, a merchant prominent in New York's revolutionary politics. As her children grew, Mary Alexander's own business ventures continued to prosper. She imported goods so extensively that it was said hardly a ship docked in New York without a consignment for her. These goods she sold, together with colony products, in her own store. In addition, her husband collected some of his lawyer's fees in kind, the goods being marketed by Mrs. Alexander. During the French and Indian W a r she may have been associated with her son William Alexander and her Livingston son-in-law in the contract they secured to supply General Shirley's Fort Niagara expedition with horses, food, tools, cannon, and boats. Her connection with her husband's career cannot be documented, beyond the fact that she provided him with important in-laws and wealth. Tradition has it that she took an intense interest in New York's political struggles, including the case of John Peter Zenger, whose newspaper her husband and his party used to attack the colony government. There is probably no basis, however, for the legend that it was she who persuaded Andrew Hamilton of

NICHOLAS VARGA

A L L E N , Elizabeth Anne Chase Akers (Oct. 9, 1 8 3 2 - A u g . 7, 1 9 1 1 ) , poet and newspaperwoman, was born in Strong, Maine, to Thomas Chase, a circuit-riding Methodist minister, and his wife, Mercy Fenno Barton. She was the second of their three daughters who survived infancy. Thomas Chase's grandfather, also named Thomas, who served with John Paul Jones aboard the Bonhomme Richard in the American Revolution, had come to Maine from Martha's Vineyard in 1 7 9 0 ; the Bartons had migrated from western Massachusetts. Lizzie, as she was known in childhood, grew up in Farmington, Maine, and attended Farmington Academy (later Maine State Teachers Coll e g e ) . She took her first step to professional authorship, it is said, at fifteen when the Boston Olive Branch paid for one of her contributions.

36

Allen

Allen From 1866 to 1873 they lived in Richmond, Va., where their one child, Grace Barton Allen, was bom. In 1874, while her husband was on an extended stay in England, Mrs. Allen returned to newspaper work in Portland as associate editor of the Daily Advertiser. Here, over the next eight years, she vigorously and efficiently performed a variety of editorial tasks, from supervising makeup to editing telegraph news. Thereafter, with her husband's business affairs established in New York City, they lived in Tuckahoe, N.Y. At intervals she assembled her verse, which continued to appear regularly in the better periodicals, into small collections, of which The Silver Bridge (1886), The HighTop Sweeting (1891), and The Sunset Song (1902) are representative. During her later years she lent her pen to the support of woman suffrage and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She died at Tuckahoe of cirrhosis of the liver in 1911 at the age of seventy-eight. Mrs. May Riley Smith, president of Sorosis, the New York woman's club, of which Mrs. Allen had been an active member, officiated at her funeral services, held at the Fresh Pond Crematory chapel; her ashes were buried in Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla, N.Y. Her husband survived her by less than a year.

At eighteen, on June 22, 1851, she was married to Marshall S. M. Taylor of Sheldon, Vt. By 1855, however, Taylor had gone to California, leaving his wife with an infant daughter, Florence; she subsequently obtained a divorce. Moving in 1855 to Portland, Maine, Mrs. Taylor secured a position on the Portland Transcript and was soon made assistant editor. Her first book of verse, Forest Buds, from the Woods of Maine, published under the pseudonym "Florence Percy," appeared in 1856. The winter of 1859-60 she spent abroad, sending letters home to the Transcript and the Boston Evening Gazette. It was from Rome that she sent to the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post the verses that were to establish her in the company of immortal one-poem poets. Her "Rock Me to Sleep," with the universally familiar opening couplet, "Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, / Make me a child again, just for to-night!" was published June 9, 1860, again under the name Florence Percy. ( For all its later popularity, she received only the Post's original payment of $5.) That August, in Portland, she was married to the sculptor Benjamin Paul Akers, also a native of Maine, whom she had met in Rome. They moved to Philadelphia, where Akers died of tuberculosis on May 21, 1861. A daughter, Gertrude Rothermel Akers, died in infancy. For a time Mrs. Akers resumed her editorial post in Portland, but in 1863, at the suggestion of Maine's Senator William P. Fessenden, she took a government clerkship in wartime Washington. During her two years there she also spent many hours in hospital work among the soldiers. In 1866 she assembled her verse, much of which had appeared in early issues of the Atlantic Monthly, to form a unit in Ticknor and Fields' august Blue and Gold Series; it was titled simply Poems, by "Elizabeth Akers ( Florence Percy)." The now famous "Rock Me to Sleep," which had been set to music, sung by the Christy Minstrels and around Civil War campfires, and widely reprinted, here made its first appearance over her real name. Challenging her authorship of the piece, Alexander M. W. Ball, a prosperous Elizabeth, N.J., dealer in leather and dabbler in verse, issued a substantial volume entitled A Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball . . . to the Authorship of the Poem, Rock Me to Sleep, Mother (1867). Eventually it was Elizabeth Akers who won vindication, but only after a sharp struggle, which raged through the pages of contemporary pamphlets and periodicals. While in Washington Mrs. Akers was married, on Oct. 4, 1865, to her third husband, Elijah Marshall Allen, a lumber merchant.

Elizabeth Akers Allen was a minor poet but a competent and graceful versifier. Her capabilities were largely eclipsed by the controversy aroused by her best-known production, which, while not a good poem, is a perfect exemplar of the kind of lump-in-the-throat sentimentality that captures the popular imagination. Her memory deserves better than this. She was among the cleverest fashioners of light verse of her time and probably exerted a beneficent influence on the more skillful practitioners in the same genre who followed her. [A collection of Mrs. Allen's papers has been given to Colby College by her granddaughter, Mrs. Sylvia C. Bergel of Port Washington, N.Y., who, together with her mother, the late Grace Barton (Allen) Cook, supplied much of the information in the foregoing account. Other data is from the Maine Hist. Soc., Portland, which also has an Allen collection. Jacob Blanck's Bibliog. of Am. Literature, I ( 1 9 5 5 ) , 7 8 - 8 7 , contains a comprehensive listing of book and sheet-music appearances. For published accounts of Mrs. Allen's life and work, see John T. Winterich, "Elizabeth Akers and the Unsubstantial Character of F a m e , " Colophon, Part XV, 1933; and the obituary in the Portland Sunday Telegram, Sept. 3, 1911. There are personal reflections in her anonymous The Triangular Society: Leaves from the Life of a Portland Family ( 1886 ). See also Israel Washburn, Notes, Historical, Descriptive, and Personal, of Livermore, . . . Maine ( 1 8 7 4 ) ; Ira T. Monroe,

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Allen

Allen

Hist, of the Town of Livermore, . . . Maine (1928); Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893); Who's Who in America, vols. I-VI; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., VI, 130. On the authorship of "Rock Me to Sleep," see N.Y. Times, May 27, 1867, p. 2; and Burton E. Stevenson, Famous Single Poems and the Controversies Which Have Raged around Them (1923).

not perform she played Juliet to his son Alexander's Romeo. She was not immune to failure, however; in the production of Steele MacKaye's Dakolar in April 1885 she was judged "too weak for the part of the heroine," and another actress was engaged to replace her ( Odell, XII, 429-30). In 1888-89 she spent a season as leading lady of the Boston Museum stock company, during which she introduced to America the roles of Mrs. Errol in Little Lord Fauntleroy and Gertrude Ellingham in Bronson Howard's Shenandoah. She appeared in Charles Frohman's successful New York production of the latter, which opened Sept. 9, 1889. After five weeks she left the cast to join Joseph Jefferson and William Florence as Lydia Languish and Cicely Homespun in their touring productions of The Rivals and George Colman's The Heir at Law, roles she repeated with them in two subsequent seasons. For five years (1893-98) she was leading lady of Charles Frohman's celebrated Empire Theatre stock company. She then (1898-99) undertook the part of Glory Qu ay le in Hall Caine's The Christian. The play, although not even then considered good drama, was immensely successful and established Viola Allen's reputation as a popular star.

JOHN T. WINTERICH

ALLEN, Viola Emily (Oct. 27, 1867-May 9, 1948), actress, was born in Huntsville, Ala., where her actor parents were appearing on tour. Her father, Charles Leslie Allen, born in Boston and descended from Thomas Allen who had settled in Braintree, Mass., in 1752, was a character actor of considerable reputation. Long associated with the Boston Theatre company, he later played regularly with his daughter Viola, retiring from the stage only a few years before his death in 1917. Viola's mother, Sarah Jane (Lyon) Allen, born in England, had come to the United States as a child; appearing as Mrs. C. L. Allen, she specialized in "old woman" parts. Viola Allen grew up in Boston and attended school there and, for several years, a Toronto boarding school, generally leading an ordinary life unmarred by the frequent uprootings common among theatrical families. When she was in her early teens the Aliens moved to New York City, where Viola continued her education at Miss Cornell's School for Girls. At fourteen she made her debut as an actress (July 4, 1882), replacing ANNIE B U S S E L L in the title role of F R A N C É S HODGSON B U R N E T T ' S Esmeralda at the Madison Square Theatre. Apparently without previous training, she began her stage career largely because she was immediately available (her father and mother were members of the Esmeralda cast) and proved to be quick at learning a part. Tiny and golden-haired, she was an immediate success. Thereafter, until her retirement nearly four decades later, she had the distinction of never playing other than leading parts; she became especially famous in Shakespearean roles. After a season on the road with Esmeralda, Viola Allen was engaged in 1884 by the actor John McCullough to play small parts in his company, but found herself instead playing opposite him after the leading lady's sudden withdrawal from the troupe. Her next engagement was with Lawrence Barrett in his shortlived production of Browning's A Blot on the 'Scutcheon (February 1885). That fall she joined the famous Italian actor Tommaso Saivini on his American tour, supporting him as Desdemona and Cordelia; on the nights he did

After another such success in Lorimer Stoddard's dramatization of F. Marion Crawford's novel In the Palace of the King (which opened in New York on Dec. 31, 1900), she formed her own company in 1903 under the management of her brother Charles W. Allen and began a series of Shakespearean productions which included Twelfth Night, A Winter's Tale, A.? You Like It, and Cymbeline. She continued to star also in current dramas, notably Irene Wycherly (1908) and The White Sister (1909-11). During 1913-14 she temporarily withdrew from the stage for the first time in thirty-two seasons. She toured as Lady Macbeth with J. C. Hackett in Macbeth in the season of 1915-16. Her last major performance was as Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor (March 1916); her final professional appearance was for war relief in New York in 1918. In 1915 Miss Allen had made her first and only motion picture, a movie version of The White Sister, filmed in Chicago by the Essanay Company. Most of the years following her retirement were spent in traveling abroad with her husband, Peter Edward Cornell Duryea, a wealthy trotting-horse breeder and manager of the Patchen-Wilkes stock farm in Lexington, Ky., whom she had married on Aug. 16, 1905, in Louisville. Their marriage, by her own avowal one of "perfect companionship and deep devotion," ended with Duryea's death in 1944; they had no children. She continued her interest in

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Alphonsa

teer work in military hospitals. On June 25, 1863, she embarked upon the real career of her life when she became the second wife of Charles Gordon Ames, a Unitarian minister twelve years her senior. Originally a Massachusetts foundling with few educational advantages, Ames had begun his career as a Freewill Baptist minister. In Minnesota, where he had been sent by that denomination to found a church, he discovered himself unable to sustain doctrinal orthodoxy under frontier conditions and, resigning his pastorate in 1856, became county register of deeds; he was also the founding editor (185557) of the Minnesota Republican. In 1859 he joined the Unitarian Church and resumed his ministerial career, first in Bloomington, 111., and then in Cincinnati. Although he was a preacher of considerable force and prominence, he is best remembered for his commitment to the amelioration of social ills; and in this endeavor his wife was a gifted co-worker and leader in her own right. Shortly after their marriage the Ameses moved to Albany, N.Y., but the strain of pastoral duties, coupled with arduous Republican campaigning, soon sapped Charles Ames' energies, and in 1865 he went to California as a Unitarian missionary to regain his health. His wife followed in 1866; they lived in Santa Cruz and San Jose. In 1869 Mrs. Ames attended the founding convention in Cleveland of L U C Y STONE'S American Woman Suffrage Association, and in the following year she and her husband helped to establish California's first state suffrage society. They soon withdrew, however, when its loyalties proved to be not with the Lucy Stone organization but with the rival movement led by SUSAN B . ANTHONY and E L I Z -

the theatre, attending plays, serving on the council of the Episcopal Actors' Guild, and gathering a library of books about the theatre; in 1946 she donated her extensive collection of theatre memorabilia to the Museum of the City of New York. Having enjoyed extraordinary popularity as a star at the turn of the century, Miss Allen managed both before and after her retirement to preserve a reputation for modesty and gentle womanliness. She died at the age of eighty at her Park Avenue apartment in New York City after a lingering illness of several years and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, N.Y. The critic Lewis C. Strang hailed her "well-rounded art" while noting her lack of any great "spontaneity" or dramatic spark; intelligent and ladylike, with great charm of manner, she acted "mentally rather than emotionally" (Famous Actresses, First Series, p. 137; Second Series, p. 313). Never perhaps a truly great artist, Viola Allen demonstrated marked competence over a long career. [A typescript autobiographical sketch, with MS. notes, is in the Theatre Collection of the Museum of the City of N.Y. A detailed list of Viola Allen's theatrical appearances, compiled by Johnson Briscoe, was printed in W a r d Morehouse's column, "Broadway After Dark," in the Sun ( N . Y . ) , Feb. 22, 1935. See also the Robinson Locke Collection of Dramatic Scrapbooks, Theatre Collection, N.Y. Public Library at Lincoln Center, vols. X I I - X V ; clippings in the Harvard Theatre Collection; George C. D. Odell, Annals of the N.Y. Stage, vols. X I - X V ( 1939—49); Lewis C. Strang, Famous Actresses of the Day in America, First Series ( 1 8 9 9 ) , and Second Series ( 1 9 0 1 ) ; John B. Clapp and Edwin F . Edgett, Players of the Present, Part I ( 1 8 9 9 ) ; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., X X X I V , 4 6 2 6 3 ; obituary in N.Y. Times, May 10, 1 9 4 8 ; May Davenport Seymour, "Viola Allen," Shakespeare Assoc. Bull., July 1 9 4 8 . ] ANDREW B.

ALPHONSA, Mother Mary. See Mother Mary Alphonsa. ALSTON, Theodosia Burr. See dosia.

A B E T H CADY STANTON.

In 1872 the family moved to Philadelphia, where Charles Ames took charge of a Unitarian congregation in nearby Germantown. Here, on the heels of the economic depression of 1873, he proposed the organization of the Relief Society of Germantown, the first attempt of its kind to deal with the problem of distributing aid to the urban poor. Central to the plan was the division of the town into districts and the recruitment of volunteer women to visit the poor and to report verified cases of need to a single superintendent. Fanny Baker Ames' involvement in problems of social welfare dates from this period. Of her role in the creation and implementation of the Relief Society, her good friend and co-worker Susan Lesley (wife of the geologist Peter Lesley) wrote in 1879: "She . . . and her husband really founded the Germantown plan, and practically

MYERS

LATHROP,

BURR,

Theo-

AMES, Fanny Baker ( June 14, 1840-Aug. 21, 1931), charity organizer, christened Julia Frances Baker, was born in Canandaigua, N.Y., the only child of Increase and Julia (Canfield) Baker. During her childhood the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where Increase Baker worked as a "coal measurer." Fanny attended the preparatory department of Antioch College for one term in 1857 and spent the next five years teaching in Cincinnati public schools and, when the Civil War came, doing volun-

39

Ames carried it out for five years. They are really the originators of the whole [charity organization] movement in this country, and can teach anybody that is willing to learn, every rope in the ship" (Lesley, II, 217). In 1877 Charles Ames assumed the editorship of the Christian Register and moved with his family to Boston, settling in the suburb of Grantville (later Wellesley Hills). The deeply devout Mrs. Ames now developed an interest in church organization. It was her suggestion that led in 1880 to the founding of the Women's Auxiliary Conference of the Unitarian Church (later the National Alliance of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women), an organization which shared the suffragist impulse to enlarge woman's sphere and promote the "generous use of time by leisured women." Her ties to Philadelphia remained strong, however, and she accompanied her husband on his regular semimonthly preaching trips to that city, spending much of her time instructing local groups in the purposes and functions of the charity organization movement. The Germantown approach attracted wide attention, and in 1878 the Ameses helped to found, on the same principles, the Philadelphia Society for Organizing Charity. As the idea of centrally organized rather than haphazard private charity became well established, Mrs. Ames' attention focused particularly on the needs of destitute children. When in 1883, after several years of informal operation, the Children's Aid Society and Bureau of Information was legally established in Philadelphia, Mrs. Ames was among the incorporators and headed its first board of directors. She traveled throughout the state founding county branches of the society, urged the state legislature to remove children from almshouses, and became a leading advocate of country homes for orphans under the oversight of local visiting committees. She thus established a reputation as a persuasive publicist for "effective and scientific charity." She was a founding member ( 1877) and later president (1887-88) of Philadelphia's reformminded New Century Club, a group of women whose varied interests included the legal status of women, literature, and municipal politics. In 1880 the Ames family moved once again to Philadelphia when Charles Ames took up the ministry of the Spring Garden Unitarian Society, but in 1888 they settled permanently in Boston where he succeeded James Freeman Clarke as head of the Church of the Disciples. Fanny Ames continued her leadership in the Unitarian Women's Auxiliary Conference, by her own formidable example encouraging the members to develop their talents as speakers

Ames and to become informed on intellectual and civic as well as spiritual matters. She was an active member of the Round Table, an informal Boston group that met regularly to discuss social work, reform, and topics of the day. She held various offices in the Massachusetts and New England woman suffrage associations, served for three years on the Boston School Committee (1896-99), and in 1891 began a four-year term of service as the state's first woman factory inspector. That same year she presented a paper on "The Care of Defective Children" before the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. Appointed to the first board of trustees of Simmons College in 1899, she participated actively in the planning which preceded the opening of that vocational college for women three years later. Although she deliberately kept her public career in the shadow of her husband's, Fanny Baker Ames brought to this supportive role a distinction of intellect and energy as well as a deep personal commitment to the emancipation of women and the enlistment of their talents in the crusade to improve social conditions. She died at Barnstable, Mass., of a heart ailment and nephritis at the age of ninety-one, nineteen years after her husband; following cremation, she was buried beside him in Lakewood Cemetery, Minneapolis. She was survived by a stepson, Charles Wilberforce Ames, and two daughters, Edith Theodora and Alice Vivian; a son, Theodore, born in California, had died in infancy, A L I C E A M E S W I N T E R followed her mother's interest in social welfare and became president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. [The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, has a folder on Mrs. Ames including a printed memorial address by the Rev. Abraham M. Rihbany ( 1931 ). See also: Charles G. Ames, A Spiritual Autobiog. ( 1 9 1 3 ) ; Mary Lesley Ames, ed., Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley ( 1 9 0 9 ) , vol. II; Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) ; Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, III ( 1 8 8 6 ) , 7 5 3 - 5 4 ; Frank D. Watson, The Charity Organization Movement in the U.S. ( 1 9 2 2 ) , pp. 175-77, 187-89; Children's Aid Soc. and Bureau of Information, Phila., First Annual Report, 188283; Emily A. Fifield, Hist, of the Alliance ( 1 9 1 5 ) , pp. 7 - 9 , 13, 15-16; New Century Club Hist. . . . 1877-98 (pamphlet, 1899); Kenneth L. Mark, Delayed by Fire, Being the Early Hist, of Simmons College ( 1 9 4 5 ) , pp. 24, 26; death record, Mass. Division of Vital Statistics.] PHYLLIS KELLEH

AMES, Mary E. Clemmer (May 6, 1831-Aug. 18, 1884), journalist and author, was born and

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Ames

Ames

unsettled and depressed, she spent some time in Washington working in army hospitals. There she formed several friendships, notably with Congressman Portus Baxter and Senator Justin S. Morrill of Vermont and their wives. With the final breakup of her marriage she returned to Washington and took up a literary career in earnest as author of a regular "Woman's Letter from Washington" for the New York religious weekly the Independent. It is for this Washington column, begun in the issue of Mar. 4, 1866, and continued for over a decade, that Mary Clemmer Ames is best known. Unlike her contemporary EMILY EDSON BRIGGS, she declined to dabble in "social gossip" for its own sake. Instead she devoted her letters to informal but pointed comment on the political issues of the day. In gathering material she spent long hours in the ladies' gallery of the Senate and House. Personally timid and sensitive to criticism, she was capable, nevertheless, of sharp condemnation of political leaders whose conduct failed to measure up to her standards of rectitude. Mrs. Ames possessed a facile pen that could turn out a four-column newspaper article almost at a single sitting. For three years ( 1869— 72) she interrupted her Washington work to write for the Brooklyn Daily Union of Henry C. Bowen, publisher of the Independent. So well did she carry out her assignments, which included a daily column, book reviews, comments on public men and events, and even the preparation of advertising copy, that during her last year she received a salary of $5,000, allegedly the largest ever paid to an American newspaperwoman up to that time. She turned her hand to other writing as well. Of her three novels, only the second, Eirene; or, a Woman's Right (1871), which drew on her wartime experience in Harpers Ferry, received much notice. More important was her Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary (1873), which the Nation hailed as her best work. Two volumes drawn from her newspaper writings appeared in the same year, Outlines of Men, Women, and Things and Ten Years in Washington. She herself derived the greatest satisfaction from her Poems of Life and Nature (1882). While deeply religious, Mrs. Ames was never fond of Christian dogma, and for this and other reasons she was not baptized until comparatively late in life, at St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington. She favored woman suffrage and was conscious of the unequal status accorded women in her day, but she took little active part in the woman's rights movement. Her own career had been forced on her

spent her early life in Utica, N.Y. She was apparently the eldest of a large family of children, of whom four sisters and two brothers grew to maturity. Her father, Abraham Clemmer, was of Alsatian Huguenot stock, his forebears (who originally spelled the name Klemmer) having settled in Berks County, Pa., before the American Revolution. Her mother, Margaret (Kneale) Clemmer, had come to Utica from the British Isle of Man in 1827. From her handsome but impractical father, whose struggles to earn a living as a tobacconist, grocer, and merchant ended in failure, Mary Clemmer derived her poetic temperament; from her mother, the radiant complexion for which Manx women are noted and a deep religious fervor. As a child Mary indulged herself freely in the fancies of her dream world and learned to compose rhymes almost before she could write. The family moved about 1847 to Westfield, Mass., where she attended the Westfield Academy. There the principal took a great interest in the young girl, and one of her teachers, Samuel Davis, was so pleased with a poem she wrote as a school exercise that he sent it to his friend Samuel Bowles for insertion in the Springfield Republican. Although young Mary Clemmer was a voracious reader, especially of history and English and French memoirs, further opportunities for schooling were denied her. The financial straits of the Clemmer family helped to bring about her unwise marriage, on May 7, 1851, to Daniel Ames (1822-1898), a graduate of Wesleyan University and a Methodist minister in Enfield, Mass. Ames subsequently held Presbyterian pastorates in Knowlesville, N.Y. (1854-56), and Winona, Minn. (1857-59). Returning east, he became principal of a boys' school in Jersey City, N.J. (1860-61), moved briefly to Washington, and then obtained a federal post in Harpers Ferry, Va., where Mrs. Ames witnessed the bombardment and surrender of that town and was for a time a prisoner of the Confederates. Desperately unhappy in her marriage, even to the point of contemplating suicide, she apparently spent some time apart from her husband before their final separation in 1865; they were divorced in 1874. Impelled by financial need, Mrs. Ames had in 1859 begun contributing letters from New York City, where she was then staying, to the Utica Morning Herald and the Springfield Republican. In New York she made the acquaintance of the authors ALICE and PHOEBE CARY, who befriended her and introduced her to their literary circle; with Alice Cary she formed an especially close bond. During the war years,

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Anderson

Anderson

by necessity, she believed, and merely served to strengthen her conviction that "the best thing that can happen to any woman is to be satisfactorily loved, to be taken care of, to be made much of, and to make much of the life and the love utterly her own in her own home" (quoted in Hudson, p. 157). In 1876 Mary Clemmer (she had resumed her maiden name following her divorce) purchased a large brick mansion on Capitol Hill and brought her aged parents to Washington to live with her. Severe headaches induced by overwork had begun to afflict her in 1875, and in January 1878 she suffered a skull fracture in a carriage accident; thereafter her literary output largely ceased. On June 19, 1883, she was married to Edmund Hudson, a noted Washington journalist who was editor of the Army and Navy Register, and accompanied him to Europe on a wedding tour. When she returned in the autumn her health seemed much improved, but she was stricken with paralysis soon afterward and died of a cerebral hemorrhage in her Washington home eight months later, in her early fifties. She was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington.

house on Broadway. By 1858 he had furnished capital for the Borden Condensed Milk Company, of which he remained a major stockholder, and in 1876 he became a director of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad. At his death, in 1884, he left his daughter a fortune of more than $10,000,000. Elizabeth Milbank was tutored privately at home and supplemented her education through extensive travel. Artistically inclined, she collected paintings, Chinese porcelains, and antique silver. Like her parents, she attended the exclusive Madison Avenue Baptist Church. She was married on June 15, 1876, in New York, to Abraham Archibald Anderson (1846-1940), a socially prominent portrait painter, sportsman, and confidant of Theodore Roosevelt. The couple had two children, Dr. Eleanor Anderson Campbell, who founded the Judson Health Center in New York, and Jeremiah Milbank Anderson, who died in childhood. Mrs. Anderson's philanthropic interests centered on public health, especially for the women and children of New York's tenement districts, and on higher education for women. The sudden loss of her only son during a diphtheria epidemic led her to the growing conviction that the protection of health and the prevention of disease were the foundation of human happiness. Having through investment multiplied the fortune inherited from her father, she now determined to devote her wealth to constructive social measures. Her benefactions began in 1892 with a gift of $350,000 for a medical pavilion at Roosevelt Hospital in New York. During the years that followed she built for the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor the Milbank Public Baths (1904), which served as a model for others subsequently developed by the city. She also subsidized a school hot lunch program, later administered by the New York Board of Education, which provided more than two million meals yearly. Like her brother Joseph Milbank, a Wall Street banker and patron of Columbia University, Mrs. Anderson early demonstrated an interest in the support of higher education. She became a trustee of Barnard College in 1894 and vice-chairman of the board of trustees five years later. In 1896 she provided funds for a new administration building, Milbank Hall, as a memorial to her parents. In 1903, realizing that the future of the college depended in part on its ability to expand, she anonymously bought and donated three city blocks (the later Milbank Quadrangle) adjoining its original campus, at a cost of $1,000,000. She later gave funds for Brooks Hall on the Quadrangle,

[The principal sources are Edmund Hudson, An Am. Woman's Life and Work: A Memorial of Mary Clemmer ( 1886), and Lilian Whiting, "Mary Clemmer," in Our Famous Women ( 1 8 8 4 ) , pp. 250-75. See also Frances Hays, Women of the Day (1885), pp. 4 4 - 4 5 ; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., VII, 2 3 3 34; obituaries in Washington Evening Star and Springfield (Mass.) Daily Republican, Aug. 19, 1884. There is a small collection of Ames papers, 1859-81, mainly letters received by Mrs. Ames, in the Rutherford B. Hayes Library, Fremont, Ohio. For an unusually militant statement of her views on woman's rights, see her 1878 letter to Senator Bainbridge Wadleigh printed in Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, III ( 1 8 8 6 ) , pp. 111-12. For an account of Daniel Ames, see Frank W. Nicolson, ed., Alumni Record of Wesleyan Univ. (4th ed., 1911). The Utica Public Library furnished data from city directories. The date of her marriage to Ames was supplied from the records of the City Clerk's Office, Westfield, Mass. Her year of birth is deduced from the marriage record, which gives her age as twenty, and the federal census schedule of 1850, which lists her as nineteen.] J. CUTLER

ANDREWS

ANDERSON, Elizabeth Milbank (Dec. 20, 1850-Feb. 22, 1921), philanthropist, was born in New York City, the younger of two children and only daughter of Jeremiah and Elizabeth (Lake) Milbank. Her father, a native of New York City, had begun his business career as a wholesale grocer; amassing considerable wealth, he then opened a bank and brokerage

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terested in the results obtained rather than in the agencies employed, Elizabeth Milbank Anderson concerned herself with urban social problems which the public at large had only begun to perceive. She believed that her benefactions were "simply filling in a breach which exists in the comfort and health of the people, which might be better filled by the city, and which it is hoped will lead to greater activity on the part of the city. . . ." Because she avoided publicity, and because the city of New York did subsequently assume responsibility for several social services inaugurated through her private efforts, the extent and significance of her philanthropy was little realized during her lifetime. The Milbank Memorial Fund has carried forward her work.

and from time to time she supplied financial assistance to individual students. A strong-willed and independent-minded woman, Mrs. Anderson combined humanitarian desire to help with a healthy skepticism of contemporary "charities"; these, she thought, dealt with symptoms rather than causes. Her major philanthropy, accordingly, was the establishment, in April 1905, of the Memorial Fund Association (renamed the Milbank Memorial Fund at her death), founded with the help of Albert G. Milbank, her cousin and close financial adviser. By subsidizing research programs in epidemiology, in nutrition, and in social problems stemming from population growth, by establishing neighborhood and community health centers and dental clinics for the children of the tenements, the Fund made original and important contributions to the well-being of New York's poor and needy. During the remaining years of her life Mrs. Anderson transferred to it more than $7,000,0 0 0 in securities. Her will provided for an additional $1,500,000, bringing the over-all endowment to $9,315,175. Meanwhile Mrs. Anderson continued to aid other philanthropies. In 1909 she gave the Children's Aid Society $500,000 for the construction of a home for convalescent children, located in Chappaqua, N.Y., far from the overcrowded slums of the Lower East Side. In March 1913 she donated $150,000, plus an additional pledge of $50,000 per year for ten years, to the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, for the purpose of establishing a department of social welfare charged with seeking "to prevent sickness and thus relieve poverty." Among its research programs were investigations of adulterated foodstuffs and the virtually unexplored problem of proper ventilation in congested urban dwellings. During the First World War Mrs. Anderson made substantial contributions to the relief of orphaned and homeless European children; in 1919 the French government made her a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. She died in New York City in her seventy-first year, of pernicious anemia, and was buried at Putnam Cemetery, Greenwich, Conn. Her will left several million dollars in charitable bequests, the largest sums to her previous beneficiaries, but small amounts also to such institutions as the National Committee for Mental Hygiene ( $ 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 ) ; the Henry Street Settlement, Fisk University, and the Harlem Legal Aid Society ( $ 5 0 , 0 0 0 each); and the National Child Labor Committee and Tuskegee Institute ($25,000 each).

[Mrs. Anderson apparently left no personal papers. H e r philanthropic activities m a y be t r a c e d in the N.Y. Tribune, Dec. 1, 1 8 9 2 , Mar. 2 3 , 1 9 0 3 , and F e b . 2 0 , 1 9 0 6 . F o r obituaries and bequests see ibid., F e b . 2 3 , 2 4 , 1 9 2 1 ; N.Y. Times, Feb. 22, Mar. 9, J u n e 3 0 , 1 9 2 1 ; Mental Hygiene, July 1 9 2 1 . H e r marriage date is given in the N.Y. Herald, June 17, 1 8 7 6 . D e a t h record from N.Y. City Dept. of Health. Mrs. Anderson's will is filed with t h e Surrogates C o u r t in N.Y. T h e principal printed sources for her life include the 1 9 2 2 Report of the Milbank Memorial F u n d ; C. E . A. Winslow, " T h e Living H a n d : Elizabeth Milbank Anderson," Milbank Memorial Fund: A Meeting Commemorating the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary ( 1 9 3 0 ) , pp. 1 1 - 6 2 ; J o h n A. Kingsbury, " A N e w Foundation and Its D o n o r , " Survey, Mar. 2 6 , 1 9 2 1 . Marion C . W h i t e , A Hist, of Barnard College ( 1 9 5 4 ) , documents her continuing interest in that institution. See also Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., X X I I I , 4 9 ( o n Mrs. A n d e r s o n ) and X I V , 2 5 9 ( o n her h u s b a n d ) ; and obituary of her father in N.Y. Times, J u n e 2, 1 8 8 4 . ] HOWARD

S.

MILLER

ANDERSON, Mary (July 28, 1 8 5 9 - M a y 29, 1 9 4 0 ) , actress, was the older of two children and only daughter of Antonia (Leugers) and Charles Henry Anderson. Her mother, a Philadelphian brought up in a devout Roman Catholic family of German extraction, had defied parental disapproval to elope with the cultivated young Englishman, come to seek his fortune in America. After living for a year in the East, the couple embarked in 1859 for California, where their daughter was born in a Sacramento hotel. While Mary was still an infant, however, they moved to Louisville, Ky., so that Mrs. Anderson, during her husband's frequent absences in England, could be near an uncle—Anthony Müller, the priest of a small German settlement near the city. Father Müller was Mary's guardian from her father's death in 1863 until her mother's remarriage in

Impatient with administrative red tape, in-

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1868 to Dr. Hamilton Griffin, a Louisville surgeon, by whom she had two more daughters. Mary was educated at the Convent of the Ursulines near Louisville and at a day school, the Presentation Academy. Her teachers found her stubborn, willing to work at what appealed to her aesthetic nature but nothing else. Her imagination was stirred by Hamlet, which her stepfather read to her when she was twelve, and after seeing Edwin Booth in Richelieu and other plays she made up her mind to be an actress. Taking lessons from a Louisville elocutionist and earnestly studying and practicing on her own, she prepared herself as Richard III, Richelieu, Pauline of The Lady of Lyons, and Schiller's Joan of Arc. Dr. Griffin introduced her to Henry Wouds, of Macauley's Theatre in Louisville, who in 1874 had her read for the celebrated CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN. At Miss Cushman's suggestion she studied briefly with the actor George Vandenhoff in New York, virtually her only professional training. Back in Louisville, Mary Anderson made her debut as Juliet at Macauley's Theatre on Nov. 27, 1875; the following February she played a week on the same boards, portraying Juliet and taking the leading roles in Fazio, The Hunchback, Evadne, and The Lady of Lyons. Appearances in St. Louis, New Orleans, and other cities of the South and West followed. At San Francisco she was warmly encouraged by Edwin Booth, though her performance in that city pleased neither press nor public nor her fellow actors until she appeared as Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering and as Parthenia in Ingomar at the very end of her engagement. Her New York debut occurred on Nov. 12, 1877, at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, in The Lady of Lyons. The Herald reviewer hailed her as an actress "of much dramatic potentiality" and described her as "Tall, willowy and young, [with] a fresh, fair face, short and rounded, a small, finely chiselled mouth, large, almond shaped eyes of dark gray or blue, [and] hair of a light brown . . ." (Odell, X, 3 7 3 ) . For the next six years she toured America in triumph. On Sept. 1, 1883, she made her London debut at the Lyceum in Ingomar. All reviewers lauded her beauty, but most found her lacking in feeling. The public, however, was enthusiastic, and she at once began to enjoy extraordinary social success. She played Rosalind at Stratford; she also acted in Edinburgh and in Dublin, where she was adored. In 1885 she returned to America with the actor Johnston Forbes-Robertson and, after a New York engagement opening with As You Like It, toured extensively. Back in London in 1887, she dou-

bled the roles of Hermione and Perdita in her own arrangemènt of A Winters Tale, which astonished everybody by running for 164 performances. The next year she brought this production to America; but the strain of overwork had begun to tell. In the spring of 1889 she suffered a nervous breakdown, and upon the advice of her physician, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the distinguished Philadelphia neurologist and novelist, she canceled her engagements for the rest of the season. As it turned out, she had canceled them forever. On June 17, 1890, in a Roman Catholic chapel at Hampstead, England, she was married to Antonio Fernando de Navarro, a wealthy American sportsman of Basque extraction, later known as a gifted amateur musician, collector, antiquarian, and writer. They settled in Worcestershire, where they led an active social life, numbering among their friends many famous people in the worlds of literature, music, and drama. This happy marriage produced first a son who died at birth, then a second son, José Maria de Navarro, who became a Cambridge archaeologist, and finally a daughter, Elena Antonia. Originally a desperately stage-struck girl, at twenty-four Mary Anderson had already begun to weary of the life of an actress, and she never regretted leaving it. During her married years, however, she had occasional contacts with the theatre. With a singing voice so good that in youth she had been urged to train it for opera, she gave a series of concerts for charity in 1903. Later she acted scenes from Macbeth and Julius Caesar at the Scotch College in Rome. In 1911 she helped Robert Hichens dramatize his novel The Garden of Allah and came to New York to see it produced at the Century Theatre. During World War I she appeared on behalf of war charities in W. S. Gilbert's Pygmalion and Galatea and Comedy and Tragedy and other roles. Surviving her husband by eight years, she died in 1940 at her home, Court Farm, Broadway, Worcestershire, at the age of eighty, of "congestive heart failure," arteriosclerosis, and chronic nephritis. Mary Anderson was a fair, stately woman, whose classical regularity of feature was modified only by a rather large nose. In the opinion of the theatre historian George C. D. Odell— who considered her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen—"if she had not begun at the top, she might have acquired greater delicacy, greater finish, greater restraint, more shading in expression . . ." (ibid., p. 375). Some found her cold and mechanical, but to the critic William Winter she was "the most essen-

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ably inhibited by her easy Episcopalianism, Miss Andrews here enjoyed frequent parties, dances, and flirtations. She also bitterly recorded in a diary her reactions to the fall of the Confederacy and the beginning of Reconstruction, and may have begun to think of becoming a writer. In 1865, once more at Haywood, she vowed never to marry but to pursue "the career I have marked out for myself" (War-Time Journal, p. 96). That year her first article, purportedly a Northern officer's lament over the evils of Reconstruction, appeared in the New York World, and in July 1866 Godey's Lady's Book published her views on the difficulties of remaining fashionable in wartime; here, as later, she wrote under the pseudonym "Elzey Hay." But as life resumed a semblance of normality her interest in authorship seemed to fade, and for some years she lived quietly at home. In 1873, however, her father's death and the loss of his estate through the speculations of a trusted adviser brought her to the verge of poverty. Confronted at age thirty-three with the problem of survival, Miss Andrews at first turned to schoolteaching. She was for one term (1873-74) principal of the Girls' High School in Yazoo City, Miss., where a brother was practicing law. Working under a Negro superintendent of education, she experienced the painful alteration in status common to many of her class throughout the South at this time. In 1874 she returned to Washington, Ga., where she served for seven years as principal of the girls' seminary. In 1885, after three years of illness, she joined the faculty of the Wesleyan Female College at Macon, and here, at intervals, she taught French and literature until 1896. From 1898 to 1903 she taught botany in Washington's public high school. The force of circumstances had likewise renewed her interest in writing, and throughout these years she appeared frequently in print, under both her own and her pen name. Her first novel, A Family Secret, a story of the postwar South, published in Philadelphia by J. B. Lippincott and Company, was said to have been that firm's most successful offering for 1876. A Mere Adventurer followed three years later, and Prince Hal, a picture of antebellum plantation life, in 1882. Though romantically nostalgic, these novels revealed in addition Miss Andrews' abiding distaste for the vulgar postwar plutocracy and her resentment of the limited sphere of action prescribed for women. She also published serial stories in various periodicals and briefly attempted lecturing on the Tennessee Chautauqua circuit.

tially woman-like and splendidly tragical Juliet that our stage has known within the last fifty years," with a voice—"so thrilling, so full of wild passion and inexpressible melancholy"— that "went straight to the heart, and brought tears to the eyes" (Other Days, pp. 256-57). Even Winter conceded, however, that she had an "inherent . . . tendency toward classic stateliness" ( Wallet of Time, II, 11-12). It was no accident that she should have been famous for her Galatea, who remained deliberately part statue even after having been brought to life. [Mary Anderson de Navarro, Λ Few Memories (1896) and A Few More Memories (1936); J. Maurice Farrar, Mary Anderson: The Story of Her Life and Professional Career ( 1884 ) ; William Winter, The Stage Life of Mary Anderson (1886), Other Days (1908), and The Wallet of Time (1913); George C. D. Odell, Annals of the N.Y. Stage, vols. X-XIV (1938-45); photographs and clippings in Harvard Theatre Collection; death record from Gen. Register Office, London. See also: Frederic E. McKay and Charles E. L. Wingate, eds., Famous Am. Actors of To-day (1896); Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., I, 243; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15 (under Navarro); Ε. H. Sothern, "Playing with Mary Anderson for Am. Soldiers," Scribner's, Jan. 1919.]

ANDREWS, Eliza Frances (Aug. 10, 1840Jan. 21, 1931), author, teacher, and botanist, was born at Haywood, her parents' plantation near Washington, Ga., a thriving planting community in the northeastern part of the state. The second daughter and sixth of eight children of Garnett and Annulet (Ball) Andrews, she was descended from James Andrews, an Englishman who had settled in Virginia about 1670. Her father, a prominent lawyer and jurist, was a lover of books who encouraged his children's literary and academic interests. Fanny, as she was known, attended the Washington Seminary for Girls and in 1857 received an A.B. degree as a member of the first graduating class at the La Grange (Ga.) Female College. The Civil War was easily the central event of her life. Gamett Andrews, though himself the owner of 200 slaves, was a Unionist who deplored and worked against secession, while all his children were ardent Confederates, three sons serving in the Southern armies. Their home was not directly in the battle area, but late in 1864, after General Sherman's "March to the Sea," Fanny and her younger sister were sent for safety to a brother-in-law's plantation near Albany, in southwest Georgia. Petite, lively, auburn-haired, and not notice-

Eliza Frances Andrews' most memorable

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Andrews work, however, was the diary she had begun in December 1864 and which she continued during the remainder of the war and the months immediately following. Forty years later she decided to publish it. The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, issued in 1908, is a revealing record of experiences both major and trivial. It has been compared by historians with the diary of M A R Y B O Y K I N C H E S N U T , affording, in the words of Ε. M. Coulter, "unexcelled" insight into "the minds and sentiments of many Southern women during wartime and early Reconstruction." Miss Andrews had never been fully satisfied with merely sentimental or nostalgic justifications of the Lost Cause. Discussions with her Unionist father had forced her to seek a rational basis for her Confederate sympathies, and by the time she published her War-Time Journal she had found this, surprisingly, in Marxist socialism. Economic determinism seemed to offer not only scientific confirmation of the Southern belief that the moralistic Yankee crusade had masked economic purposes, but also the bittersweet knowledge that the rebellion had been "doomed from the first by a law as inexorable as the one pronounced by the fates against Troy" (prologue to WarTime Journal, p. 14). She also found satisfaction in the thought that although "wage slavery" had vanquished outmoded chattel slavery in 1865, the Yankee capitalists, in their turn, were soon to fall before socialism, the next evolutionary stage. From 1899 to 1918 she listed herself in Who's Who in America as a Socialist, and she contributed at least one article to the International Socialist Review ("Socialism in the Plant World," July 1916). After her retirement from teaching, Miss Andrews spent much of her time pursuing the study of botany, in which she had first become interested as a young girl. She was largely selftaught, but she ultimately achieved considerable competence in this area and produced two textbooks, Botany All the Year Round (1903) and A Practical Course in Botany (1911). The latter was translated for use in the schools of France. She continued to write, mainly on botany, throughout the last years of her life in Rome, Ga. Dying there of heart disease in 1931 at the age of ninety, she was buried in the family plot in Rest Haven Cemetery, Washington, Ga. "The exigencies of the times did away with many conventions," Eliza Frances Andrews had written in 1908 of the impact of the Civil War upon Southern women (WarTime Journal, p. 2 1 ) . Certainly its unsettled aftermath had opened the way for her own varied career.

Andrews [Letters and scrapbook of Eliza Frances Andrews in Garnett Andrews Papers, Southern Hist. Collection, Univ. of N.C. Library; editorial introduction by Spencer Bidwell King, Jr., to 1960 edition of Miss Andrews' War-Time Journal (the citations above are from this edition); Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) ; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15; obituary in N.Y. Times, Jan. 23, 1931. See also: Bertha Sheppard Hart, Introduction to Ga. Writers ( 1 9 2 9 ) ; E. Merton Coulter, Travels in the Confederate States ( 1948 ) ; and, on her early literary work, Mrs. Mary T. Tardy, The Living Female Writers of the South ( 1 8 7 2 ) . For her later articles see Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, 1890-1930, and Torrey Botanical Club, Index to Am. Botanical Literature. Death record from Ga. Dept. of Public Health.] JAMES

W.

PATTON

ANDREWS, Fannie Fern Phillips (Sept. 25, 1867-Jan. 23, 1950), pacifist and internationalist, was born in Margaretville, Nova Scotia, Canada, the second daughter among seven children, of whom she and her twin brother Frank (who became a foreman in a shoe factory) were the third and fourth. Her parents, William Wallace Phillips and Anna Maria (Brown) Phillips, were natives, respectively, of Turner Center, Maine, and Wilmot, Nova Scotia. Fannie grew up in Lynn, Mass., where her father settled about 1876 and worked as a shoemaker. Her mother was an active Baptist and a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. After graduating from the Salem (Mass.) Normal School in 1884, Fannie taught school for six years in Lynn. On July 16, 1890, she became the second wife of Edwin Gasper Andrews, a Lynn salesman ten years her senior; they had no children. From early childhood Mrs. Andrews had shown an eagerness for education, and in 1895 and 1896 she enrolled in the Harvard summer school. Encouraged by one of her professors, Paul Hanus, the founder of Harvard's graduate school of education, she then attended Radcliffe College, where she received an A.B. degree in education and psychology in 1902, at the age of thirty-four. Although she participated at this time in the woman suffrage and other social reform movements in Boston, her primary interest was in education. In 1907 she launched the first of many organizations connected with her name, the Boston Home and School Association, which sought to draw parents into more active participation in the public schools. Mrs. Andrews served first as its secretary and later, in 1914-18, as president. Her educational interests had meanwhile merged with the dominant concern of her later

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The Freedom of the Seas (1917). She also helped organize a United States branch and served as its international corresponding secretary. After the war she campaigned with passionate conviction for the emerging League of Nations and in the fall of 1918 helped organize the League for Permanent Peace to advance that ideal. She attended the Paris Peace Conference as a representative of the United States Bureau of Education, at the same time participating in the Conference of Allied Societies as one of the delegates of the League to Enforce Peace. Speaking on behalf of the International Council of Women and the Conference of Woman Suffragists of Allied Countries, she made an unsuccessful effort to inject into the Covenant of the League of Nations a provision for a permanent bureau of education. Such an agency, for which she had long worked, eventually came into being in the 1920's as the International Bureau of Education, at first under private sponsorship but from 1929 as an intergovernmental body. Mrs. Andrews was twice sent by President Roosevelt, in 1934 and 1936, as an official delegate to its meetings. From her experiences at the Paris Peace Conference stemmed the chief interest of Mrs. Andrews' later years, the mandate system. During the war she had returned to Radcliffe for graduate study when her work on the international scene made her aware of the limitations of her knowledge in this area. For her doctoral dissertation she wrote "The Mandatory System after the World War," for which she received a Ph.D. in international law and diplomacy in 1923. Continuing her research in this field, she traveled in the Near East in 1925 to examine the mandates in operation and wrote The Holy Land under Mandate (2 vols., 1931), a detailed and comprehensive appraisal in which she treated the highly controversial subject of the Arab-Jewish claims with impartial detachment. This work and subsequent studies established Mrs. Andrews as one of the few women scholars of eminence in the field of international relations. A resolute woman with exceptional organizing ability and an original mind, Mrs. Andrews was strikingly handsome in person, with a very fair complexion and dark hair. She served as a trustee of Radcliffe College (1927-33), where she had earlier helped to organize the HarvardRadcliffe Research Bureau, an organization which sponsored research in international law and foreign relations. She was active also in the affairs of Phi Beta Kappa and the American Association of University Women, especially in promoting the latter's international inter-

life, world peace. Enlisted in the peace movement by her fellow Bostonian LUCIA AMES MEAD, Mrs. Andrews in 1908 founded the American School Peace League "to promote through the schools and the educational public of America the interests of international justice and fraternity." She became secretary and operating head of the new society, which by 1915 had branches in forty states. It won widespread support. The National Education Association urged all teachers to cooperate. In 1912 the United States Commissioner of Education, Philander P. Claxton, asked Mrs. Andrews to serve as a special collaborator in his bureau, which she did until 1921, and his office began to distribute League material. The movement even attracted attention in Europe. French teachers organized a similar group; and Mrs. Andrews on a trip to England in 1914 helped establish the School Peace League of Great Britain and Ireland. She worked tirelessly for the American League as a lecturer and writer, organizing chapters, persuading schools to adopt its program, and personally preparing much of the material for classroom use. These circulars, leaflets, and booklets included poems, quotations from statesmen and soldiers against war, accounts of peace work, information on other lands and peoples, and programs for pageants and essay contests, all designed to further the message of international brotherhood. Although its most active period was during its first twenty years, the American School Peace League (renamed in 1918 the American School Citizenship League) continued in existence and under her secretaryship until her death. Mrs. Andrews was in Europe planning an international congress of education when the First World War broke out. Shocked by the conflict, she thereafter devoted much of her energy to advancing the ideal of international organization, working especially through the League to Enforce Peace and the Central Organization for a Durable Peace. The first was a propaganda society in the United States whose purpose was to advance the idea of a postwar union; Mrs. Andrews utilized the channels of the American School Peace League to introduce its programs into the classrooms of the nation. The second, primarily a study group, was the only truly international body during the war years to consider a postwar association of nations, proposing a "Minimum Program" on which such an agency could be built. A leading member of the Central Organization, Mrs. Andrews served on its international executive committee and wrote a monograph on one of the subjects investigated,

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ests. She visited Europe several times in the 1930's to gather material for a projected study of European diplomacy after the Treaty of Versailles, but this did not materialize. Her husband, who had accompanied her on her postwar travels, died in 1935. Fannie Fern Andrews died of arteriosclerosis in a nursing home in Somerville, Mass., in 1950, at the age of eighty-two, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. [Mrs. Andrews left a large manuscript collection, now in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, which covers the various organizations and activities in her life. In addition to pamphlets and periodical articles, her published writings include many speeches in the annual Jour, of Proc. and Addresses of the Nat. Education Assoc. F o r biographical information, see her autobiography, Memory Pages of My Life ( 1 9 4 8 ) ; Who's Who in America, various issues, 1 9 1 0 - 5 1 ; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1 9 1 4 - 1 5 ; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., vol. A, pp. 3 5 6 - 5 7 ; and Lucia Ames Mead: Memorial Meeting ( 1 9 3 7 ) , pp. 2 2 - 2 4 . Information about her parents, husband, etc., was secured from death and marriage records in the Mass. Registry of Vital Statistics, from the Lynn ( M a s s . ) Public Library, from Boston city directories, and from a brother-in-law, Mr. Howard C. Eia, Somerville, Mass. Mrs. Andrews' work is discussed in Merle Curti, Peace or War ( 1 9 3 6 ) , and Madeleine) Z. Doty, The Central Organisation for a Durable Peace ( 1 9 4 5 ) . ] WARREN F. KUEHL

ANDREWS, Jane (Dec. 1, 1833-July 15, 1887), educator and writer for children, was born in Newburyport, Mass., the third daughter and third in a family of six children of John and Margaret Demmon (Rand) Andrews. Her father was a bookseller and later cashier in a bank. Her paternal ancestors (Andrewses and Wigglesworths) included leaders in education, the church, and philanthropy; her grandfather, the Rev. John Andrews, was pastor of the First Religious Society (Unitarian) of Newburyport. The Rands on her mother's side represented the town's shipping and financial interests at a time when Newburyport was a center of world trade. Jane grew up in an atmosphere of intellectual concerns, broad outlook, and "disinterested benevolence." She received a thorough academy education at Newburyport's Putnam Free School, on the side taking part (along with HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD and Louisa Parsons Stone Hopkins) in a small writing group directed by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, pastor of the Unitarian Church. During the winter of 1850-51 she also taught in a free evening school for cotton-mill workers organized by Higginson. She entered the State Normal School at West Newton,

Mass., that spring, graduating in July 1853 as valedictorian of her class. Among her teachers she was particularly influenced by LUCRETIA CROCKER, a stimulating and imaginative teacher of geography. Living in the same boardinghouse with ELIZABETH PEABODY, Jane Andrews met the latter's brother-in-law Horace Mann, who persuaded her to enroll in his new college, Antioch, in Ohio. She was the first student to register on its opening that fall, one of only eight of 150 applicants who qualified for college work, and she evidently taught in the preparatory department as well. But overwork and difficult living conditions in the half-finished college building proved too much for her, and illness, apparently of a neurological nature, caused her to leave Antioch within a year and return to Newburyport. Most of the next six years she spent as an invalid, suffering from a "spinal affection." By 1860, however, she had recovered sufficiently to begin in her home a small primary school, which she conducted for the next twenty-five years. Here she developed teaching methods that were far ahead of her day. Nature study was based on direct observation; geography included human life as well as physical facts; lessons were built on political events and the town shipping news; and the children were stimulated to individual responsibility and creative expression. The goal always was to train responsible citizens for an interrelated society where all should live as equals. In contrast to the prevailing reliance on textbooks, her teaching was spiced with experiments, plays, games, and stories. Among her pupils were Ethel Parton, the later author, ALICE STONE BLACKWELL, editor and suffragist, and J. Lewis Howe, chemist and educational leader. Miss Andrews' first and most famous book grew out of a collection of stories used to supplement geography lessons. Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball That Floats in the Air (1861) presented seven tales of happy little girls, each living in a strangely different place on the earth but all members of God's human family. She applied the same approach to history in Ten Boys Who Lived on the Road from Long Ago to Now (1886), which tied together the stories of boys in ten different periods. Other supplementary readers displayed her talent for observing nature accurately and for describing it in a tone of exciting wonder. All reflected Horace Mann's belief in the individual's responsibility to society, in contrast to the popular McGuffey texts, which considered virtue almost entirely from a personal point of view. Jane Andrews' sensitivity and intuitive understanding had the effect of interpreting

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Andrews the Columbia Law School, who became a justice of the New York State Supreme Court (1900-17) and then of the state Court of Appeals ( 1 9 1 7 - 2 9 ) . Their only child, Paul Shipman Andrews (b. 1887), became dean of the College of Law of Syracuse University. Mrs. Andrews and her husband traveled widely from their home in Syracuse, throughout the United States and to Europe and South America, but their favorite retreat was a wilderness camp in Canada, a hundred miles from Quebec, where they spent thirty summers. The romantic tales that were frequently composed here are difficult to reconcile with the rugged sportswoman who in one season shot seven deer, three caribou, and two moose, who in an open letter to her readers boasted only of her paddling skill, and who confessed that she "would rather ride a horse than do anything in creation." Altogether she produced nearly two dozen short books and scores of poems, stories, and articles that appeared principally in Scribner's Magazine, but also in the Ladies' Home Journal, Harper's Monthly Magazine, and McClure's Magazine. Her settings were reflections of her life and times—the courtroom, the parsonage, the battlefields of World War I, the Canadian woods—but there reality ended. Mary Andrews knew well the highly marketable formula of sentimental plot ( a young minister risks his career and his beloved to stand by a drunken friend—and so gains the best of pastorates and the handsomest of wives), romantic characters (Reginald Fairfax, Billy Strong, Schuyler Van Courtland), and sentimental themes (the triumph of goodness, the brotherhood of men at war, the patriotic spirit) . And her style was made to match: "a May breeze rustling through the greenness of the quadrangle, brushed softly the ivy-clad brick walls, and stole, like a runaway child to its playmate, through an open window . . ." (A Good Samaritan, p. 4 2 ) . The Perfect Tribute, Mary Andrews' most famous story, appeared first in Scribner's in July 1906. To the familiar account of Lincoln's disappointment at the reception of the Gettysburg Address, she added an apocryphal and saccharine story of a young Southerner who seeks a lawyer to draw a will for his brother, a Confederate soldier dying in a Washington hospital. Playing the part of the lawyer, Lincoln goes unrecognized to the hospital and is convinced by the soldier that his speech was a great one—before "the door of death . . . opened wide and a strong wind carried the bright, conquered spirit into the larger atmosphere. . . ." Published in book form that same

children to themselves and made her books especially appealing. Published by Ginn & Company after 1893, the six "Andrews books" were widely used in elementary schools for more than five decades after their author's death and influenced the ideas of many young people. Seven Little Sisters alone paid royalties for ninety years, appearing in a new edition sixty-three years after its publication. It apparently sold close to half a million copies and was also printed in England and translated into German, Chinese, and Japanese. Renewed ill health forced Jane Andrews to close her school in 1885. She died of meningitis in Newburyport two years later, at the age of fifty-three, and was buried there in Oakhill Cemetery. [Norma Kidd Green, A Forgotten Chapter in Am. Education: Jane Andrews of Newburyport ( 1961 ) ; Louisa Parsons (Stone) Hopkins, "Memorial of Miss Jane Andrews," in 1897 edition of Seven Little Sisters; Harriet Prescott Spofïord, A Little Book of Friends ( 1 9 1 6 ) ; obituary tribute in Woman's Jour., July 23, 1887; John J. Currier, Hist, of Newburyport, Mass. ( 2 vols., 1 9 0 6 - 0 9 ) ; unpublished memoirs of Louisa Parsons Stone Hopkins (courtesy of Mr. John B. Hopkins, Wellesley Hills, Mass.) and Ethel Parton (Newburyport Public Library); papers of Ticknor & Fields, James Parton, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Houghton Library, Harvard Univ.; records of State Teachers College, Framingham, Mass., of Antioch College, and of Ginn & Co., Boston; interviews and correspondence with former pupils of the Andrews school; death record from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics.] NORMA KIDD G R E E N

ANDREWS, Mary Raymond Shipman (Apr. 2, 1860-Aug. 2, 1936), author, known especially for her sentimental tale of Lincoln, The Perfect Tribute, was bom in Mobile, Ala., of parents recently removed from their native New York state. Her father, Jacob Shaw Shipman, was an Episcopalian minister who had studied at Yale and had married, at his first pastorate in Whitesboro, N.Y., the widowed Ann Louise (Gold) Johns. From his second pastorate, Christ Church in Mobile, they moved on in 1861 to Lexington, Ky., where Mary, the oldest of their three boys and three girls, spent most of her childhood. After attending local schools, she studied at home under her father, a "finished scholar" as she later described him. In 1877, after two years as bishop at Fond du Lac, Wis., he became pastor of Christ Church in New York City, the family home thereafter. On Dec. 31, 1884, Mary Shipman was married to William Shankland Andrews of Syracuse, N.Y., a recent graduate of Harvard and

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Anneke

year, this sentimental anecdote ultimately sold more than 600,000 copies. Contemporary critics called Mary Andrews "an accomplished story-teller" and praised the "dramatic flutter" of her pages. A New York Times reviewer probably pinpointed her appeal for most of her readers in this appraisal of a novel: "A nice, good, clean story that rolls along charmingly and ends happily." A parttime professional writer, Mary Andrews knew enough of her craft to please a large magazine audience for twenty years. The opportunity her books and stories give us to look at this audience is their chief claim to our attention. She died of cancer in Syracuse at the age of seventy-six and was buried there in Oakwood Cemetery. Her husband died three days later. [The most interesting biographical statement is Mary Andrews' own in Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, The Junior Book of Authors ( 1936 ). Irene B. Baright wrote a sentimental tribute, An Appreciation of the Life and Writings of Mary Raymond. Shipman Andrews ( 1 9 3 7 ) . Also useful are Kunitz and Haycraft's Twentieth Century Authors ( 1 9 4 2 ) and the N.Y. Times of Aug. 3, 1936. Her other principal works include A Good Samaritan ( 1 9 0 6 ) , Three Things ( 1 9 1 5 ) , Yellow Butterflies ( 1 9 2 2 ) , and Pontifex Maximus ( 1 9 2 5 ) . On her father, see Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XVIII, 72. Christ Episcopal Church, Mobile, Ala., supplied Mrs. Andrews' birth date; other family data from her son.] CARLIN

ANGELA, Mother. See gela.

gillespie,

T.

KINDILIEN

Mother An-

ANNEKE, Mathilde Franziska Giesler (Apr. 3, 1817-Nov. 25, 1884), German-American woman's rights advocate, author, and educator, was born in Lerchenhausen, Westphalia, the eldest of the twelve children of Karl Giesler or Gieseler, a well-to-do mine owner, and Elisabeth (Hülswitt) Giesler. She was taught by private tutors and reared in the Catholic faith. At nineteen she was married to Alfred von Tabouillot, a French wine merchant living in Prussia who was considerably older than she. After a year and a half the marriage was dissolved, following a long legal battle which gave Mathilde custody of her infant daughter, Fanny, and enabled her to resume her maiden name. Although this unhappy experience undoubtedly influenced Mathilde Giesler's later crusade for woman's rights, at the time she sought solace in her religion, preparing two prayer books, in verse and prose, for Catholic women. In 1840 she compiled a volume of poetry, Heimatsgruss, consisting of selections and

translations from Ferdinand Freiligrath, Nikolaus Lenau, Byron, and Petrarch and some verse of her own. Two collections of contemporary poetry followed and, in 1844, a drama, Othono, oder die Tempelweihe, produced in Münster and later repeated much more successfully in America in 1882 at the Milwaukee Stadt Theater. Probably the decisive factors in Mathilde Giesler's rapid transformation from a devout Catholic into a radical freethinker were her father's death in 1847 and her marriage on June 3 of the same year to Fritz Anneke, a welleducated Prussian artillery officer with a radical bent. In this time of revolutionary ferment in Germany, Anneke's interest in communism led to the loss of his army commission and an eleven-month jail sentence. During his imprisonment his wife published a revolutionary journal, the Neue Kölnische Zeitung, that was soon suppressed, and afterward, briefly, a Frauenzeitung. Through her husband she came to know Karl Marx, Michael Bakunin, and other prominent leaders of mid-nineteenth-century radicalism. In the German revolutions of 1848 and 1849 Anneke commanded a force of 1,200 men. His tall, blue-eyed wife, her black hair cut short, rode with her husband into the battle line. When the Prussians captured the fortress of Rastatt, the Annekes fled to Switzerland and France, and then joined the exodus of German "Forty-Eighters" to America. Settling in Milwaukee in 1849, they lectured on the revolution and on German literature, and Mrs. Anneke became a correspondent for German papers here and abroad. Her husband taught swimming and riding and worked for a time as a typesetter and, in 185051, as a draftsman for a railroad company in Elgin, 111. In 1852 they moved to New Jersey, where Anneke edited the Newarkerzeitung. A few years later he went abroad as a correspondent for twelve American papers. Mrs. Anneke joined him in Europe in 1860. Anneke, like his wife an ardent abolitionist, returned the following year to the United States to take part in the Civil War. Mrs. Anneke remained in Switzerland with the children, augmenting the little help she received from her husband by selling an occasional article to newspapers in Switzerland and Germany. After spending five months in Paris, she returned to Milwaukee in 1865. Anneke meanwhile had secured a commission as an officer in the Union Army, but he ran into difficulties with his superiors and was finally dismissed from the service in 1863. Thereafter he worked as a clerk and interpreter, sold books, and wrote for the St. Louis Anzeiger des Westens and other papers.

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A Milwaukee historian recalled her in her later years as "a portly figure, robed in black," who "walked with a masculine and military stride" (quoted in Krueger, p. 164). She died in Milwaukee at the age of sixty-seven. At the memorial services C. Herrmann Boppe, a fellow radical and editor of the Milwaukee Freidenker, delivered the eulogy. She was buried in Milwaukee's Forest Home Cemetery.

At the time of his death, in Chicago in December 1872, he was working for the Illinois Staatszeitung and acting as agent for a German society for the aid of German immigrants. Marriage with this unstable, supersensitive, highly talented, and uncompromising refugee, who never found his niche in America, proved difficult for a woman torn between a desire for an independent career and her love for a romantic, restless husband. After 1861 they went their separate ways, but the marriage was never dissolved. Of their six children, three died in a smallpox epidemic in 1858 (Anneke, as a matter of principle, had refused to have them vaccinated), leaving only Fritz, Percy Shelley, and Hertha. The woman who was to become one of America's most prominent advocates of equal suffrage had early committed herself to the cause, publishing in 1847 a pamphlet entitled Das Weib in Konflikt mit den sozialen Verhältnissen (Woman in Conflict with Social Conditions). In 1852, three years after her arrival in Milwaukee, she launched the monthly Deutsche Frauenzeitung, a radical, freethinker's journal dedicated to the complete emancipation of women; it immediately became the target of ridicule by practically the entire German-language press. With her husband's move to Newark, she transferred her woman's journal there, where it appeared for two and a half years, sustained in large measure by the editor's uncertain income from lecture tours in the larger Eastern cities. By this time she had established contact with the American woman's rights movement, addressing its convention in New York in 1853. She spoke frequently at other such meetings, often combining her plea for equal rights with attacks on prohibition, nativism, and clericalism. In 1869 she helped found a Wisconsin woman suffrage association, which she several times represented at conventions of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Mrs. Anneke's other major interest was the Milwaukee Töchter Institut, which she opened in 1865 in association with Cecilia Kapp (later a professor at Vassar), a cousin of Friedrich Kapp, another leading Forty-Eighter. This girls' school, conducted in German, lasted eighteen years, attained a peak enrollment of sixty-five pupils, and won Mrs. Anneke high regard among German-American educators. She herself managed the whole undertaking, teaching an amazing number of classes and subjects. She supplemented the school's budget by lecturing on politics, art, the theatre, and German literature, in addition to selling insurance and writing for the Illinois Staatszeitung.

[The two-volume MS. "Biog. Notes in Commemoration of Fritz Anneke and Mathilde Franziska Anneke," by Henriette M. Heinzen in collaboration with Hertha Anneke Sanne ( 1940 ), in the State Hist. Soc. of Wise., is indispensable. Of less value are A. B. Faust in German-Am. Annals (Phila.), May-Aug. 1918; Anna Bios, Frauen der Deutschen Revolution 1848 (Dresden, 1928), pp. 17-23; and Lillian Krueger in Wis. Mag. of Hist., Dec. 1937 (which includes a photograph). For the history of the Forty-Eighter immigration, see Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution ( 1952 ). See also, on her woman's rights and suffrage activities, Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, I ( 1 8 8 1 ) , 571-73, II ( 1 8 8 1 ) , 374, 392-94; Woman's Jour., Dec. 20, 1884.] CARL

WITTKE

ANTHONY, Susan Brownell (Feb. 15, 1820Mar. 13, 1906), woman suffrage leader, was born on a farm near Adams, Mass., the second of the eight children of Daniel and Lucy (Read) Anthony. Her American forebear, John Anthony, Jr., had settled in Rhode Island in 1634; his Quaker descendants migrated to western Massachusetts and there developed prosperous frontier farms. Her maternal grandfather, Daniel Read, had fought in the Revolution and served in the Massachusetts legislature. When Susan was six, her father, who had given up farming to set up a cotton mill in Adams, moved to Battenville, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley some thirty-five miles north of Albany, to manage a larger mill. Here she was educated in the district school and in a home school established by her father, followed by four months (1837—38) at a Friends' Seminary near Philadelphia run by Deborah Moulson, a stem disciplinarian and moralist. Though Anthony had married "out of meeting" (the Reads were Baptists), his children received a grounding in Quaker tenets, including the belief in the equality of women before God, as expressed in the custom by which women as well as men spoke and held seats of honor in the meetings. A lifelong interest in labor problems began as Susan admiringly watched her father's mill workers, young women from nearby farms, even on one occasion working with them for several weeks as a special privilege. Until 1837 Daniel Anthony prospered, but

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Anthony he suffered serious reverses in the panic of that year and in 1839 he moved his family to nearby Hardscrabble (later Center Falls), N.Y., hoping in some measure to retrieve his losses. From an early age Susan had taught in local schools (discovering to her chagrin that women teachers earned far less than men), and in 1839, to help her father pay his debts, she left home to teach, first at Eunice Kenyon's Friends' Seminary in New Rochelle, N.Y., and then, in 1846, after the family had moved to a farm near Rochester, at Canajoharie Academy, where she was headmistress of the Female Department. She grew dissatisfied with teaching, however, and returned in 1849 to manage the family farm while her father built a successful insurance business. The atmosphere in her home, where such men as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips were frequent guests, turned her interests naturally to the reform movements of the day, including temperance, antislavery, and woman's rights. Her parents and younger sister Mary had attended the first woman's rights convention, in Seneca Falls in 1848, and from them she heard of ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, who had proposed a resolution demanding woman suffrage. In 1850, through AMELIA BLOOMER, editor of a Seneca Falls temperance paper, she met Mrs. Stanton. They at once became devoted friends, and Mrs. Stanton gradually won the young recruit to a belief in the central importance of the ballot. Susan Anthony was drawn to the movement but, feeling inadequate, confined herself for a time to work for the Daughters of Temperance, a group she had joined in 1848. In 1852, however, when because of her sex she was refused permission to speak at an Albany temperance rally, she left indignantly and soon formed the Woman's New York State Temperance Society under Mrs. Stanton's presidency. Her conversion to the cause was complete when she attended her first woman's rights convention in Syracuse the same year, and her conviction that voteless and propertyless women could exert little influence in any reform movement was deepened in 1853 when women delegates were refused recognition in an uproarious session of the World's Temperance Convention in New York City. Several months later she helped organize the "Whole World's Temperance Convention," also in New York. In the same year she threw the convention of the New York State Teachers' Association into confusion by her request, ultimately granted, that she be permitted to participate in the discussions. Her life had found a focus, and she

Anthony threw herself unreservedly into the woman's rights movement. Her exceptional organizational ability and political acumen quickly won the respect of the leaders of the movement. In the years prior to the Civil War, working behind the scenes to secure speakers, arrange dates, and raise money, she was the prime mover in a series of state and national woman's rights conventions held within New York state. In addition, from 1854 on she organized county-by-county canvasses in which she and others went from door to door obtaining signatures on petitions to the legislature demanding woman suffrage and improvement of the Married Woman's Property Law. After six years the legislature did in 1860 give married women a better legal status, including the right to retain their own earnings and to sue in court. Her collaborator in all these efforts was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose facile pen, oratorical ability, and winning personality were of great value to Miss Anthony, who lacked these attributes. "The Napoleon of the woman's rights movement," as William Henry Channing once characterized Susan Anthony, was practical and intelligent, and men as well as women liked to discuss their work with her. Of medium height and weight, she dressed simply and neatly. She had keen grey eyes and dark hair which she parted in the center, drawing it severely over her ears. A wide and sharply down-turned mouth caused some to characterize her wrongly as dour and unhappy. She suffered from a slight strabismus condition, in later years insisting that she be photographed only in profile. This, together with a voice which even a friendly critic described as "an earnest, attractive monotone" (Harper, p. 272), contributed to an unwillingness to appear on the public platform which she never wholly overcame. More than any other woman suffrage leader, she was the victim of masculine ridicule, often in the form of abusive and coarse newspaper attacks. The Utica Evening Telegraph called her "personally repulsive," while the New York World opined, "Susan is lean, cadaverous and intellectual, with the proportions of a file and the voice of a hurdy-gurdy" (quoted in ibid., pp. 84, 264). The Bloomer costume, which she doggedly wore for one year ( 1853-54 ) in the belief that dress reform was essential for a freer, more active life for women, was the subject of much merriment. Though she had several suitors, including a wealthy Quaker widower from Maine, the fact that she remained unmarried enabled hostile critics to dismiss her feminism as merely the product of bitterness and frustration. Those who knew her best

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Anthony ers would swell the ranks in opposition to woman suffrage. She believed that with appropriate urging Congress could be persuaded that this was woman's hour as well as the Negro's, particularly in view of the loyal support the women of the North had given the war effort and the antislavery campaign. When young Theodore Tilton, editor of the Independent, proposed that the causes of Negro and woman suffrage could best be advanced by a single organization, she consented against her better judgment to the formation in 1866 of the American Equal Rights Association and accepted the post of corresponding secretary. It soon became apparent, however, that the leaders, including Tilton and her old ally Wendell Phillips, intended to concentrate on securing the vote for the Negro. Nevertheless, utilizing her wartime experience, she was able to lay before Congress in 1866 petitions with thousands of signatures asking for woman suffrage. On the state level she presented prosuffrage petitions in impressive numbers to New York's constitutional convention in 1867, but was defeated in spite of the support of George William Curtis, Gerrit Smith, and Henry Ward Beecher. She then proceeded with Mrs. Stanton to Kansas, where woman suffrage and Negro suffrage amendments were being referred to the people. After a grueling campaign in every part of the state she saw both proposals defeated. In this Kansas referendum Republican leaders had endorsed Negro suffrage but had been silent on the woman suffrage issue, and Miss Anthony, forced to face the unwelcome fact that the dominant party had no intention of granting women the right to vote, turned elsewhere for support. She found it in the person of George Francis Train, a wealthy, flamboyant, and eccentric Democrat who had helped in the Kansas campaign. After underwriting a speaking tour by Mrs. Stanton, Miss Anthony, and himself en route to the East, Train further promised to finance a woman suffrage paper in New York. The new weekly, christened the Revolution, made its debut in January 1868 with Miss Anthony as publisher and Mrs. Stanton and Parker Pillsbury as editors. A crusading paper, radical by the standards of the day, it strongly opposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, advocating an "educated suffrage irrespective of sex and color," as well as equal pay to men and women for equal work, practical education for girls, the opening of new occupations to women, and more liberal divorce laws, the last being a subject of particular interest to Mrs. Stanton. It also, perforce, served as a mouthpiece for Train's ideas,

sought to dispel this popular estimate of her personality. "She has, indeed, her faults and angles," wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1868, "but they are all outside. She has a broad and generous nature, and a depth of tenderness that few women possess. . . . I have never known her to do or say a mean or narrow thing" (Eminent Women of the Age, p. 400). Her co-workers were sometimes annoyed by her unremitting zeal, but she continued to urge them on to greater efforts. Her interest in woman's rights did not lessen her interest in the abolition of slavery. In 1848 she began to attend the Unitarian church when strong opposition to the antislavery position developed in the Friends' meeting. (She retained her Quaker affiliation throughout her life, however.) A close friend of the leading antislavery figures, she was from 1856 until the Civil War the principal New York agent for William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society. In keeping with Garrison's uncompromising abolitionism she urged her hearers to "Overthrow this government, commit its blood-stained Constitution to the flames, blot out every vestige of that guilty bargain of the fathers . . . " (MS. in Anthony Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College). Early in 1861 she marshaled a group of abolitionist speakers on a tour of western New York that was frequently marked by the violence of hostile mobs. During the Civil War she and Mrs. Stanton won the gratitude of Senator Charles Sumner and others by organizing the Women's Loyal National League, which secured hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions calling for Negro emancipation. She supported John C. Frémont's presidential ambitions in 1864 and opposed the reelection of Lincoln, whose reconstruction policies she distrusted. At the end of the war, in 1865, she made the long, difficult journey to Kansas to visit her brothers Daniel and Merritt, who had settled there. The West made such a favorable impression upon her that she was tempted to remain, but when she learned that the reconstruction policy of many Republicans included Negro suffrage but ignored the comparable demands of women, she returned to the East. Her fears were confirmed when the proposed Fourteenth Amendment not only failed to enfranchise women but for the first time introduced the word "male" into the Constitution. Much as she favored Negro enfranchisement, she felt strongly that Negroes should not be given the vote ahead of women (whom she considered better qualified because better educated), and she feared that male Negro vot-

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Anthony

including the boycott of foreign goods, the encouragement of immigration, and greenback currency. The Revolution reflected Miss Anthony's continuing interest in labor problems, which as early as 1853 had led her to help a group of Rochester seamstresses draft a code of fair wages for the working girls of the city. Now in New York City she organized a Working Women's Association (see AUGUSTA L E W I S THOUP ), which encouraged employed women to form unions to win higher wages and shorter hours. It also stressed the importance and power of the vote and in a limited way carried out educational work to develop self-confidence and self-respect among women workers. In 1868 the Working Women's Association sent Miss Anthony as a delegate to the National Labor Union convention in New York. Here her resolutions calling for an eight-hour day and equal pay to women for equal work were accepted, but one endorsing woman suffrage was turned down. The Revolution, however, was becoming an increasingly heavy financial burden. Train had supported it for only a few months, and thereafter the responsibility had fallen upon Miss Anthony. In May 1870 she reluctantly turned it over to a new owner, Laura Curtis Bullard, but assumed the entire indebtedness of $10,000, which she began at once to discharge by means of lyceum lecture tours in the Middle and Far West. For addresses on such topics as "The Power of the Ballot" and "Social Purity" she received seventy-five dollars. A popular lecturer, ladylike in her black silk platform dress, she was not the caricature some expected. Despite a strenuous schedule involving travel in all kinds of weather and accommodations in dreary hotels with poor food, she continued her lecturing steadily until 1876 when the debt was repaid. Meanwhile, the pressing need for an effective organization devoted exclusively to woman suffrage had become more evident. Through the efforts of Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton, Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas and Congressman George W. Julian of Indiana had in December 1868 introduced into Congress the first woman suffrage amendment to the Constitution, but it had received little attention. To generate support for the proposal and to strengthen her fight against the Fifteenth Amendment, then under consideration, Miss Anthony in January 1869 called a woman sufrage convention in Washington, D.C., the first since the war and the first to be held in the capital. In May, after the annual gathering of the Equal Rights Association in New York had

produced the usual disagreements, Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton hastily called a meeting in the office of the Revolution and formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. Though Mrs. Stanton, out of deference to her pioneering work for woman suffrage, was chosen president, Miss Anthony, as a member of the executive committee and later as vice-president-at-large, was the driving force. For the rest of her life she used its annual conventions as a forum from which to guide, steady, and prod her flock. Some suffrage leaders of a more cautious disposition, however, were upset by what they felt to be Miss Anthony's and Mrs. Stanton's intemperate opposition to Negro enfranchisement, their willingness to accept support from "Copperheads," their association with George Francis Train, their interest in divorce and labor questions, and their willingness to admit any and all, including cranks and eccentrics, into their conventions. They also disapproved of the drive for a federal woman suffrage amendment, favoring a state-by-state approach. On a more personal level, many found Miss Anthony domineering, and cited in support of their view the somewhat secretive formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association, to which they felt only those wholly in accord with the Stanton-Anthony viewpoint had been invited. These dissidents, many of them New Englanders, rallied around L U C Y STONE and later in 1869 formed the American Woman Suffrage Association, creating a schism that was to last for two decades. Undaunted, Miss Anthony carried on with her usual single-mindedness, entering upon a thirty-year period of almost ceaseless travel throughout the country. She worked both for a federal suffrage amendment and in various state campaigns, particularly in the Middle West, where she found woman suffrage sentiment to be growing rapidly. At the National Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington, D.C., in 1870, the first success, the granting of the vote to women in Wyoming Territory, was celebrated. The following year VICTORIA WOODHULL, a convert to woman suffrage who believed that women already had the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, memorialized Congress asking legislation to implement this right. The same claim, when earlier advanced by VIRGINIA LOUISA MINOR and her husband, a St. Louis attorney, had had Miss Anthony's interest and support, but neither she nor her colleagues had been able to attract the attention of Congress as could the glamorous Mrs. Woodhull. Susan Anthony attended the Con-

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Anthony gressional hearing on the Woodhull memorial and for a time cooperated with Mrs. Woodhull, until she sensed that the latter was using the suffrage organzation to further her own ambitions. Miss Anthony retained, however, her conviction that the rights of women as citizens and persons were guaranteed by the postwar amendments, and to test this view she cast a ballot (Republican) in the 1872 presidential election before nonplused election officiais realized what was afoot. Arrested and indicted for voting illegally, she was tried in the United States District Court, pronounced guilty by a hostile judge without a poll of the jury, and fined $100. Although she refused to pay the fine, no steps were taken to enforce the sentence, and she was therefore unable, as she had hoped, to carry the case to the federal Supreme Court for a clarifying decision. With Mrs. Stanton she took her message to California in 1871, stopping en route in Wyoming and in Utah, both territories where women had won the franchise. Traveling on alone to Oregon Territory, she drove over lonely mountain trails to visit frontier towns, winning friends for the cause. "I miss Mrs. Stanton," she commented in a family letter written from Oregon, "still I can not but enjoy the feeling that the people call on me. . . . There is no alternative—whoever goes into a parlor or before an audience with that woman does it at the cost of a fearful overshadowing, a price which I have paid for the last ten years, and that cheerfully . . ." (Harper, p. 396). She took part in the Michigan woman suffrage campaign of 1874, and two years later, at the Fourth of July ceremonies at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, she and two colleagues dramatically presented a "Woman's Declaration of 1876" asking civil and political rights for women in fulfillment of the ideals of 1776. In Colorado the following year she took part in that state's unsuccessful woman suffrage effort. At Mrs. Stanton's and her instigation, Senator Aaron Sargent of California in January 1878 introduced in the United States Senate a woman suffrage amendment following the wording of the Fifteenth Amendment. The Sargent amendment was reintroduced in each succeeding Congress, and Miss Anthony campaigned for it everywhere, featured it at the annual conventions of the National Woman Suffrage Association, and gradually won Congressional and newspaper support. In the late 1870's, concerned lest the woman's rights struggle be lost to history, she began with the help of Mrs. Stanton and MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE to write a chronicle of the movement, and in 1881 financed and published

Anthony the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage. Two more volumes followed in 1882 and 1886, and a fourth was issued in 1902 with the editorial help of IDA HUSTED HABPER, who also, following Miss Anthony's wish, published a fifth and sixth volume in 1922 carrying the story through to ultimate victory. This monumental work of over 5,000 pages forms an important historical source. Within the National Woman Suffrage Association Susan Anthony achieved a remarkable degree of unity. Though some state leaders, like L I L L I E DEVEREUX BLAKE in New York and ABIGAIL SCOTT DUNiwAY in Oregon, became alienated and hostile, most appear to have considered it an honor to do her bidding. She was capable of close friendships with those admitted to her "sacred inner circle," as one member called it (ibid., p. 945). As Mrs. Stanton grew older and unable to keep the pace of her tireless friend, others, calling themselves "Aunt Susan's girls," took her place. In the late 1860's Dr. C L E M E N C E s. L O z i E B , a New York homeopath, gave Miss Anthony fifty dollars weekly as she struggled to keep the Revolution afloat, and until her death Miss Anthony wore a ring Dr. Lozier had given her. Another young worker to whom Miss Anthony was close was Rachel Foster (see RACHEL FOSTER A V E R Y ) , with whom she took her first European vacation in 1883. Also of the inner circle was CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT of Iowa, who became a valued lieutenant after 1890, contributing her remarkable organizing ability and forceful speeches to the cause. Perhaps the strongest bond of her later years was with ANNA HOWARD SHAW, a young Methodist minister and temperance lecturer with a remarkable gift for public speaking. From their first meeting at the International Council of Women in 1888, Dr. Shaw became Miss Anthony's most trusted and devoted colleague and confidante. The marriage of a valued co-worker, such as that of Lucy Stone in 1855 or of Rachel Foster thirty-three years later, was invariably a severe blow to Miss Anthony, and gave rise to sharp comments about "the mighty matrimonial maelstrom"; she was similarly impatient over the temporary inactivity of a suffrage worker resulting from pregnancy. As Mrs. Stanton observed, "the outpourings of Miss Anthony's love element all flowed into the suffrage movement" (History of Woman Suffrage, I, 678). In 1890, after several years of negotiations, which grew from overtures made by Lucy Stone and efforts of the younger members, the two woman suffrage associations were reunited as the National American Woman Suffrage Association, pledged to press both for a federal

55

Anthony woman suffrage amendment and for state action. Mrs. Stanton was retained as president and Miss Anthony as vice-president-at-large. When the former resigned in 1892 Miss Anthony became president, a position she held until 1900. She continued her efforts in the West, where new states were seeking admission to the Union. The admission of Wyoming as the first woman suffrage state in 1890 was a promising victory, but in the same year she and Anna Howard Shaw waged a losing battle in South Dakota, where the liquor interests persuaded newly naturalized immigrants that woman suffrage meant prohibition. From the Civil War until 1890 Miss Anthony, when not traveling, had lived first in New York City and then in a Washington, D.C., hotel. In that year, having reached seventy, she curtailed her peripatetic existence and settled with her sister Mary in Rochester, where she soon added local affairs to her broader concerns. In 1892 she was appointed a trustee of the State Industrial School at Rochester, and served until 1895. Always a firm believer in coeducation, in 1900 she helped open the University of Rochester to women, personally raising the final $8,000 of an endowment fund for the purpose. After 1893, when Mrs. Catt supervised the successful campaign for woman suffrage in Colorado, Miss Anthony generally left the state campaigns to her able assistant. Her remarkable energy and vitality, however, made retirement unthinkable. She took an active part in the California campaign of 1895-96, traveling to every part of the state. Again, however, liquor interests led the opposition and woman suffrage was defeated. During the Spanish-American War she spoke her mind freely regarding women's lack of a vote on matters of war and peace, and contended that feminine housekeeping ability, if put to use, could have corrected unsanitary conditions in army camps. She saw the importance of winning the support of labor organizations, and her lifetime interest in the labor movement served her in good stead in 1899 when the American Federation of Labor received her with great enthusiasm and unanimously adopted a resolution urging Congress to enfranchise women. The treatment of the Negro in both North and South was of great concern to her, and she expressed herself freely against lynchings, race riots, and discrimination of any kind. When in the South she spoke in Negro churches and schools, and she welcomed Negroes to woman suffrage conventions. The unwillingness of her younger colleagues to relate woman suffrage to current affairs such

Anthony as these often disappointed her. These young women, many of them college-trained, she sometimes felt were too academic in their approach, expending their energies on the mechanics of organization and inclined to be satisfied with making and listening to speeches at pleasant conventions. The contrast between the older and the younger workers was sharply drawn in 1896 when a resolution was introduced in the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention disavowing any connection between the association and The Woman's Bible recently published by Mrs. Stanton. Miss Anthony considered the proposal unnecessary and dangerous. "I shall be pained beyond expression if the delegates here are so narrow and illiberal as to adopt this resolution," she said. "If we do not inspire in women a broad and catholic spirit, they will fail, when enfranchised, to constitute that power for better government which we have always claimed for them. . . . I pray you vote for religious liberty, without censorship or inquisition" (Harper, p. 854). Nevertheless, the resolution passed, with Anna Howard Shaw, Carrie Chapman Catt, Rachel Foster Avery, and A L I C E STONE B L A C K W E L L (Lucy Stone's daughter) voting with the majority. As Miss Anthony grew older, the vilification of earlier years gave way to a popular respect that at times approached adulation. Newspapers now spoke of her wit, her friendliness, and the benign, grandmotherly qualities suggested by the aged face and white hair. Her visit to the Woman's Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 was a personal triumph. The symbol of the woman's movement, she was the center of interest wherever she appeared, the one woman everyone wanted to see. Her California visit in 1895, under the auspices of the Woman's Congress of the California Midwinter Exposition, and an appearance in 1905 at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, Oreg. (where she unveiled a statue of S A C A J A W E A ) , were in the nature of triumphal tours. Miss Anthony had never drawn a salary, and in 1895, at a seventy-fifth birthday dinner in her honor, she was presented with an $800 annuity raised by her co-workers. Though she protested that she would rather make history than write it, she was persuaded to prepare her reminiscences, and the ultimate certification of respectability, a massive two-volume Life of Susan B. Anthony by her able collaborator Ida Husted Harper, appeared in 1898, with a third volume following in 1908. Nor was international acclaim lacking. In 1888, acting upon Mrs. Stanton's initiative and aided by Rachel

56

Anthony Foster,

WRIGHT SEWALL, and FRANCÉS (who had enlisted her Woman's Christian Temperance Union for woman suffrage), she had founded the International Council of Women, and as head of the United States delegation to the council's meetings in London in 1899 and Berlin in 1904 she was widely feted and honored as "Susan B. Anthony of the World." In Berlin, fulfilling a long-time dream, she founded with Mrs. Catt's aid the International Woman Suffrage Alliance and became its honorary president. At eighty, determined to retire at last from the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she began seriously to consider in whose hands she could most safely leave the cause. She turned most naturally to Anna Howard Shaw, but she also recognized the exceptional ability of Carrie Chapman Catt. Mrs. Catt was duly elected her successor in 1900. In 1904, when Mrs. Catt resigned owing to her husband's ill health, Miss Shaw was elected to succeed her. In February 1906 Susan B. Anthony attended her last woman suffrage convention, in Baltimore, and left her message for the future: "Failure is impossible." In March, at the age of eighty-six, she died of heart failure at her Rochester home and was buried in Rochester's Mount Hope Cemetery. Throughout the world, newspapers, statesmen, and sorrowful colleagues paid her high tribute. To the suffrage movement she left her modest savings and the memory of her indomitable spirit. Though others exceeded her in wit, brilliance, and platform eloquence, none matched her single-minded dedication or the ability with which she had led the suffrage movement for over fifty years. At the time of her death her goal had been realized in only four states, but she, more than any other, had opened the way for the adoption fourteen years later of the Nineteenth Amendment granting the ballot to the women of the United States. MAY

WILLARD

[Of the scattered manuscript materials, the more extensive holdings are in the following repositories: Library of Congress; Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; Vassar College Library; Susan B. Anthony Memorial, Rochester, N.Y.; Univ. of Rochester Library; Seneca Falls ( N . Y . ) Hist. Soc.; Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.; N.Y. Public Library; Boston Public Library; Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; and the Am. Antiquarian Soc., Worcester, Mass. Printed sources include Ida H. Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony ( 3 vols., 1 8 9 8 - 1 9 0 8 ) ; sketch by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Eminent Women of the Age ( 1868 ) ; Mrs. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage ( 6 vols., 1 8 8 1 - 1 9 2 2 ) ; and later biographies of Miss Anthony by Rheta

Antin Childe Dorr ( 1 9 2 8 ) , Katharine Anthony ( 1 9 5 4 ) , and Alma Lutz ( 1 9 5 9 ) , the last with extensive bibliography. For interpretative treatment, see also Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the U.S. ( 1 9 5 9 ) , and Robert E . Riegel, Am. Feminists ( 1 9 6 3 ) . ] ALMA LUTZ

ANTIN, Mary (June 13, 1881-May 15, 1949), author, interpreter of the immigrant, was born in Polotzk, Russia, the second of six children of Israel and Esther (Weltman) Antin. She spent her childhood in the restricted environment of one of the small towns in the pale of settlement to which Czarist policy confined the Jews. Her father was a petty trader, this being the only means of livelihood open to people of his faith. But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, even the isolated villages of eastern Europe felt the effects of modernization. Israel Antin, who as a young man had lived for a time outside the pale, was not content with traditional life and dreamed of a fresh start in the tyew World, where education and advancement were open to all. When prolonged illness caused his business to fail, he migrated to America in 1891. Like many others who took the same step, he left his family at home while he struggled to make a start for them in Boston. Three years later, when Mary was thirteen, she, her mother, her two sisters, and her brother followed him to the United States. Success for the Antins was as elusive on one side of the ocean as on the other. A refreshment stand at Revere Beach, despite a promising start, proved a failure. The family then moved to Chelsea, a town on the outskirts of Boston with a substantial Jewish immigrant population, but failed to make a go of a grocery store there. The Antins finally settled in the slums of Boston's South End, where they eked out a meager livelihood from the combined earnings of the father, the oldest sister, and the brother. Mary, however, was judged worthy of a better fate. The public schools opened the doors of the New World to the eager adolescent. She proved an attentive and brilliant student. She learned English quickly and in a half year advanced through the first five grades. More important, she caught the interest of sympathetic adults. Mary S. Dillingham, her teacher in Chelsea, was sufficiently impressed to arrange for the publication of one of the young girl's compositions, "Snow," in Primary Education; and Mary, fired with enthusiasm through seeing her work in print, turned to writing poetry, some of which appeared in the Boston Herald and even the Transcript.

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Antin Mary Antin seemed one of those promising immigrant children whose achievements, goodhearted Americans expected, would justify the nation's capacity for assimilating newcomers. Her teachers therefore encouraged her to attend the Girls' Latin School in Boston. Despite the family poverty, her father was determined that she go on with her education, and she continued to do well in studies preparing her for college. At Hale House, a South End settlement, she joined a natural history club of settlement workers and their friends. This opened up "the stupendous panorama . . . painted in the literature of Darwinism," which helped relieve her youthful doubts about the purpose of life. She met the venerable Edward Everett Hale, who welcomed her to his home and made his library available to her. She also gained the friendship of Hattie L. Hecht, whose prominence in local Jewish communal activities was an assurance of future support. While still in school, Mary Antin assembled a series of letters she had written in Yiddish to her uncle in Russia and translated them into English. Hattie Hecht persuaded Philip Cowen of the American Hebrew to arrange for their publication and also induced Israel Zangwill, the English novelist, to write a preface to the little book. From Plotzk [Polotzk] to Boston (1899) was a sensitive, girlish account of her journey to America and attracted favorable attention. A personal crisis, however, upset the calculation that Mary Antin would continue to higher education at Radcliffe College. On a field trip he was conducting for the Boston Society of Natural History she met Amadeus William Grabau, a geologist who had graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was completing a doctorate at Harvard. The handsome scientist, eleven years her senior and the son of a German-born Lutheran minister, won her heart. They were married in Boston on Oct. 5, 1901; their daughter, Josephine Esther, was born shortly thereafter. They made their home in New York City, where Grabau had accepted a professorship at Columbia University. Though Mary Antin took courses at Columbia's Teachers College and Barnard College, she did not enroll for a degree. Her ambitions for authorship, however, persisted. Her poetic efforts remained unpublished, but she continued to speculate about the meaning of her experience. Somehow her journey from medieval Polotzk to modern America seemed to have a spiritual dimension as well as the physical one she had already described. These introspective speculations meshed with the transcendentalist ideas of her

Antin New York friend Josephine Lazarus, who urged Mary to write her autobiography. The death of Miss Lazarus in 1910 spurred Mary into action. In 1911 the Atlantic Monthly printed a short story she had written set in Polotzk, and this was followed that same year by the first installments of what became her best-known work. The Promised Land (1912) offered vivid recollections of her childhood in Polotzk and her years in Boston. It also summed up a decade's thinking about the meaning of her migration, her adolescent success in the land of the free taking on wider significance as proof of the abundant opportunity of American life. Her message brought reassurance to a public beset by the problems of twentieth-century urban society, and the book sold nearly 85,000 copies before her death. Thereafter Mary Antin was committed to the defense of both Americanism and immigration. In 1914 They Who Knock at Our Gates justified admitting newcomers to the country in the face of a rising sentiment for restriction. "What we get in steerage," she argued, "is not the refuse, but the sinew and bone of all the nations." Between 1913 and 1918 she spent much of her time expounding her ideas of progressive patriotism in lectures 'throughout the country on such topics as "The Responsibility of American Citizenship," "The Civic Education of the Immigrant," and "The Public School as a Test of American Faith." In 1916 she campaigned for the Republican presidential candidate, Charles Evans Hughes. The World War added new tensions to her life. While she threw herself into lectures for the Allied cause, her husband, an admirer of German science, refused to conform to the fashionable anti-German passions of the moment, and his position at Columbia became increasingly uncomfortable. In 1918 Mary Antin suffered an attack of neurasthenia, from which she never fully recovered; by 1919, when Grabau left Columbia, they had separated. The following year he went to China, where he remained until his death in 1946. During these years she spent much of her time in Winchester, Mass., where her family now lived, and at the Gould Farm colony in Great Barrington, Mass. She continued to worry about the meaning of life and was attracted by the concept of anthroposophy propounded by Rudolf Steiner, as seen in her intense mystical essay in the Atlantic Monthly of May 1937. For most of her adulthood she had lived cut off from Jewish life and thought, but in her last essay, "House of the One Father" (Common Ground, Spring 1941), she movingly expressed her solidarity with the people of

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Arthur

Arthur

Polotzk, past and present. Mary Antin's home in her last years was in Albany, N.Y., where a sister lived. She died at the Pinehurst Nursing Home in Suffern, N.Y., in 1949, of myocarditis and cancer.

medium height, slender, with brown hair and eyes, and wore rimmed glasses for nearsightedness. After a long engagement, they were married on Oct. 25, 1859, at Calvary Church in New York. They had three children: William Lewis Herndon, who was born in 1 8 6 0 and lived only three years, Chester Alan, Jr. ( 1 8 6 4 ) , and Ellen (Nell, 1 8 7 1 ) . T h e Civil W a r was a difficult period for Mrs. Arthur. While her husband served with the Union Army until the beginning of 1863, becoming quartermaster general of New York troops, many of her Virginia relatives were in the Confederate forces. She was cut off not only from them but from her mother, who spent the war years in Europe. She was, however, able to visit Fredericksburg at the close of the war and renew family ties. She and her husband prospered during the postwar years, as Arthur became a Republican leader in New York and a loyal adherent of the political machine of Senator Roscoe Conkling. They bought a house, spent summer vacations at fashionable resorts, and participated extensively in the social and cultural life of New York City. Mrs. Arthur, who had an excellent singing voice of near professional quality, frequently appeared in private concerts singing operatic arias and lieder. She was several times soloist with the Mendelssohn Glee Club, of which she and her husband were members. Though not involved in her husband's political activities, Mrs. Arthur was distressed by the attacks upon his reputation which prefaced his removal in July 1 8 7 8 from the office of Collector of the Port of New York, when President Hayes, seeking civil service reform, moved against the traditional practice of the "spoils system" in the New York Custom House. She was traveling in England and France at the time of his suspension, but was with him when the United States Senate upheld the removal the following February. Early in the next year, after participating in a concert while her husband was in Albany on party matters, she suddenly developed pneumonia. She died in New York City soon after Arthur reached her bedside; she was buried in the Arthur family lot in Albany's Rural Cemetery. Her death, at forty-two, left two young children and a husband wholly unprepared for such a sudden bereavement.

[Mary Antin's writings are in large part autobiographical but do not treat events after 1900, except indirectly in "House of the One Father." There is also some information in the memorial account of her husband by Hervey W. Shimer in Geological Soc. of America, Proc., 1946, pp. 15566; and in Abraham Cronbach, "Autobiog.," Am. Jewish Archives, Apr. 1959. See also the obituary of Mary Antin in the N.Y. Times, May 18, 1949, which contains minor inaccuracies; Who's Who in America, 1918-19; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXXIX, 40; N.Y. Times, July 20, Oct. 12, 1916; and Publishers' Weekly, June 11, 1949, p. 2396. For a fuller recent account, see the author's foreword in the 1969 paperback edition of The Promised Land. Death record from N.Y. State Dept. of Health. On Grabau, see also Wilhelm A. Grabau, Die Geschichte der Familie Grabau (1929), p. 188; and obituary by H. D. Thomas in Nature, July 20, 1946.] OSCAR

HANDLIN

A R T H U R , Ellen Lewis Herndon (Aug. 3 0 , 1 8 3 7 - J a n . 12, 1 8 8 0 ) , wife of Chester Alan Arthur, afterward president of the United States, was a seventh-generation Virginian. The daughter of William Lewis Herndon, explorer of the Amazon, and a niece of Matthew Fontaine Maury, oceanographer, both distinguished naval officers, she was born in Culpeper, Va., the home of her mother, Frances Elizabeth (Hansbrough) Herndon. She was an only child. She grew up in Fredericksburg, Va., her father's birthplace, and in Washington, D.C., where she was confirmed at St. John's Episcopal Church. In 1857 her father, then on leave from the Navy to serve as captain of a mail and passenger steamer running between New York and Panama, went down with his ship off the Carolina coast after saving many of his passengers. Grateful citizens of New York City, moved by his heroism, gave his widow a house there, to which she brought her daughter in 1858. Perhaps through one of her Virginia cousins who was a medical student in New York, Ellen met Chester A. Arthur, a young lawyer born in Vermont but reared and educated in upstate New York. He was the son of a Baptist clergyman and teacher and was seven years older than she, tall, handsome, and cultivated. Though she was not a "Southern beauty" in the conventional sense, her appearance was pleasing and her manners blended vivacious amiability with a sense of style. She was of

Arthur, who survived her by seven years, remained devoted to her memory. T h a t fall he was elected vice-president. When he succeeded James A. Garfield as president in 1 8 8 1 he identified himself with her church in Washington and in 1 8 8 3 placed a stained glass window dedicated to her in its south transept. His

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Arthur

youngest sister, Mary Arthur McElroy, came from Albany to serve as White House hostess and as supervisor of his daughter's education. [The Chester A. Arthur Papers, Library of Congress, including genealogical and historical data assembled by Mrs. Arthur's cousin John Waterhouse

Herndon; George F. Howe, Chester A. Arthur

( 1935). Items have been obtained from the records of the Mendelssohn Glee Club, St. John's Episcopal Church, Washington, D.C., and Calvary Episcopal Church, N.Y. City, but contemporary registers do not record her confirmation or marriage.] GEORGE

F.

HOWE

ARTHUR, Julia (May 3, 1869-Mar. 29, 1950), actress, was born in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Christened Ida Lewis, she was the fifth of sixteen children of Thomas J. Lewis, a tobacconist and cigar manufacturer, and Hannah (Arthur) Lewis, respectively of Welsh and Irish birth. Her mother, whose family name she later took for the stage, was a fine amateur Shakespearean reader. At the Lewis home in Hamilton, young Ida used to strut up and down in an attic room, reciting the lines of such heroines as Portia to an improvised audience of dolls. Her talents were first recognized in a performance of Zamora in The Honeymoon, given by an amateur dramatic club when she was eleven. At fourteen she joined the Shakespearean repertory company of Daniel E. Bandmann, with which she toured for three seasons, appearing in New York—still as Ida Lewis—at the Third Avenue Theatre in November 1886. She then went to England and Germany for a year's study. On her return, in 1887, she joined Kate Forsyth's repertory company in San Francisco, where she played leads in such modern plays as The Galley Slave, The Two Orphans, and Divorce. Experience with other stock companies followed, until in February 1891 she returned to New York—now under the name Julia Arthur—as leading lady with Harry Lacy in The Still Alarm. Her first real success, however, came in August 1891 at the Union Square Theatre when she played Queen Fortunetta in The Black Masque, an adaptation of Poe's Masque of the Red Death. The opening night made her famous, and that winter she was engaged as leading woman in A. M. Palmer's stock company, then the most prominent one in America. She remained with this group for over a year, playing Jeanne in The Broken Seal (February 1892, her first appearance for Palmer), Letty Fletcher in Saints and Sinners, and Lady Windermere in the first performance in this country of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan (February 1893), in

which she played opposite Maurice Barrymore as Lord Darlington. Some critics regard this as her greatest characterization. She also played in Thomas Bailey Aldrich's one-act drama Mercedes ( May 1893 ). Her fathomless dark eyes, deep, rich voice, and emotional intensity fitted her particularly well for the tragic role of Aldrich's fervid, tempestuous Spanish girl. In 1895 Julia Arthur extended her success to the London stage when she accepted the offer of Sir Henry Irving to join his Lyceum Theatre company as leading woman in Tennyson's Becket and as understudy to Ellen Terry. During the next two years, in London and on the company's American tour, she played Elaine in King Arthur, Sophia in Olivia, Lady Anne in Richard III, and Imogen in Shakespeare's Cymbeline, regarded as one of her greatest roles. So enthusiastic was her reception by the American public that she decided to organize her own company. As her first starring venture she presented a dramatization by Stephen Townsend and FRANCÉS HODGSON BURNETT of the latter's A Lady of Quality (at Wallack's Theatre, Nov. 1, 1897), taking herself the role of Clorinda Wildairs—one of the triumphs of her career. Next year, after touring in A Lady of Quality, she played Parthenia in her own production of Ingomar, Rosalind in As You Like It, and Galatea in Pygmalion and Galatea. On Feb. 23, 1898, Julia Arthur was married, in Covington, Ky., to Benjamin Pierce Cheney, Jr. (1866-1942), a wealthy Boston financier long interested in the drama, who subsequently financed several productions in which his wife starred; they had no children. She retired from the stage in the spring of 1900, but returned on Nov. 1, 1915, in an effort to compensate for losses suffered by her husband through bad investments, appearing at the 48th Street Theatre, New York, in The Eternal Magdalene, by Robert McLaughlin. During World War I she worked for the Red Cross and planned and played in benefit productions; she also made her film debut as Edith Cavell in The Woman the Germans Shot (1918). In 1924 Julia Arthur retired finally from the stage. She died at the age of eighty at her home in Boston, of heart block and cancer. According to her own wish, there were no funeral services; her ashes were scattered at sea. A commentator in 1899 (Lewis C. Strang) found Julia Arthur "intelligent, cultured, sincere, and mentally independent." Ambitious and hardworking—her motto, which she carried with her always in a gold locket, was

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Askew

Askew "Laborare est orare"—she was "one of the three or four" Americans who were "actually . . . accomplishing something for the drama as an art." While not, in Strang's view, a great actress, she was "a woman of magnificent depth of feeling," with the capacity to "burn into the memory of the person that sees her in any rôle whatsoever an impression that never wholly fades away." [Julia Arthur, "My Career," a series of articles in Hearst's Mag., M a r - J u l y 1916; John Clarke, The Julia Arthur Book ( 1 8 9 9 ) , a collection of pictures with a review of her career; Lewis C. Strang, Famous Actresses of the Day in America, First Series ( 1 8 9 9 ) ; George C. D. Odell, Annals of the N.Y. Stage, vols. XIV (see especially p. 5 7 9 ) and X V ( 1 9 4 5 - 4 9 ) ; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., X, 4 5 5 ; Who's Who in the Theatre (1st ed., 1 9 1 2 ) ; Who's Who in America, 1 9 1 4 - 1 5 ; clippings in the Theatre Collection, N.Y. Public Library at Lincoln Center (in the Players' Collection and the Robinson Locke Dramatic Scrapbooks), and in the Harvard Theatre Collection (which has 8 scrapbooks and 6 boxes of programs, clippings, pictures, etc., donated by Miss Arthur). Information on the Lewis family was supplied by Miss Dorothy E . Simpson of the Hamilton ( Ont. ) Public Library. Other data from death record in Mass. Division of Vital Statistics. Miss Arthur's marriage record ( copy from Clerk of County Court, Covington, Ky. ) gives her name as Ida Lewis Enos.] CLAIRE MC GLINCHEE

A S K E W , Sarah Byrd (Feb. 15, 1877-Oct. 20, 1 9 4 2 ) , librarian, was born in Dayton, Ala., of Presbyterian stock, the youngest of three daughters of Thyrza (Pickering) and Samuel Horton Askew, whose father had come from Georgia to settle on a cotton plantation in Dayton in 1835. Sarah's mother died in 1879 and her father, an accountant and bank manager, married Kittie Reeves, the only mother Sarah remembered, who bore him six daughters and a son. Sarah attended Dayton Academy until she was thirteen, when the family moved to Atlanta, Ga. Growing up near the home of Joel Chandler Harris, she learned to tell the B'rer Rabbit stories with a charm that for the rest of her life would captivate audiences of all ages. After graduating from high school in Atlanta, she attended a business school and worked briefly as a stenographer. She was visiting a sister in Cleveland, Ohio, while recovering from a long illness, when she met William H. Brett, the librarian of the Cleveland Public Library, who offered her temporary employment. She had always loved books herself and now had a vision of what they could mean in the lives of others. With Brett's encouragement she went east to attend the library school of

Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y. Finishing at Pratt in 1904, Miss Askew returned to a position in the Cleveland Public Library, but in 1905 she was invited to go to New Jersey as "organizer and missionary" for the New Jersey Public Library Commission. There were only sixty-six libraries in the state; her instructions were to "get libraries going." Driving her own horse and buggy "over sandy roads and hill trails," she visited towns "lacking either the initiative or the information" to start a library, and in 1906 she established a summer school where librarians of small libraries could, as she put it, "learn to do a better job." Inspired by Miss Askew's vivid personality, the State Teachers' Association, the Federation of Women's Clubs, state and local grange groups, and many other organizations threw themselves wholeheartedly behind the library movement, which was now gaining momentum. In 1909 she resigned to accept the position of reference librarian in the State Library at Trenton but she returned to the Commission in 1915, to remain the rest of her life. Particularly concerned with making books available to people in rural areas and in towns too small to maintain local libraries, Miss Askew gradually turned her attention to founding a county library program, again winning enthusiastic support from civic organizations. When the citizens of Burlington County started a library in 1920, following the passage that year of a state law authorizing the development of county libraries, she designed a Model-T book truck to carry books to people who had never before had library service. Under Miss Askew's guidance twelve county libraries were established and New Jersey came to be known as a pioneer in the county library movement. In addition there were 316 local libraries in New Jersey by the time of her death. During World War I Miss Askew organized the entire state in an effective scheme to supply books to military camps and troopships. Under her personal supervision, librarians also provided book service to patients in military hospitals. She performed valuable services again during the depression, when she supervised a large corps of WPA workers, giving much-needed help to libraries, and during World War II, when she helped to organize a Victory Book Campaign. Small, red-headed, with sparkling blue eyes and a determined chin, her speech softly slurred by her Alabama background, Sarah Askew was described by one of her sisters as "quicksilver." Her lively humor made her an effective speaker before all kinds of audiences. She was twice president of the New Jersey Li-

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Astor

brary Association (1913-14 and 1939-40), vice-president of the American Library Association (1938-39), chairman of children's reading for the National Congress of Parents and Teachers (1924-29), and a member of the Trenton Board of Education (1923-33). She contributed frequently to professional publications. In 1930 New Jersey College for Women (later Douglass College) of Rutgers University conferred upon her its first honorary degree. She died in Trenton, N.J., of bronchopneumonia after a long hospitalization for cancer and was buried in the family plot in Atlanta, Ga. [The fullest account of Miss Askew is a sketch by Hannah Severns in Emily M. Danton, ed., Pioneering Leaders in Librarianship ( 1953 ). See also Mabel Johnston Niemeyer in N.J. Library Assoc. Newsletter, Sept. 1961; Who Was Who in America, vol. II (1950); obituary in Trenton (N.J.) Evening Times, Oct. 21, 1942. Other information from Mrs. I. W. Summerlin of Chapel Hill, N.C., Miss Askew's half sister; from records of the N.J. Public Library Commission; and from death record in the State Dept. of Health. Though the last gives Miss Askew's birth year as 1863, family sources and federal census schedules for Marengo County, Ala. (courtesy of Mrs. Mary Ella Terrill of the Univ. of Ala. Library), establish the year as 1877.] M A B E L JOHNSTON

ASTOR,

Caroline

Webster

NIEMEYER

Schermerhorn

(Sept. 22, 1830-0ct. 30, 1908), society leader, was bom in New York City, the sixth daughter and youngest of the nine children of Abraham and Helen (White) Schermerhorn. She was almost certainly named for the recently married Mrs. Daniel Webster (Caroline LeRoy), with whom there were many family connections. The Schermerhoms, a Dutch clan who had arrived in Albany about 1640, had prospered in New York commerce and real estate; by 1800 they were leading members of the old Knickerbocker aristocracy. Caroline's father, a partner in the family ship chandlery firm, was by 1845 one of New York City's wealthy merchants, worth about $500,000. Through her Van Cortlandt maternal grandmother Caroline was related to nearly every prominent New York family of the time. She attended a school conducted by a Frenchwoman, Mrs. Bensee, and completed her education in Europe, where she learned "to sing, to play the piano, to paint on canvas and china," and to speak fluent French. On Sept. 20, 1853, she was married to William Astor, son of William Backhouse Astor and grandson of the John Jacob Astor who had founded what had become the richest family in the United States. Despite the financial brilliance of the match (her husband eventually inherited a large part of his father's $40,000,-

000 estate), she was always conscious of her own superior social background. The first twelve years of marriage Mrs. Astor presumably devoted to her children: Emily (later Mrs. James J. Van Alen), Helen Schermerhorn (Mrs. James Roosevelt Roosevelt), Charlotte Augusta (Mrs. J. Coleman Drayton and afterward Mrs. George Ogilvy Haig), Caroline Schermerhorn (Mrs. Marshall Orme Wilson), and John Jacob IV. Soon after the close of the Civil War, however, from the joint pinnacle of her husband's wealth and her own impeccable social standing, she decided to introduce order and hierarchy into the confusion of postwar nouveau riche society, much in the same way that John D. Rockefeller was introducing it into business. Her sister-in-law, Mrs. John Jacob Astor III, was at that time considered the outstanding social leader, but Caroline Astor set out to surpass her. Her husband showed little interest in these ambitions, not because of any devotion to business, but because he preferred his Dutchess County estate of Ferncliff, winters in Florida, and his yacht. Mrs. Astor, however, did not lack male assistance in her social campaigns, for she found an able court chamberlain and adviser in Ward McAllister, a humorless, indefatigable snob and bon vivant, who had Astor family connections through the Wards. In turn, McAllister fully appreciated Mrs. Astor's potentialities as a social leader, sizing her up as an ambitious woman with great administrative skill and good judgment of people, who, though valuing colonial ancestry, recognized the importance of the parvenu. It was in the 1880's and '90's that Mrs. Astor was at her apogee, not only as the greatest hostess in New York, but as the determiner of the "Four Hundred," a phrase which McAllister coined in 1888 and which soon found a permanent place in the American language as the symbol for upper-crust society. Mrs. Astor's great annual ball usually occurred on the third Monday in January, and there was much heartburning among those with social pretensions who were not invited. For many years these balls were held at the red brick and brownstone house which her husband had built for her on the west side of Fifth Avenue (now the site of the Empire State Building), but after her husband's death in 1892 and the erection of the Waldorf Hotel next door, she moved to a white marble Renaissance palace adjoining that of her son, John Jacob Astor IV, at 840 Fifth Avenue, near 65th Street. Far more exclusive than Mrs. Astor's balls were her three-hour dinner parties of at least seven courses, limited to 150 persons and occasion-

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Astor ally honoring such celebrities as Prince Louis of Battenberg or Prince Henry of Prussia. Mrs. Astor is quoted as having said that her ideal of society was "the old French salon . . . attended by the most distinguished statesmen, poets, artists and financiers," but actually her dinners were famous for their dullness. She also gave elaborate musicales and was at home informally on Sunday afternoons so that young society men in business would have the opportunity to call. Whenever she dined out, she was always placed to the right of the host. At the Metropolitan Opera she appeared promptly at 9 P.M., resplendent in all the jewels that helped to give the Diamond Horseshoe its name. Her departure, which bore no relation to the stage of the performance, was the signal for the elite to leave. In February Mrs. Astor usually traveled to her Paris apartment on the Champs Élysées, spending some time also in London and perhaps at a watering place. Back in New York in early July, she hastened to her Newport home, Beechwood, where she gave a series of dinners, musicales, and sometimes balls. Here she engaged in her most celebrated social feud. After the death of her brother-in-law, John Jacob Astor III, in 1890, she insisted on being addressed simply as "Mrs. Astor." Her husband's nephew, William Waldorf Astor, resented her claim to be the head of the family and forced his gentle wife to demand that she too be addressed simply as "Mrs. Astor." The strife provided amusement for millions of Americans until W. W. Astor gave up the struggle and moved to England. Mrs. Astor also made brief visits in the fall, and sometimes also in the spring, to Femcliff, where she might catch an occasional glimpse of her husband, whose infrequent appearances in society were a matter of comment. Into her charmed circle Mrs. Astor preferred to admit only the old colonial and Knickerbocker families, for a long time looking down on people like the Vanderbilts with their recently acquired railroad fortune. In 1883, however, she was forced to call on Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt (see ALVA SMITH VANDEBBILT BELMONT) so that young Caroline Astor might be invited to the famous costume ball that opened the Vanderbilt Fifth Avenue mansion, a celebrated capitulation that marked the final entrance of the Vanderbilts into New York society. But Mrs. Astor never accepted the Goulds or the Harrimans, though in the late 1890's she began to entertain leaders of Chicago society such as Mrs. Potter Palmer (BEBTHA HONOBÉ PALMEB) and at least one Jew—James Speyer, the husband of her friend ELLIN PBINCE SPEY-

EB. On the other hand, she would never recognize a divorcée, until her own daughter became one. After Ward McAllister's death in 1895 Mrs. Astor made the gaudily unconventional Harry Lehr his successor. Her choice of such a companion was in itself a sign that the old order was at last changing. Nevertheless, she regarded the antics of Lehr's next patroness, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish (MARIAN GRAVES ANTHON FISH) as a disintegrating force in society. Mrs. Astor, it was generally agreed, was never beautiful, but she was "as straight as an Indian" and carried her head high, "not with arrogance, but good breeding." She dressed in velvets, satins, brocades, silks, and laces from Worth, favoring royal purple and deep green. She was famous for her emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, and particularly for the celebrated diamond stomacher that was popularly believed to have belonged to Marie Antoinette (Harry Lehr said they made her look like a walking chandelier). She would never discuss her age, wore a black wig, had a horror of being photographed, and usually appeared heavily veiled even in daytime, so that the Carolus Duran portrait is the only likeness of her usually reproduced. Opinions of her personality varied. Some described her as a cold, strongwilled, and despotic grande dame. Others pictured her as a gracious and kind person who never spoke ill of others, was loyal to old friends, and was simple and unaffected, even "motherly." She was a devout Episcopalian and made charitable donations to hospitals. Mrs. Astor's health collapsed in the summer of 1906, and she remained in seclusion at her Fifth Avenue home the last two years of her life. She died there at seventy-eight of a heart condition intensified by age, and was buried in the Astor plot in Trinity Cemetery at Broadway and 153rd Street. For two decades Mrs. Astor had been a national legend, her name the symbol for exclusive aristocratic society. By the time of her death it was generally felt that society had become too complex for any one woman ever again to be such a complete dictator. [Richard Schermerhorn, Jr., Schermerhorn Genealogy and Family Chronicles ( 1 9 1 4 ) ; R. Burnham Moffat, The Barclays of N.Y. ( 1 9 0 4 ) ; and the N.Y. Evening Post, July 13, 1901, supply family background. For lengthy press accounts of Mrs. Astor's career, see N.Y. World, Oct. 30, 31, and Nov. 3, 1908; N.Y. Times, Oct. 30 and 31, 1908; N.Y. Herald and Sun, Oct. 31, 1908. Rebecca H. Insley, "An Interview with Mrs. Astor," Delineator, Oct. 1908, would be valuable if it is genuine. Reminiscences of Mrs. Astor appear in Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, The Social Lad-

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Atherton

Atherton der (1924); Elizabeth Drexel Lehr, "King Lehr" and the Gilded Age ( 1935 ) ; Elizabeth, Lady Decies, Turn of the World ( 1937 ) ; and Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., Queen of the Golden Age (1956); especially important is Ward McAllister, Society as I Have Found It ( 1890). She also figures prominently in Harvey O'Connor, The Astors (1941), and Lucy Kavaler, The Astors (1966); and in such popular secondary works as Dixon Wecter, The Saga of Am. Society ( 1937 ) ; Lloyd Morris, Postscript to Yesterday (1947) and Incredible N.Y. (1951); and Cleveland Amory, Who Killed Society? (I960).] W A L L A C E EVAN DAVIES

ATHERTON, Gertrude Franklin Horn (Oct. 30, 1857-June 14, 1 9 4 8 ) , author, was born in San Francisco, Calif., the city with which she identified her literary career. She was an only child, although subsequent marriages of her parents provided her with two half sisters and one half brother. Thomas Lodowick Horn, her father, had come to San Francisco from his native Connecticut in time to participate in the vigilance committee of 1856. Thoroughly Yankee in outlook, although of French and Dutch descent, he came of a family of shipping men and had himself succeeded in business. He courted Gertrude Franklin stubbornly, but, because of her New Orleans breeding, she disdained all Yankees, and only his ample means finally made him acceptable as a husband. Thomas Horn installed the spoiled Southern belle in a house on San Francisco's Rincón Hill and indulged her extravagances, but the marriage did not prosper; she took to hysterics, he to drink, and both to quarreling so violently that a final breakup was inevitable. Ostracism forced the young divorcee to retreat with her two-year-old child to her father's ranch south of the city. There Gertrude Horn spent the next five years, until her mother's second abortive marriage. In retrospect, Gertrude Atherton considered Stephen Franklin, her strict yet sympathetic grandfather, the strongest force in her early life. He was a great-grandnephew of Benjamin Franklin and an earnest Presbyterian who had left his native New York state to settle in New Orleans, where he had made and lost much money; he had then migrated to San Francisco, where he became editor of that city's first newspaper and served for years as secretary of the Bank of California. He recognized his granddaughter's potentialities and urged her to develop them by reading in his library. His tutelage was stern. "I was brought up with a prayer-book in one hand," Mrs. Atherton later remarked, "and the Atlantic Monthly in the other." The result was a strong reaction

against religion and an early wish to become a writer. Attendance at several private schools, including St. Mary's Hall at Benicia, Calif., supplemented her grandfather's discipline; then, when she was seventeen, a threat of tuberculosis sent her to Lexington, Ky., for a change of air and for the finish to be gained at Sayre Institute. She overcame the chest complaint but fled home before completing the course. She found her mother contemplating a third marriage, to George Henry Bowen Atherton, fourteen years her junior, the son of a wealthy American hardware merchant and a blueblood Latin mother from Chile. Atherton's infatuation soon shifted to Gertrude, now a striking blonde of middle height, with blue eyes and a classical profile. Behind her mother's back he persuaded the daughter to elope with him, and they were married by a priest on Feb. 14, 1876. The wedding caused a break with her mother and, for Gertrude herself, virtual incarceration. George Atherton's views on women and marriage were thoroughly Spanish, and he was, besides, pathetically jealous, even of the books his wife read. Motherhood brought no improvement. Gertrude Atherton thought herself devoid of maternal instinct and surrendered control of her children—George Goñi, destined to die at six, and Muriel Florence—to her mother-in-law, whose strong hand ruled Fair Oaks, the family's country estate where George Atherton insisted on living. A repeated failure in practical matters, he looked to his mother for support and could tolerate no effort by his wife to fill the vacuum of her existence, least of all her urge to write. She nevertheless managed to complete a novel, "The Randolphs of Redwoods," which the Argonaut serialized anonymously and which was later ( 1 8 9 9 ) published in book form as A Daughter of the Vine. It created a local furor and angered the Atherton clan, who deemed it a social blunder. The young wife persisted at night, locked in her room, writing stories and sketches and another novel that took her years to place. But in 1887 overt rebellion became unnecessary. Her husband sailed as a guest on a Chilean warship and died at sea, of a kidney hemorrhage; a schooner from Tahiti brought the body home in a barrel of rum. Mrs. Atherton never remarried, but dedicated the rest of her long life to the craft of writing and to a determined battle with Mrs. Grundy. Lacking college training, she had much to learn, but since she felt that San Francisco could offer little to serve her needs, she went

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Atherton to New York, then on to France, England, and Germany. One result of her extensive travels was the wide range of locale in her work. California retained its hold, however, and the city of her birth remained her permanent home. She reverted frequently to California themes, including life in the Spanish period, which inspired such books as The Doomstvoman (1892), The Splendid Idle Forties (1902), and Rezánov (1906). Though not remarkable for technical innovations or for superiority of style, her reconstructions of the past had much vitality, grounded as they often were on large accumulations of data. To assure the authenticity of The Conqueror (1902), her novelized life of Alexander Hamilton, she digested two hundred books and visited the British West Indies, where her subject was born. The result was so convincing that the book sold close to a million copies over the years and inaugurated the form of the biographical novel. A book a year flowed from Mrs. Atherton's pen, usually fiction, sometimes belles-lettres or informal history, until the total reached almost sixty. She considered Tower of Ivory (1910), a study of genius set in Munich, her finest novel, overrating it no doubt for personal reasons. Equally good, and of more interest to many readers, was Perch of the Devil (1914), a social novel set in Butte, Mont., during the violent period of the war of the Copper Kings. Julia France and Her Times (1912) was the first of several novels dealing with feminism and woman's rights. In 1914 she published her best venture into nonfiction, California: An Intimate History. Mrs. Balfame (1916), a murder story, demonstrated how banal her work could be when the subject failed to arouse her; but seven years later she produced the best seller of 1923 with her most sensational novel, Black Oxen. Then sixty-six years old, Mrs. Atherton had felt herself go stale the year before, and had sought out one of the clinics giving "rejuvenation" treatments as advocated by the Austrian physician Eugen Steinach. Convinced that X-ray stimulation of the ductless glands had restored her vigor, she wrote a story of an aging woman who retrieves her youth through endocrine treatment and, with it, romantic attentions. The novel brought Mrs. Atherton international notoriety—and Dr. Steinach wealthy patients. She went on to give in The Immortal Marriage (1927) a scintillating reconstruction of Athens during the Periclean Age. In 1940, hale at her eighty-third birthday, she styled herself the "living proof, Exhibit A," of artificial rejuvenation. Nearly eight years later she was still writing, in daily stints, when a stroke sent her to Stanford Hospital in San

Atkins Francisco. She died there within a month; her remains were cremated at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park. Several of her books, notably The Conqueror, promise to endure; others were eclipsed before her death. She wrote too much, often too hastily, and her achievement failed to reach the highest distinction. She received no preeminent literary awards, though in 1925 the French government bestowed on her three medals, including that of the Legion of Honor, for war work done in 1916, and the National Academy of Literature chose her as president in 1934. Her wannest recognition came in her native state: she received honorary degrees from Mills College in 1935 and the University of California in 1937, and the city of San Francisco honored her ninetieth birthday with a gold medal. [The Library of Congress and the Bancroft Library, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, hold collections of Mrs. Atherton's papers and MSS., but no adequate biography has yet appeared; perhaps such a work was forestalled in 1932 by her own readable Adventures of a Novelist. Her M y San Francisco: A Wayward Biog. ( 1946 ) contains additional information about her life. Lewis Leary's Articles on Am. Literature, 1900-1950 (1954) lists a dozen critical papers and interviews rich in pertinent biographical detail. Harlan Hatcher's Creating the Modern Am. Novel (1935) contains a brief assessment of her literary worth. See also Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXXVI, 15; Henry James Forman in Calif. Hist. S oc. Quart., Mar. 1961; Carl Van Vechten, "Some 'Literary Ladies' I Have Known," Yale Univ. Library Gazette, Jan. 1952.] THUEMAN

WILKINS

ATKINS, Mary (July 7, 1819-Sept. 14, 1882), California educator, was born in Jefferson, Ohio. She was one of twelve children, of whom nine girls and one boy lived to maturity, Mary herself falling somewhere near the middle. Her Puritan ancestors had come from England to Connecticut as early as 1630. Her parents, Sarah (Wright) and Quintius Flaminius Atkins, had moved to Ashtabula County, Ohio, in 1802 with a party of Connecticut emigrants. Her father, to whom she was very close, carried the U.S. mail, served as a lieutenant in the War of 1812, and was a missionary to the Indians, a business agent, a road and canal builder, county sheriff, county auditor, and judge. Deeply religious, he was a Presbyterian and an abolitionist. Mary was educated at home and in public schools and academies in northern Ohio. Beginning in 1835 she taught in a series of rural schools in western New York. While still teaching she enrolled in Oberlin College, graduating

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Atkins from the literary course with honors in 1845 and later ( 1 8 4 7 - 4 9 ) serving as assistant principal of the "Ladies Department." At this time she was a leader in the Oberlin Female Moral Reform Society. Subsequent appointments took her to Columbus and then to Cincinnati, in each case as principal of the female department of the high school. But her health was poor and she was restless and dissatisfied; at one point she was strongly tempted by an offer to go to Siam as a missionary. She chose, however, the golden land of California. Arriving at a time when women comprised less than ten per cent of the state's population, she became in January 1855 the principal and proprietor of a Young Ladies' Seminary at Benicia, located on an inlet of San Francisco Bay, a thriving waypoint to the mining country and recently the capital of the fledgling state. The years between 1850 and 1890 were the heyday of the private ( usually sectarian ) seminary in California because of the dearth of public high schools. The Benicia Seminary had been founded in 1852 as a Protestant but nonsectarian school. (Miss Atkins herself became an Episcopalian.) When she acquired it, the Seminary had been near bankruptcy several times, but under her guidance it prospered and gained a wide repute. In 1863, still restless and searching despite her success, she rented the school and sailed for the Far East, stopping en route to visit Oahu (Punahou) College in Honolulu, run by a missionary couple, Cyrus and SUSAN MILLS. Next year, on her return, she sold the Benicia Seminary to Mr. and Mrs. Mills; they took over on Jan. 1, 1866. After spending a year in England and Europe visiting school systems, Mary Atkins returned to Ohio and became a teacher in the Cleveland High School. On Mar. 29, 1869, she was married to John Lynch (Oberlin A.B., 1851, M.A., 1869), who had been a public school supervisor in Ohio and an officer in the Civil War and was now a prominent figure, sympathetic to the Negro cause, in Reconstruction Louisiana. They lived in New Orleans for six years, then spent the year 1876 in Philadelphia, where Lynch was state commissioner to the Centennial Exposition. In 1877 they moved to Santa Barbara, Calif. The following year Mrs. Lynch received an honorary master's degree from Oberlin. Cyrus and Susan Mills had meanwhile built a school of their own in the foothills south of Oakland, Calif. To their new Mills Seminary, which opened in 1871, they brought part of the faculty and some of the students they had had at Benicia. The Benicia Seminary continued, however, under other auspices, and in

Atwater 1879 Mary Atkins Lynch bought it back and became once more its principal. The school flourished, with pupils coming to her from as far away as San Diego and even Illinois. But in 1882, at sixty-three, she died in Benicia "of an organic disease." She was buried in a pioneer cemetery there, her simple gravestone inscribed: "Solid blocks of pure marble best represent her." The Benicia Seminary survived her by only four years. The present Mills College, which grew out of Mills Seminary, considers the Benicia Seminary its founding institution. Mary Atkins was five feet, seven inches tall. Her straight brown hair framed an oval face, with a high forehead and regular features. Her blue eyes were level and direct. At the time of her death newspapers wrote of her "power for organization and magnetic influence on those around her." A former pupil testified that she was an indefatigable worker, quick in perception, fearless of criticism, straightforward in business, hospitable and loving in friendship. As an educator of young women, she was revered on the West Coast somewhat as MARY LYON and CATHARINE B E E C H E R were in the East. [MSS. in Bancroft Library, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley: letters from Q. F. Atkins to Mary Atkins, genealogies, photographs, teaching certificates, Mary Atkins' diaries, clippings from Calif., Ohio, and La. newspapers, etc.; "Reminiscences of Young Ladies Seminary, Benicia," typewritten, in Mills College Library; The Diary of Mary Atkins (Mills College, 1937); Frances J. Hosford, Father Shipherd's Magna Charta: A Century of Coeducation in Oberlin College ( 1 9 3 7 ) , pp. 125-28; Semicentennial Register of the Officers and Alumni of Oberlin College ( 1 8 8 3 ) , p. 57; William W. Ferner, Ninety Years of Education in Calif., 18461936 ( 1 9 3 7 ) ; Elias O. James, The Story of Cyrus and Susan Mills ( 1 9 5 3 ) ; Rosalind A. Keep, Fourscore and Ten Years: A Hist, of Mills College ( 1 9 3 1 ) ; "Wyandot Missions in 1 8 0 6 - 7 - D i a r y of Quintius F. Atkins," Western Reserve and Northern Ohio Hist. Soc., Tract No. 50 ( 1 8 7 9 ) , pp. 110-13; information from Oberlin College. The MS. "Jour, of John Lynch, 1844-1852" is in the Oberlin College Library.] CORINNE LATHROP GILB

ATWATER, Helen Woodard (May 29, 1876June 26, 1947), home economist, was born in Somerville, Mass., but grew up in Middletown, Conn., where her father, Wilbur Olin Atwater, a pioneer in agricultural and food chemistry, was a professor at Wesleyan University. Born in Johnsburg, N.Y., he was a seventh generation descendant of David Atwater, who had come from England to New Haven, Conn., in 1637; Helen's mother, Marcia (Woodard) Atwater, was from Bangor, Maine. Atwater had

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Atwater studied chemistry in Germany, and his wife music; several times during Helen's girlhood he returned to European universities and laboratories, taking his family with him. Helen, the elder of two children and only daughter, thus received much of her early education in schools abroad, becoming fluent in French and German. She completed her education at Smith College, entering in 1894 and receiving the B.L. degree in 1897. After graduation, Helen Atwater spent the next nine years as her father's assistant, helping him in the preparation and writing of many of his papers, as he continued his newly undertaken work in calorimetry, or the energyproducing values of various foods. From his research, conducted under the auspices of the federal Department of Agriculture, came two influential bulletins: The Chemical Composition of American Food Materials (1896) and Principles of Nutrition and Nutritive Value of Food (1902), the first popular presentation of the new findings. As Helen Atwater later recalled, she "never planned a career, it just unfolded as one thing led to another." After her father's death (1907) she prepared a bibliography of his extensive writings on nutrition. She then joined the scientific staff of the Office of Home Economics in the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington, where for fourteen years (1909-23) she interpreted to rural women and homemakers the new knowledge of food values and preparation of food. Her writings appeared in department publications, in the Journal of Home Economics, and elsewhere. In 1923, when a reorganization within the Department of Agriculture made an appropriate time for change, Helen Atwater accepted an offer to become the first full-time editor of the Journal of Home Economics, the organ of the American Home Economics Association. Though the association and its Journal had begun in 1909, home economics was still a young field, and Miss Atwater, through her articles and editorials, helped to shape its development. Aided by her travel experiences, her wide reading, and the stimulus of growing up in a home that was a center for scientists and scholars, she maintained a high standard of writing and subject matter; through her broad contacts she in turn extended the understanding of what home economics could contribute to society.

World War I, in Washington, she was executive chairman of the department of food production and home economics of the Woman's Committee of the United States Council of National Defense. She served on the committee for the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection (1930) and also participated in the President's Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership (1931). For twenty years she was an active member of the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, formed in 1920 as a clearinghouse for organizations engaged in promoting federal measures of special interest to women, and was its chairman from 1926 to 1928. A member of the American Public Health Association, she was chosen chairman of its committee on the hygiene of housing in 1942. Helen Atwater, in the words of an editorial colleague, possessed "gifts of insight and clear thinking linked to . . . [a] sound sense of values and active imagination." Just over five feet tall, she had lively brown eyes, a keen wit, and an ease in conversation that not only enlivened sober committee meetings but enabled her to work with a great variety of people as well. Her sense of humor made her a happy participant in the stunts at the annual dinners of the Women's National Press Club, of which she was a long-time member. At age sixty-five she retired from the editorship of the Journal of Home Economics, but she continued to live in Washington until her death there in 1947, of a cerebral thrombus and generalized arteriosclerosis. She was buried in Indian Hill Cemetery, Middletown, Conn. Smith College had awarded her an honorary Sc.D. in 1943. Within the American Home Economics Association Miss Atwater had, with her European experience and language ability, taken a special interest in its programs to aid foreign students wishing to study home economics in this country. The association in 1948 established in her memory the Helen Atwater International Fellowship Award.

As a professional woman of warm human sympathy, Miss Atwater was associated with a wide variety of agencies and groups. In Middletown she had been active in civic affairs and Congregational church work. During

AUNT FANNY. See Barker.

[Jour, of Home Economics, Nov. 1941 and various issues; Smith Alumnae Quart., Nov. 1947, Feb. 1948; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15; Am. Men of Science (7th ed., 1944); Who Was Who in America, vol. II (1950); death record from D.C. Dept. of Public Health; family data from Mrs. Catherine Atwater Galbraith, a niece. On Miss Atwater's father, see Diet. Am. Biog.] ELIZABETH GAGE,

NEIGE

TODHUNTER

Frances Dana

AUSTIN, Mary Hunter (Sept. 9, 1868-Aug. 13, 1934), author, was born in Carlinville, 111.,

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Austin the second daughter and fourth of six children of George and Susannah Savilla (Graham) Hunter, whose eldest son and daughter had died in infancy. Mary's father had come from Yorkshire, England, in 1851, and after attending Shurtleff College in Alton, 111., had been admitted to the bar in 1858. Three years later he married Susannah Graham, whose father was a Scotch-Irish druggist and whose mother (née Dugger) was descended from Pierre Daguerre, who had come with Lafayette from France. Fevers shattered George Hunter's health during his Civil War service, and he returned in 1864 a semi-invalid to resume law practice at Carlinville. His illness cast a shadow over Mary's childhood. Rejected by her mother, she was by all accounts an odd, perverse child. While her father's strength was ebbing away she turned to her sister Jennie for solace. He died in October 1878, and two months later she lost the second support of her childhood when diphtheria took her sister's life. Her mother now concentrated affection on her elder son, leaving Mary to her own resources, of which she had a rich endowment. She had long recognized a second personality, a deeper, more intuitive one than her immediate self; and this she called "I-Mary." It was "I-Mary" who later wrote many of Mrs. Austin's works, in a state near trance. She sometimes called this deeper self the Inknower, sometimes Genius, using the term in a classical sense; she also explained it as "the free, untutored play of the racial inheritance into the immediate life of the individual." Sometimes she identified it with the shaman's Wakonda; at others, with "the presence of God." Whatever the name, it remained the central fact of her life, the core of her private religion, and the source of her art. It had sustained her since the age of five when, in a phrase of her own, "God happened to Mary under [a] walnut tree." That encounter left her a mystic, always religious, though attached to no particular sect except for two barren trials of Methodism. Precocious at school, Mary began to write poems before the age of ten; but on entering Blackburn College in Carlinville, in 1884, she studied art, then majored in science instead of literary studies. She took a B.S. degree in 1888, the year her family moved to California to undertake a desert homestead at the edge of the San Joaquin Valley. There Mary began that impassioned intimacy with the desert that would lead to her most distinguished books. While teaching school, she was courted by Stafford Wallace Austin, scion of a missionary family in Hawaii. They were married on May

Austin 19, 1891, and Austin became manager of an irrigation project in Owens Valley. The scheme failed, however, before their daughter Ruth was born in October 1892. Financial debacle was a milder blow than the discovery that their baby was a congenital idiot. Mrs. Austin was forced to teach again to help her husband, who became a county superintendent of schools but lacked the will to succeed. To care for Ruth under such conditions so frayed her nerves that she eventually decided to place the child in an institution. (Ruth died in 1918.) Meanwhile, encouraged by sales to the Overland Monthly, Mary Austin determined upon a writing career. While moving with her husband from one parched desert town to another she worked at the craft and made studies of the Indians she encountered. A dozen years of "picking and prying" into the mysteries of the wastelands at last crystallized in fourteen sketches which she wrote at white heat. They were published in 1903 as The Land of Little Rain, her first book, which brought her sudden renown and survives yet as a Western classic. Meanwhile, her marriage had failed; she left her husband now, and later divorced him. She built a house at Carmel, Calif., and there joined a Bohemian group that included George Sterling, Ambrose Bierce, and Jack London. She began to publish a volume a year—in 1904, The Basket Woman, a book of Paiute Indian legends; in 1905, Isidro, an improbable romance of mission days in California; and in 1906, The Flock, a classic account of sheepherding in her land of little rain. She also finished Lost Borders, but before its appearance, in 1909, she had sailed to Italy, expecting to die of cancer. In Rome she perfected certain prayer techniques under Catholic guidance, without joining the Church. As the growth in her breast subsided, she resumed the career that would, in time, see the publication of thirty-two books and over two hundred articles. The immediate result of her Rome experience was Christ in Italy (1912). In London, she found that her name threw her among such notables as George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, and H. G. Wells, who called her the most intelligent woman in America. She went home in 1910 to help with the New York staging of her poetic drama The Arrow Maker, which was produced in the spring of 1911. Then she lectured in San Diego; indeed for the rest of her life she alternated writing with platform appearances, including lectures on her theories of Indian poetic rhythms at the University of California, Yale, and, on a visit to London in 1921, the Fabian School. On the platform her rotund

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Austin body and heavily jowled face, with its "high forehead and abundant . . . gold-brown hair," exuded such assurance as to the genius of Mary Austin that she was tagged with an "Empress complex" by a disaffected critic. From 1912 on she divided her time between Carmel and Manhattan, where she later associated herself with the artists and writers around Mabel Dodge. She met feminist leaders of the day and enlisted in the suffrage and birth control movements, aiding them with her writing. She also published essays on socialism and problem novels like A Woman of Genius (1912), full of veiled autobiography. Less successful were The Ford (1917) and No. 26 Jayne Street (1920), each too sternly didactic to excel as fiction. But her interest in Indians remained intense and much of her later work deftly probed their inner life. Her reexpressions of aboriginal song appeared in The American Rhythm (1923), whose thesis assumed that authentic poetry drew its rhythms from the ground which nourished the poet's roots; and her verses in The Children Sing in the Far West (1928) were audacious attempts to place herself in as close accord with "the run of wind in tall grass" as any red chisera. Mary Austin's devotion to Indian culture, as well as to Spanish colonial art, led her to settle in Santa Fe, Ν.Méx., in 1924, the year she published The Land of Journeys' Ending. She had a Spanish adobe built—"Casa Querida"— where she lived with a niece and namesake, Mary Hunter. Friends came to visit her here, and it was in this house that w i l l a c a t h e r wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop. Mrs. Austin took the lead now in moves to conserve the region's native arts and handicrafts, and in 1927 she was a New Mexico representative at the Seven States Conference on the water-diversion problems of the projected Boulder Dam. Six years later the University of New Mexico honored her with a Doctor of Letters degree. Hardworking to the last, she finished a manuscript on Spanish art in 1934 and had started another novel when death claimed her at home, in sleep, after a heart attack. Her remains were cremated and her ashes later sealed in a natural crypt on Mount Picacho overlooking Santa Fe. Mary Austin's chief accomplishment as an author remains her treatment of the arid regions of the West and their manifold life, including that of the Indian. Her nature writings, which include permanent classics, are justly equated with those of John Muir, John Burroughs, Thoreau, and the two Bartrams. The pity is that more of her work did not sustain this high level. Much of it is so thesis-ridden,

so eccentric in conception, and at times even so flawed in execution that it must be barred from the front rank of American letters, and not a little of it appeals only to a cultish minority. [Mary Austin's papers are at the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. The fullest published primary source remains her autobiography, Earth Horizon ( 1 9 3 2 ) , but biographical detail is available in other of her works, notably Everyman's Genius ( 1925), Experiences Facing Death ( 1931 ), and three articles in the Bookman: Apr. 1921, Mar. 1922, and June 1923. See also her autobiographical sketch of 1902, published in Grant M. Overton, The Women Who Make Our Novels ( 1 9 1 8 ) , pp. 164-69. Helen M. Doyle, Mary Austin, Woman of Genius ( 1 9 3 9 ) , and Thomas M. Pearce, The Beloved House ( 1940), are perceptive memoirs by personal friends. Dudley T. Wynn has published an article in the Va. Quart. Rev., Spring 1937, and a 22-page abridgment ( 1941 ) of his doctoral dissertation, "A Critical Study of the Writings of Mary Hunter Austin" (N.Y. Univ., 1940). Other materials may be found in Franklin Walker, A Literary Hist, of Southern Calif. ( 1 9 5 0 ) ; Louis Adamic, My America ( 1 9 3 8 ) ; Willard Hougland, ed., Mary Austin: A Memorial ( 1 9 4 4 ) ; Henry C. Tracy, Am. Naturists ( 1 9 3 0 ) ; and articles by: Elizabeth S. Sergeant in Saturday Rev. of Literature, Sept. 8, 1934; Henry Smith in N.Mex. Quart., Feb. 1931; Mabel Major in ibid., May 1934; Lincoln Steffens in American Mag., June 1911; Carl Van Doren in Century, Nov. 1923.] THURMAN

WILKINS

AVERY, Martha Gallison Moore (Apr. 6, 1851-Aug. 8, 1929), Socialist and Catholic lay apostle, was bom in Steuben, Maine, as were her parents, Albion King Paris Moore, a house builder, and Katharine (Leighton) Moore; she was the third daughter and fourth of eight children. When Martha was thirteen her mother died, and she went to live with her grandfather Samuel Moore, a Jeffersonian Democrat and for many years a member of the Maine senate. She was educated in the village school in Steuben and later in a private dame school. For a time she carried on a millinery business in Ellsworth, Maine, where she joined the Unitarian church. On Mar. 18, 1880, she was married to a fellow church member, Millard Filmore Avery, son of a shipowner-merchant of Ellsworth. Their only child, Katharine, was born in 1881. By 1886, however, Avery had left home to become a traveling salesman, and Mrs. Avery moved that year with her daughter to Boston; her husband died in 1890. In Boston Martha Avery explored with interest the many "advanced ideas" she encountered. She later regarded as especially influential her fifteen years of study with a "master

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Avery in Cosmic Law," Dr. Charles D. Sherman, a student of astrology and Oriental lore who had spent some years in India. In 1888 she became a charter member of the First Nationalist Club of Boston, formed by followers of Edward Bellamy. When the club split in 1891, she joined the Socialist Labor party. She quickly attained some prominence in party affairs, serving as a lecturer, a member of the party's state committee (1892-95), a delegate to the national convention of Daniel De Leon's Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance in 1898, and, in the same year, Socialist Labor candidate for state treasurer. During the party dissension of 18991900, Mrs. Avery at first sided with De Leon but eventually found her way into the new Socialist party. In the late 1890's Mrs. Avery developed a close association with David Goldstein, an English-bom Jewish cigar maker and a fellow Socialist. When she founded in 1896 her Karl Marx Class—renamed in 1901 the Boston School of Political Economy—Goldstein served as its secretary. Increasingly, however, the two became "unsettled in their Marxian orthodoxy as they discovered the anti-religious and, as they believed, the anti-moral implications of that system" (Lord et al., III, 631). A particular turning point was the general Socialist defense of the Rev. George D. Herrón's divorce and his subsequent marriage to Carrie Rand (see CAROLINE A M A N D A SHEHFEY H A N D ) . When the Massachusetts Socialist convention of 1902 rejected Goldstein's and Mrs. Avery's motion to repudiate Socialists who attacked religion, preached violence, or advocated free love, they both left the movement. Mrs. Avery had meanwhile been drawn toward Catholicism. Having been impressed, while lecturing in Montreal, by the "exquisite manners" of the daughters in the family with which she was staying—the result, she was told, of their convent education—Mrs. Avery sent her own daughter, after high school, to a Quebec convent school (Goldstein, Autobiography, pp. 89-90). Within a few months, early in 1900, the girl decided to become a Catholic, and a few years later entered the Congrégation de Notre Dame as Sister St. Mary Martha. On May 1, 1904—the day was chosen to symbolize her total renunciation of Marxism—Mrs. Avery was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith at Boston's Church of the Immaculate Conception; Goldstein was converted to Catholicism a year later. Both had already turned to answering the "falsehoods of Socialism." In 1903 they published their jointly written Socialism: The Nation of Fatherless Children. This critical exposition of socialist doctrine and its im-

plications, particularly in regard to marriage and the family, won praise from President Theodore Roosevelt and from Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor. Within Massachusetts, Mrs. Avery and Goldstein, by their writing and speaking, played a significant role in turning back, in 1903, a rising tide of Socialist party victories in such shoe-manufacturing cities as Haverhill and Brockton. During the next decade, Mrs. Avery continued, through lectures and writing, to combat socialism, at the same time seeking to promote reform along nonsocialist lines. Her emphasis on the social principles of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum and her firm support of trade unions and collective bargaining made her one of the pioneers of the Catholic social justice movement. Turning her Boston School of Political Economy to these new ends, she also took a leading role in the Common Cause Society, organized in Boston in 1912 by a group of Catholic laymen, which held a weekly forum and supported minimumwage and other labor legislation; she was its president from 1922 until her death. Increasingly, however, Mrs. Avery and David Goldstein were drawn toward the idea of lay proselytizing for the Roman Catholic Church, of "going out into the streets and public squares, as the Socialists did, and preaching Catholicism to all comers" (Lord, III, 631). In 1916 they presented their plan to William Cardinal O'Connell and the next year, with his approval, launched the Catholic Truth Guild. Speaking from its auto-van painted in the Papal colors, flying an American flag, and emblazoned with the motto, "For God and Country," with a large crucifix at her back, Mrs. Avery soon became known to hundreds of Bostonians who stood on street corners as she delivered the Catholic message. Her intense enthusiasm quickly converted her mission into the most extensive layman's apostolate in American Catholic history. Though she herself confined her speaking to New England, the Guild's "pulpit on wheels" toured the country as far west as the Pacific. As a person, Martha Avery was described by David Goldstein as "a highly cultured, womanly woman, aristocratic in her bearing, eloquent and fearless" (Autobiography, p. 7). Some of her Socialist colleagues, during the intraparty struggles of 1899-1900, judged her more harshly as an "opportunist" and "productive of discord" (Bedford, pp. 143-45). Before her conversion to Catholicism she had supported woman suffrage at legislative hearings, but she afterward opposed it, on one occasion

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Avery

debating the issue with ANNA HOWAHD S H A W at Boston's Faneuil Hall. She continued speaking for the Catholic Truth Guild until a few days before her death in 1929. She succumbed to arteriosclerosis at her home in the Boston suburb of Medford at the age of seventy-eight and was buried in Holyhood Cemetery, Brookline, Mass. [The fullest accounts of Mrs. Avery's work are David Goldstein, Autobiog. of a Campaigner for Christ (1936), and two articles by D. Owen Carrigan: "Martha Moore Avery: Crusader for Social Justice," Catholic Hist. Rev., Apr. 1968, and "A Forgotten Yankee Marxist," New England Quart., Mar. 1969; the latter should, however, be supplemented by Henry F. Bedford, Socialism, and the Workers in Mass., 1886-1912 (1966). See also: Am. Catholic Who's Who, 1911; editorial tribute in America, Aug. 24, 1929, pp. 462-63; Robert H. Lord et al., Hist, of the Archdiocese of Boston, vol. Ill (1944); Marc Karson, Am. Labor Unions and Politics, 1900-1918 (1958), chap, ix, which relates the work of Mrs. Avery and Goldstein to other Catholic efforts to ward off socialism in the American labor movement; and James J. Kenneally, "Catholicism and Woman Suffrage in Mass.," Catholic Hist. Rev., Apr. 1967. Mrs. Avery's daughter, Sister St. Mary Martha, C.N.D., of Waterbury, Conn., provided helpful family data. Mrs. Avery's baptismal date, sometimes given as 1903, was confirmed by the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Boston. Death record from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics. There is a collection of Mrs. Avery's papers at Xavier College, Sydney, Nova Scotia.] JAMES P. SHENTON

AVERY, Rachel G. Foster (Dec. 30, 1858Oct. 26, 1919), suffragist, was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., one of three children—probably the youngest—of J. Heron Foster and Julia (Manuel) Foster. Her father, a native of Greensburg, Pa., was founder and editor of the successful Pittsburgh Dispatch; he served also for two terms in the state legislature and as a colonel in the Civil War. Rachel's mother, of English origins, was from Johnstown, N.Y.; she has been described as "notably strongminded, clear-headed and intelligent" (Nevin, p. 30). Both parents were Quakers and reformers, the father a vigorous opponent of slavery, the mother an early advocate of woman's rights. The first suffrage meetings in Pittsburgh were reportedly held in her home, inspired by E L I Z A B E T H CADY STANTON, a friend from her Johnstown days. At his death in 1868, Foster left his family a considerable fortune. His widow took her two daughters, Julia and Rachel, to Philadelphia, where they were educated in private schools and were active in L U C R E T I A M O T T ' S Citizens' Suffrage Associa-

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tion. Rachel, independent and restless, traveled widely in Europe, and for a time in 1885 studied political economy at the University of Zurich. There she became acquainted with F L O R E N C E K E L L E Y , whose interest in socialism she seems for a time to have shared. In 1879, already a suffragist by inheritance, Rachel Foster attended the National Woman Suffrage Association convention, met SUSAN B. ANTHONY, and at once threw herself into the cause. Elected corresponding secretary of the national association in 1880, she arranged a series of suffrage conventions in the Midwest that year and in New England the following year; in 1882 she personally directed the campaign for a suffrage amendment in Nebraska. Miss Anthony immediately took Miss Foster to her heart, and in later years spoke of her as "my dear, first adopted niece." A trip to Europe together in 1883, at Miss Foster's expense, cemented the friendship. Thereafter Rachel Foster arranged Miss Anthony's tours, worked on the history of the suffrage movement which she was compiling, and regularly contributed from her own means so that "Aunt Susan" could continue to lecture and travel. The older leader gradually turned over to Rachel Foster an increasing amount of her organizational work, on which the younger woman thrived, and came to rely not only on her capacity for administrative detail but also on her judgment in both political and personal matters. Once, when Miss Anthony was about to buy yet another black dress, Miss Foster persuaded her to buy what she really preferred, a dark garnet velvet one. (Rachel Foster herself, despite her Quakerism, dressed with an eye to style; on the European tour in 1883 she was presented at the Court of St. James in a lownecked, sleeveless dress with a four-yard train.) Only rarely, over a period of twenty-five years, does this intimate friendship appear to have undergone any strain. Miss Anthony was upset by her friend's marriage, on Nov. 8, 1888, to Cyrus Miller Avery—son of Rosa Miller Avery, a Chicago suffragist and reformer—fearing that her protégée might drop her work for the cause. But Mrs. Avery remained at her post for many years, despite the care of three daughters: Miriam Alice Foster (adopted in 1887), Rose Foster Avery (bom 1890), and Julia Foster Avery. Another occasion for misgiving came at the Washington convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1896, when Rachel Avery led a rebellion of Miss Anthony's "girls" against The Woman's Bible, published the year before by Mrs. Stanton. This work, designed to show how organized religion per-

Ayer

Avery petuated feminine subordination, contained biting commentaries on Biblical passages derogatory to women. Though Miss Anthony sided with Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Avery and others objected to the book on the ground that it would offend religious people who might otherwise be drawn into the movement, and under their leadership the convention disavowed any responsibility for it. Within a few months, however, Mrs. Avery and another of the insurgents had written Miss Anthony "most tender and beautiful letters, acknowledging their mistake, expressing their sorrow and begging to be reinstated in her confidence and affection" (Harper, II, 856). As the years passed Rachel Foster Avery continued to be one of Miss Anthony's most loyal lieutenants and her perennial secretary. She helped plan and contributed generously to a number of state suffrage campaigns, particularly those in Kansas in 1887 and 1892. In 1888, with MAY WBIGHT S E W A L L and Miss Anthony, she organized the Washington gathering where the International Council of Women was founded and thereafter served as corresponding secretary of that body ( 1 8 8 8 93) and of its American affiliate, the National Council of Women ( 1 8 9 1 - 9 4 ) . In 1893 she was secretary of the organization committee of the World's Congress of Representative Women, held in connection with the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She also helped to bring about the merger of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1890 with its rival, the American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1901, a year after Miss Anthony retired as head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Mrs. Avery resigned her long-held position as corresponding secretary, but she remained active in the movement. For a time she had made her home in Chicago, where her husband was a manufacturer's agent, but by 1901 she was living in Philadelphia. Thereafter she spent several years in Switzerland with her daughters. When the International Woman Suffrage Alliance was organized in Berlin in 1904 she became its secretary, serving until 1909. Upon returning to the United States she was elected first vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1907 and served until 1910, when she resigned along with F L O R E N C E K E L L E Y and others in protest against what she considered the ineffectual leadership of ANNA HOWAED SHAW. From 1908 to 1910 Mrs. Avery headed the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association (with Lucy E. Anthony, Susan B. Anthony's niece, as her secretary); she did much to revitalize the cause in Pennsylvania,

among other things winning a full-fledged endorsement of woman suffrage from the state Federation of Labor. She also supported the woman's club movement, joining the Chicago Woman's Club and Philadelphia's New Century Club. Mrs. Avery lived to see the suffrage amendment passed by Congress but not its final ratification. She died in a Philadelphia hospital of pneumonia in 1919, at the age of sixty; her remains were cremated. Miss Anthony had said of her in 1901: "I should never have been able to carry on the work of the society as its president for so many years but for her able cooperation. . . . She has done the drudgery of this association for more than twenty years . . ." (History of Woman Suffrage, V, 17). [Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) ; Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., eds., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, vols. IV-VI ( 1 9 0 2 - 2 2 ) ; Ida H. Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony ( 3 vols., 18981908); Katharine Anthony, Susan B. Anthony ( 1 9 5 4 ) ; Alma Lutz, S usan Β. Anthony ( 1 9 5 9 ) ; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle ( 1959 ) ; Dorothy Rose Blumberg, Florence Kelley ( 1 9 6 6 ) ; Who's Who in America, 1899-1900 to 1912-13. Information about Mrs. Avery's father was supplied by the Pa. Division, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; on her mother, see Adelaide M. Nevin, The Social Mirror: A Character Sketch of the Women of Pittsburg and Vicinity ( 1 8 8 8 ) , p. 30. Cyrus Avery's occupation from 1893 city directory ( courtesy of Chicago Hist. Soc. ). Death record from Pa. Dept. of Health.] CHRISTOPHER LASCH

AYER, Harriet Hubbard (June 27, 1849-Nov. 23, 1903), businesswoman and journalist, was born in Chicago, according to the most acceptable evidence in 1849. Unquestionably she was born to comfortable circumstances. Her father, Henry George Hubbard, a native of Vermont, was a successful real estate dealer who was a cousin of Gurdon Hubbard, one of the growing city's leading merchants; through his marriage in 1845 to Juliet Elvira Smith, he was related as well to other first families of Chicago. Harriet, the second of their three daughters and third of their four children who survived infancy, lacked no material advantages. She was privately educated at Chicago's Convent of the Sacred Heart (although the family religion seems to have been Episcopalian), graduating at fifteen. Nevertheless, family legend has it that she was a lonely and fearful child who was considered an ugly duckling. Her father died in 1852, her mother lapsed into semi-invalidism, and there was apparently

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Ayer a sense of relief in the Hubbard home when, at the end of June 1865, Harriet, just turned sixteen, was married to Herbert Copeland Ayer, son of a wealthy Chicago iron dealer. She bore him three children: Harriet (1867); another girl who died in infancy during the Chicago Fire of 1871; and Margaret Hubbard (1877). Between 1866 and 1882 Mrs. Ayer flowered into independence and beauty as a wealthy society matron. Herbert Ayer, like most businessmen of his generation, was wholly absorbed in work and left to his wife the management of the home and the pursuit of culture. This last Harriet undertook eagerly. She traveled abroad and read widely, and also took part in amateur theatricals, entertained visiting actors, and did some translations of French drama at a time when the stage was still under a slight stigma of impropriety. Her intellectual and artistic interests figured in a growing estrangement between her and Ayer which culminated in her departure with her two daughters for New York in 1882 and a divorce in 1886. Meanwhile, in 1883, Ayer failed in business, leaving Harriet with the burden of supporting herself and her children, a task she took up with drive and energy. For a time she worked as a decorator and saleswoman in the employ of expensive furniture establishments; then in 1886 she secured backing for a business venture of her own. This was the manufacture and sale of a facial cream which she claimed to have discovered in Paris. With shrewd use of advertising psychology, she announced that it had been used by Madame Recamier, a famous beauty of Napoleon's day, whose name she placed on the label together with her own. Having thus lent her social prestige to the endorsement of a popular product, she hammered home this combination of snob appeal and ballyhoo by extensive newspaper advertising, proving herself a pioneer in modem merchandising techniques. Serious problems, however, soon clouded the success of Recamier Preparations, Inc. One of her backers and associates, James Seymour, who was also her daughter Harriet's father-inlaw, charged as a stockholder that she was mismanaging the company's affairs and was mentally deranged. Mrs. Ayer struck back in 1889 with a countersuit, asserting that Seymour was illegally holding a block of stock which she had given him merely as collateral for a loan, since repaid. She also claimed that he had tried to deprive her of her reason, and linked him with others in an alleged plot to alienate her children's affections and to poison her. It is impossible on the basis of the sur-

Ayer viving evidence to evaluate these claims and counterclaims. The courts appeared to support her in denying to Seymour the power to vote the disputed stock. On the other hand, Mrs. Ayer obviously did suffer from severe neurasthenic disorders, and a long, unhappy period of litigation and illness came to a shocking climax in February 1893 when her divorced husband and daughter Harriet succeeded in having her committed to a private insane asylum outside New York. During this struggle she lost both the custody of her children and her business investments. After fourteen months of confinement, her lawyers succeeded in having her released. She now undertook a series of lectures describing her unjust detention (since she insisted that she had never been other than completely sane) and dramatically calling attention to the wretched treatment of the mentally ill and the dangerous ease with which unwanted persons could be imprisoned in asylums by conniving relatives and complaisant doctors. A new period in Mrs. Ayer's life began in 1896 when Arthur Brisbane, then an editor of the New York World, hired her to write a column of beauty advice for the newly developed woman's page of the Sunday edition. The articles were a popular success and formed the basis for Harriet Hubbard Ayer's Book: A Complete and Authentic Treatise on the Laws of Health and Beauty (1899). Mrs. Ayer thus came to play a role in two emergent movements, independence for women and the new mass journalism. She made the newspaper more attractive to poor girls, who, for two or three cents, could share the "secrets" of a famous society woman's beauty. And since the "secrets" consisted in good part of commonsense hints on bathing, sleep, fresh air, exercise, and sound food, she also helped release the would-be belle from the old restrictive pattern of sheltered delicacy, thus encouraging women to enter a wider sphere of activity. Her own record of successful self-support was also a heartening example. Harriet Hubbard Ayer's last years were spent in New York, where until her death she remained on the World. She was reconciled with her daughters and recognized for her work. In 1903, at fifty-four, she died at her New York apartment of pneumonia and chronic nephritis; she was buried in Graceland Cemetry, Chicago. She was succeeded on the World staff by her daughter Margaret, who later married the editor of the World, Frank Cobb. [Mrs. Ayer also wrote Woman's Guide to Health and Beauty (1904). An undocumented biography

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Ayres

by Margaret Hubbard Ayer and Isabella Taves, The Three Lives of Harriet Hubbard Ayer ( 1957), is based on recollections furnished by her daughter Mrs. Cobb to Miss Taves. There is a sketch in Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1893 ), and a brief typewritten memoir by Henry E. Hamilton in the library of the Chicago Hist. Soc. See also Albert Payson Terhune, To the Best of My Memory (1930), p. 213; and obituaries in N.Y. Times and Chicago Tribune, Nov. 26, 1903.] BERNARD

A.

WEISBERGER

AYRES, Anne (Jan. 3, 1816-Feb. 9, 1896), pioneer in American Episcopal sisterhoods, was born in London, England, one of six children of Robert and Anne Ayres. Little is known of her background and early life. She came with her parents to New York City in 1836 and there began teaching young girls of well-to-do families, one of them a niece of the Episcopal clergyman William Augustus Muhlenberg. In the summer of 1845, after hearing a sermon by Muhlenberg, Miss Ayres resolved to devote her life to the service of Christ. That fall, in a simple private ceremony on All Saints' Day, she was formally consecrated by him as Sister Anne. Although Muhlenberg at first took no further steps to build a sisterhood, it seems clear that he and Anne Ayres had such a goal in mind. He was then the head of an Episcopal college on Long Island but was already building his new Church of the Holy Communion in New York City, where he planned to conduct a broad, pioneering program of parish social service. For this he needed a corps of assistants, and while there were as yet no English or American sisterhoods in the Anglican Church, he was familiar with the order of deaconesses begun in Germany by the Lutheran pastor Theodor Fliedner of Kaiserswerth. In 1852 the Sisterhood of the Holy Communion, attached to Muhlenberg's church, was formally organized, with Anne Ayres as "First Sister." Early in 1854 the sisters took up residence in a donated house behind the church; by 1857 three more women had joined, with others as probationers. In clear contrast to the Roman Catholic orders, the members took no lifetime vows: each merely pledged herself to a three-year term of service which could be renewed. Each sister was expected to follow certain procedures of selfexamination, to provide the costs of her support, to refrain from marrying during her term of duty, and to defer to the direction of the "First Sister," although there was no rule or discipline in the traditional conventual sense. They were to wear a prescribed form of dress,

but this was to be an adaptation of secular dress, not a religious habit. The purpose, as Anne Ayres expressed it in her Evangelical Sisterhoods (1867), was a practical one: by living together, away from conflicting domestic duties, the sisters could best serve the sick and needy. As Dr. Muhlenberg, over the next quarter of a century, developed his charitable program, Anne Ayres was his closest associate. One of his major projects was the building of a church hospital, an idea he conceived as early as 1846 at a time when New York City had only two hospitals, one for seamen and one for paupers. A small infirmary, fitted out in 1853 by Anne Ayres and her fellow sisters in rented rooms near the Church of the Holy Communion, was succeeded in 1858 by the newly constructed St. Luke's Hospital, at Fifth Avenue and 54th Street. Sister Anne, as "House Mother," had charge of both nursing and household administration, with Muhlenberg (who soon afterward resigned his parish to give full time to the hospital) as superintendent and pastor. Within the sisterhood, however, some members apparently found Sister Anne's direction "erratic and autocratic" ( Sister Mary Hilary, p. 14). Some also came to favor a more strictly conventlike basis of organization, and in the winter of 1862-63 four sisters, led by H A R R I E T S T A R R C A N N O N , left the hospital and organized a new Episcopal sisterhood more akin to Catholic orders. In 1865 Dr. Muhlenberg undertook a new venture: St. Johnland on Long Island, a "Christian industrial community" planned as a refuge for the poor, far from the evils of city life, with special provision for homeless and handicapped patients, orphaned children, and the aged. To this undertaking Anne Ayres as a trustee gave an increasing amount of her time. Her sisterhood, serving both the hospital and St. Johnland, now became the Sisterhood of St. Luke and St. John (though the earlier name was retained by some sisters who continued in parish work at the Church of the Holy Communion) . Sister Anne's principal work in her later years, however, was as companion, nurse, and secretary to the aging Dr. Muhlenberg. In 1876, in formal recognition of the role she had assumed, the trustees of both St. Luke's Hospital and St. Johnland voted her the title "Sister Superintendent," with powers coordinate with Muhlenberg's. With his death, in 1877, Miss Ayres withdrew from the hospital but continued at St. Johnland. She had already begun the task of editing Muhlenberg's essays and speeches, published in two volumes (1875-

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Bache 77) as Evangelical Catholic Papers. By his express wish, she also wrote a careful fulllength biography, based on Muhlenberg's diaries and personal papers. He had specified that his papers be destroyed after the biography was completed; shortly before her own death she destroyed her papers as well, that she might be remembered only through the life and work of her pastor. She died of acute bronchitis and endocarditis at St. Luke's Hospital (then in its new location on 113th Street) at the age of eighty. After funeral services in the hospital chapel, her body was interred in God's Acre at St. Johnland, beside that of Dr. Muhlenberg. The Sisterhood of the Holy Communion never became large and ultimately went out of existence in 1940. Anne Ayres is significant, however, as the first American Episcopal sister, as the woman who planted the seed for the revival of the monastic life in the Episcopal Church, and as the prin-

cipal colleague of a vigorous and innovative Episcopal pastor. [Harry Boone Porter, Jr., Sister Anne, Pioneer in Women's Work (pamphlet, 1960), is the fullest biographical sccount. Anne Ayres, Evangelical Sisterhoods (1867), describes the emergence of the sisterhood and articulates its rules and rationale; see also her earlier Practical Thoughts on Sisterhoods (1864). Sister Anne's biography, The Life and Work of William Augustus Muhlenberg (1880), though self-effacing, is an important source. For the split of 1862-63, see Sister Mary Hilary, C.S.M., Ten Decades of Praise: The Story of the Community of Saint Mary (1965); and the earlier Morgan Dix, Harriet Starr Cannon (1896). See also Henry C. Potter, Sisterhoods and Deaconesses at Home and Abroad ( 1873 ) ; and obituaries in The Living Church, Feb. 22, 1896; the Churchman, Feb. 15, 22, 1896; and N.Y. Herald, Feb. 12, 1896. Death record from N.Y. City Dept. of Health.] VIRGINIA NELLE BELLAMY

Β BACHE, Sarah Franklin (Sept. 11, 1743-Oct. 5, 1808), relief worker during the Revolutionary War, daughter of Benjamin Franklin and DEBORAH ( R E A D ) FRANKLIN, was bom in Philadelphia, the youngest of Franklin's three children. Mindful of her brother Francis' untimely death in 1736, her parents had Sarah (or Sally) inoculated for smallpox in 1746. She received a good conventional education from local schoolmasters—reading and writing (her grammar and penmanship were always clear and firm), arithmetic, needlework, dancing, French, and music (Francis Hopkinson said in 1765 that she played the harpsichord "really . . . very well"). Her father thought her "affectionate, dutiful and industrious," with "one of the best hearts," and throughout his life delighted in making her gifts of clothes, even while urging her to live plainly. She accompanied Franklin on his trip to New England in 1763, meeting members of his family and forming lasting friendships with her aunt JANE M E C O M and with Catharine (Ray) Greene, wife of William Greene, later governor of Rhode Island. She often visited her brother (or half brother) William, governor of New Jersey, who, equally devoted to her, had her picture painted in 1766 seated at an armonica, a musical instrument their father had invented. She attended Philadelphia Assembly balls and,

as her mother noted, had "friends all about on every side." Her marriage to the Philadelphia merchant Richard Bache ( 1737-1811), a native of Settle, Yorkshire, created family tensions, her father opposing the match because Bache was in debt and without prospects. Franklin, then in England, deferred to his wife's judgment, however, merely warning against "an expensive feasting wedding" and advising a limit of £.500 for clothes and furniture. The marriage took place in Philadelphia on Oct. 29, 1767; the ships in the harbor celebrated by breaking out their colors. Bache's finances improved; Franklin liked him when they met, in 1771, loaned him £ 2 0 0 to open a dry goods shop, and let the couple live rent-free in his house. Their first child, Benjamin Franklin Bache, was born in 1769, and for the next few years Sarah Bache's life revolved around her family: she once apologized that she knew "very little that passed out of the nursery, where indeed its my greatest pleasure to be." She had in all eight children, of whom seven survived infancy: Benjamin, William, Elizabeth Franklin, Louis, Deborah (who married William J. Duane, later Secretary of the Treasury), Richard, and Sarah. "It is said Mr. Bache is remarkable for having the finest children in Philadelphia," Jane Mecom wrote on the birth of the last, in 1788.

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Bache T h e Revolutionary W a r changed Sarah Bache's life in several ways. Her husband, appointed postmaster general in 1776, was often away; and her father in 1 7 7 6 took Benny with him to France, where the lad remained until 1785. When the British army advanced across New Jersey in 1776, Sarah took refuge at Goshen, Chester County; and on its approach in September 1777 she again fled—four days after the birth of her second daughter—first to Lower Dublin Township, then to Manheim, Pa. As her father's representative (her mother had died in 1 7 7 4 ) she had to entertain those to whom he gave introductions, among others Thomas Paine and the French minister, Conrad Alexandre Gerard. But her most signal wartime activity was in the campaign of the Philadelphia women, organized in 1 7 8 0 by ESTHER ( D E B E R D T ) REED, to raise money for Washington's army. W h e n Mrs. Reed died, in September 1780, Mrs. Bache finished the work. Over $ 3 0 0 , 0 0 0 (Continental) was collected from 1,645 donors. At Washington's suggestion the women bought linen for shirts and, to make their money go further, made the shirts themselves. Much of the cutting was done at Sarah's house. On Dec. 26, 1780, she informed Washington that 2 , 0 0 5 shirts had been delivered to the army. " T h e Ladies concerned in this affair," Isaac All, a ship captain married to a cousin of Sarah's, wrote to Franklin, "have gained immortal honour, of which Mrs. B. might claim a capital share." French officers in America were extravagant in their praise. Mrs. Bache was her father's hostess from 1 7 8 5 until his death in 1790, presiding over the tea table while her children played, sometimes boisterously, around their grandfather. Washington paid several calls in the summer of 1787; on leaving Philadelphia he gave her a copy of Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus. Franklin's will left Sarah and Richard Bache in comfortable circumstances. T h e y visited England in 1792, when John Hoppner painted her portrait (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York C i t y ) . In 1794 Bache gave up business and retired to a farm (which he named Settle) on the Delaware River below Bristol, Pa. When Sarah became ill of cancer in 1807, they returned to Philadelphia for medical treatment. She died there the following year at the age of sixty-five and was buried beside her parents in the graveyard of Christ Church (Episcopal), of which she had been a member throughout her life. Six of her children survived her; Benjamin, the oldest, had died of yellow fever in 1 7 9 8 . [The principal sources are Sarah Bache's letters and those of her family (in the passages quoted

Bacon above the spelling has been modernized). Most of these letters are in the Am. Philosophical Soc., Phila.; many will be printed in Leonard W. Labaree et al., eds., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin ( 1 9 5 9 ); others are in Carl Van Doren, ed., Letters of Benjamin Franklin and Jane Mecom (1950). A short sketch by her grandson William Duane is in Elizabeth F. Eilet, The Women of the Am. Revolution ( 1 8 4 8 ) , I, 332-48; and there are interesting and revealing recollections in A Book of Remembrance ( 1901 ) by her granddaughter Ellen Duane Gillespie.] WHITFIELD J. BELL, JR.

B A C H M A N , Maria Martin. See MARTIN, Maria. B A C O N , Albion Fellows (Apr. 8, 1 8 6 5 - D e c . 10, 1 9 3 3 ) , housing reformer, was b o m in Evansville, Ind., the youngest of the four daughters of Albion and Mary (Erskine) Fellows. Her father was a descendant of William Fellows, who had come from England to Ipswich, Mass., in the 1630's. Born near Sandwich, N.H., in 1827, he moved west with his parents in the 1830's, settling eventually near Dixon, 111. In 1854 he graduated from Indiana Asbury (later D e Pauw) University and that same year entered the Methodist ministry. His wife, of Scotch-Irish descent, was a native of McCutchanville, Ind., eight miles from Evansville. When Fellows died a few weeks before the birth of his last daughter, his widow took the children to her family home in McCutchanville. In this country village, where she lived for eighteen years, Albion Fellows developed a love of nature, a devotion to home and family, and an intense religious faith. She had hoped to attend college, but her mother could not afford the expense, so her formal education was limited to the country schoolhouse and the Evansville High School. After graduating in 1883, she became private secretary to her mother's uncle, Judge Asa Ingleheart, in Evansville. On Oct. 11, 1888, she was married to Hilary Edwin Bacon, an Evansville banker and retail merchant fifteen years older than she. T h e y had four children: Margaret Gibson, Albion Mary, and twins, Joy and Hilary Edwin, born in 1901. In the years immediately following her marriage, Mrs. Bacon found relaxation in reading, painting, and the composition of piano tunes and poetry. She and her sister ANNIE F E L L O W S JOHNSTON, later known for her children's stories, published a joint volume of poems, Songs Ysame, in 1897. Many of them dealt with death and the fading of youth, reflecting a mystical, almost unworldly element in Albion Bacon's personality. When her second daughter was

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Bacon still a baby, a long illness reduced Mrs. Bacon to eight years of semi-invalidism. She was roused from her lassitude, however, when her two oldest children came down with scarlet fever which she believed had been contracted from schoolmates. Volunteering to serve on the sanitation committee of Evansville's Civic Improvement Society, she began to discover the slums of this Ohio River factory town. Her indignation and curiosity were aroused; she read Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives and then became a "friendly visitor" for Evansville's associated charities in order to meet the poor in their homes. Profoundly disturbed by what she saw, Mrs. Bacon tried a variety of remedies. She started an association to help the working girl, which first set up a lunch and recreation room close to the factories and then a dormitory home. She helped launch a county tuberculosis association and the Monday Night Club, a group of civic leaders interested in social service. Eventually, however, she became convinced that squalid, unsanitary housing was the fundamental cause of the misery and social deterioration she saw around her. In her opinion slumbred vice and disease threatened the whole social organism. As chairman of the Monday Night Club's housing committee, she conceived the idea of getting tenement regulation included in a building code that was before the city council, but the ordinance she drafted was pigeonholed. Word that the Commercial Club of Indianapolis was interested in a similar ordinance led her in 1908 to frame a comprehensive state law, for which she secured advice from the New York housing authority Lawrence Veiller. The State Conference of Charities gave its endorsement, and the Commercial Club agreed to support it, provided she herself would stay to see it through the legislature. Hitherto Mrs. Bacon—a slight, frail woman, scarcely five feet tall, with soft eyes and a gentle manner—had sought to interest others in pushing her ideals to reality while remaining in the background. With her family's encouragement, however, she now accepted the responsibility of leadership. Launching a statewide campaign of publicity and organization, she took her housing bill to the state capital in 1909, got it introduced and favorably reported, addressed a joint session of the legislature ("I felt so little. The place seemed made .for giants"), and saw it pass, though amendments limited its coverage to Indianapolis and Evansville. When, after the defeat of her new tenement bill in 1911, her oldest daughter died, she sought refuge in work. She wrote hundreds of letters, circularized the legislature, toured the

state speaking to key organizations, and won support from the State Federation of Women's Clubs, whose housing committee she led, and from the Indiana Housing Association, which she had helped organize in 1911. She triumphed finally in 1913 when the legislature passed a law regulating all residences in Indiana cities other than one-family dwellings. A further act (1917) empowered state and local boards of health to condemn unsafe or unsanitary homes. Mrs. Bacon's major housing work was completed by 1917, but she continued active in social reform. She helped establish the Evansville City Planning Commission in 1921 and served as its president for many years. She also headed the executive committee of the Indiana Child Welfare Association. When Gov. James Goodrich appointed a Commission on Child Welfare and Social Insurance in 1919, Mrs. Bacon, as chairman of its subcommission on child welfare, helped prepare legislation which, besides strengthening the enforcement of the housing laws, improved child labor and school attendance laws and established a state probation system particularly concerned with juvenile problems. During the 1920's she was active in state and city charity, public health, and mental hygiene movements. Her literary bent and deep religious feeling, which had remained strong even in the years of her greatest public activity, found expression in a series of pageants written for various public occasions and in two devotional books, Consolation: A Spiritual Experience (1922) and The Path to God (1928). She died of heart failure in Evansville in 1933, at sixty-eight, and was buried there in Oak Hill Cemetery. As a middle-class housewife turned reformer, Albion Fellows Bacon was not a unique phenomenon, but she was among the most influential of the feminine humanitarians of her day. Her lectures, articles, and books spread the housing gospel to social workers and laymen throughout the country. Although her program, like that of most other housing reformers before World War I, was patterned after Lawrence Veiller's New York State Tenement House Law of 1901 and his subsequent "model" housing laws, no other woman was so directly responsible for the housing legislation of an entire state. Her career drew strength and inspiration from her Methodist training, with its emphasis on social service as a religious duty, and from her warm, tightly knit family life, always an irresistible spur to action. Her conscience could not rest so long as others were prevented by their environment from achieving such family unity. Finally, the memory of the

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man, March 1926). Her interest in Japan began at fourteen, in 1872, when her father, at the request of Arinori Mori, Japanese minister in Washington, took under his guardianship twelve-year-old Stematz Yamakawa, one of the pioneer group of five young girls sent by the Japanese government the previous year to be educated in the United States. Living together as sisters for the next ten years, Alice and Stematz became fast friends; on visits and summer trips Alice also came to know Umé Tsuda, another member of the group, who had been received into the Washington home of Charles Lanman, the American secretary to the Japanese legation. Miss Yamakawa graduated from Vassar College in 1882, ranking third in her class, of which she had been president for three years. That summer, before returning with Miss Tsuda to Japan, Miss Yamakawa studied at the Connecticut Training School for Nurses, founded at the New Haven Hospital by Alice Bacon's sister-in-law, the noted Civil War nurse GEORGEANNA w o o L S E Y BACON. Alice Bacon had meanwhile continued her studies at home, in 1881 passing, in three subjects, the advanced Harvard examinations for women, then a test of college-grade achievement offered in several Eastern cities. After the death of her mother, long an invalid, she went in 1883 to teach at Hampton. Here her work centered in the "practice school," the Institute's public elementary school for training student teachers.

McCutchanville hills and open fields made the slum hateful in her eyes. It was unnatural, she felt, indeed sinful, for men to live where sunlight and beauty never penetrated. [The indispensable source for Mrs. Bacon's housing work is her autobiographical Beauty for Ashes (1914). Also useful are her articles "The Housing Problem in Ind.," Charities and the Commons, Dec. 5, 1908; "The Awakening of a State— Ind.," Survey, Dec. 17, 1910; "What the Day's Work Means to Me," Bookman, Oct. 1915; "What Bad Housing Means to the Community," Am. Unitarian Assoc., Dept. of Social and Public Service, Social Service Series Bull., no. 3 (n.d. ); and "The Divine Call: Follow Me," Survey, Oct. 1912. See also the chapter on Mrs. Bacon in Helen C. Bennett, Am. Women in Civic Work (1915); Who Was Who in America, vol. I (1942); and the lengthy obituary in Evansville Sunday Courier and Jour., Dec. 10, 1933. Mrs. Bacon's three surviving children—Mr. Hilary E. Bacon, Mrs. Joy Bacon Witwer, and Mrs. Albion Bacon Smith—generously provided information about their mother's personality and family background. The Evansville-Vanderburgh County Dept. of Health supplied a death certificate. For a fuller account of Mrs. Bacon's work, see the author's article in Midwest Rev., 1962.] BOY LTJBOVE

BACON, Alice Mabel (Feb. 26, 1858-May 1, 1918), teacher at Hampton Institute and in Japan, writer on Japanese life and customs, was born in New Haven, Conn., the third daughter and youngest of the five children of the Rev. Leonard Bacon and his second wife, Catherine E. (Terry) Bacon. There were nine other children by the first marriage. Leonard Bacon, for over forty years pastor of Center Church in New Haven and subsequently a professor in the Yale Divinity School, was an eminent figure in the Congregational Church. His enthusiasm for improving the status of the Negro and his antislavery arguments were widely influential, and Alice Bacon carried forward in her own life her father's spirit of public service and of good will toward various races and peoples. Her half brother Leonard W. Bacon also distinguished himself as a Congregational clergyman; her much older half sister Rebecca assisted in founding Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Va., at the close of the Civil War. DELIA BACON, originator of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare authorship, was her aunt. Alice Bacon was educated at private schools in New Haven. At twelve she spent nearly a year at Hampton visiting her sister, then assistant principal of the Institute, while there sometimes attending classes and at one time teaching a class of freedmen (Southern Work-

In 1888 Miss Bacon was invited to teach at the Peeresses' School in Tokyo, conducted by the Imperial Household Department for daughters of the nobility. Umé Tsuda had been in charge of the teaching of English in the school since its establishment three years before, having been recommended to this position by no less a person than Hirobumi Ito, later chairman of the committee for drafting the constitution of 1889 and four times prime minister; Miss Tsuda had acted as interpreter and English teacher for his wife and daughter after returning to Japan. Her recommendation of Alice Bacon had been seconded by Stematz Yamakawa, now the wife of Count Iwao Oyama, minister of war and later commanding general in the Sino-Japanese War, and who from her eminent social position was to maintain an active interest in Japanese women's education throughout her life. Alice Bacon eagerly accepted the challenge. Arriving in June with her collie dog Bruce, her inseparable companion, she dedicated herself wholeheartedly to her work, strongly influencing the school's teaching of English and leaving warm memories of herself as a person. She lived with Miss Tsuda in a small house in a quiet quarter near the school

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Bacon and passed her time almost entirely in Japanese society, observing, in her visits to the families of their friends and pupils and on her travels, many aspects of Japanese life rarely seen by Western visitors. Miss Bacon returned in the fall of 1889 to her work at Hampton. When one of her Negro students who wished to become a nurse was refused admission to several training schools, she conceived the idea of founding a hospital at the Institute to provide not only nursing education but better medical care for the children and sick of the surrounding community. With the aid of Gen. Samuel C. Armstrong, Hampton's principal, she raised enough money among friends in the North to build the Dixie Hospital, which with two wards and kitchen was opened in May 1891. Her understanding of racial problems and particularly of the viewpoint of the educated Negro are evident in her article on "The Negro and the Atlanta Exposition" (Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund, Occasional Papers, No. 7, 1896), dealing with the controversial Negro exhibit at the Cotton States Exposition of 1895. Miss Bacon was meanwhile busy with other writing based upon her experiences in Japan. Her book Japanese Girls and Women, published in Boston in 1891, was in essence an account of the changes in women's lives that had begun with the fall of feudalism twenty years before her visit. This had been a subject often discussed with her friends in Tokyo. In completing the book she had the help of Umé Tsuda, now enrolled as an advanced student at Bryn Mawr College, who spent the summer of 1890 with her at Hampton. Miss Bacon's letters written from Japan to relatives and friends in the United States were published in 1893 as A Japanese Interior. Reviewers praised the books for their fluid and sparkling style as well as for the author's sympathetic acceptance of a different culture, and they reached a wide audience, making a significant contribution to American knowledge of Japanese life. The spring of 1900 found Alice Bacon again in Japan, helping Umé Tsuda found the Girls' English Institute, later popularly known as Tsuda College, which, except for mission schools, was the first institution in Japan wholly devoted to advanced training for women. This was the realization of a hope first conceived during Miss Tsuda's Bryn Mawr days and fostered through the years after her return to the Peeresses' School. The new institution opened in September 1900 in a small private house rented with funds contributed by American friends, with Miss Bacon as Miss Tsuda's chief assistant and Stematz (Yamakawa)

Oyama an active adviser. It offered graduates of the girls' high school a thorough training that prepared them for self-supporting work as teachers of English or the pursuit of English studies. Alice Bacon contributed significantly to the Tsuda institute's development, especially through her conduct of morning worship and weekly discussions of current topics. She carried a heavy teaching load and accepted no remuneration. She also taught at the Tokyo Women's Higher Normal School. Leaving Japan in April of 1902, Miss Bacon returned to her New Haven home. Her publishers promptly brought out a new edition of Japanese Girls and Women to which she had added a chapter on social changes in the decade since her first visit. In 1905 she published a collection of Japanese folk tales, In the Land of the Gods. Her teaching career ended with a period (1908-10) at Miss Capen's School in Northampton, Mass. In New Haven she was active in the Center Church's foreign mission work and founded the Women's Civic Club. Her summers were spent managing Deep Haven Camp, which she had established at Holderness, N.H., on Squam Lake, and where scholars, writers, and church friends were her paying guests. Here she gave a large annual entertainment to raise money for the Dixie Hospital. One of her Dixie nurses cared for her in her last illness. She died in New Haven at the age of sixty, following an intestinal operation, and was buried in the Grove Street Cemetery there. [Miss Bacon also edited an American edition of Human Bullets: A Soldier's Story of Port Arthur, by Lieut. Tadayoshi Sakurai ( 1 9 0 7 ) . Besides her own writings, the principal sources are: Thomas W. Baldwin, Bacon Genealogy: Michael Bacon of Dedham, 1640, and His Descendants (1915); B. G. Northrop, "The Three First Japanese Girls Educated in America," Independent, Jan. 30, 1896; Francis G. Peabody, Education for Life: The Story of Hampton Institute ( 1 9 1 8 ) ; Cora M. Folsom, "The Dixie Hospital in the Beginning," Southern Workman, Mar. 1926; obituaries in Neu) Haven Jour. Courier and New Haven Register, May 3, 1918. Information was also obtained from the files and scrapbooks left by Miss Tsuda ( in the Tsuda College Library); from Dr. Margaret T. Corwin, niece of Miss Bacon; and from Mrs. Maki Vöries, Miss Ai Hoshino, and Mrs. Matsu Tsuji, who remember Miss Bacon as a teacher.] YASAKA TAKAGI

BACON, Delia Salter (Feb. 2, 1811-Sept. 2, 1859), author, lecturer, and originator of the theory that Shakespeare's plays were the work of Francis Bacon, was born in what is now Tallmadge, Ohio, the fourth daughter and fifth of

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him in the New Haven ministerial association. There ensued a full-scale ecclesiastical investigation involving a complex personal rivalry between Leonard Bacon and Nathaniel W. Taylor, a Yale theology professor, and their followers. MacWhorter was acquitted by a narrow margin in November 1847, but his reputation was permanently blighted. The entire incident was revived in 1850 when Catharine Beecher, overriding her former student's urgent pleas, published a self-righteous and gossipy book called Truth Stranger than Fiction, which attempted to vindicate Miss Bacon. For Delia Bacon the MacWhorter affair meant utter humiliation. Though she lectured with some success in Boston in 1850—51 and in Brooklyn's Stuyvesant Institute two years later, her public appearances grew rarer as she withdrew into a private world where mystic exaltation alternated with intense depression. "The purposes that had become a part of my being, are broken off," she wrote Miss Beecher. "God does not need my labor, he appoints me to suffer" (Truth Stranger than Fiction, p. 260). Her former enthusiasm for teaching and lecturing faded into a single-minded absorption in the past, while the romantic strain apparent in her fictional works was replaced by an intense and acerbic intellectualism. Gradually all her attention came to focus on a single theme: her belief that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare had in fact been composed by a coterie of political radicals led by Francis Bacon. In May 1853, subsidized by a sympathetic New York lawyer, she sailed for England, supposedly to pursue her research. In fact, however, she made no effort to document her theory with external evidence. A solitary and eccentric figure living penuriously in London and Stratford, she spent her time analyzing the plays for hidden meanings. Viewing herself as a "departed spirit," she wrote: "I don't wish to return to the world. I shrink with horror from the thought of it" (Hopkins, p. 205). She was convinced that important papers had been interred with Shakespeare's body, but her resolution to open his tomb failed her during a long evening's vigil in Stratford's Holy Trinity Church.

seven children of the Rev. David and Alice (Parks) Bacon, Connecticut Congregationalists and former missionaries to the Indians. Her father's effort to establish at the Tallmadge site a pioneer farming community based on the principles of early New England Puritanism ended in failure, and his death in 1817 left the family in poverty. Friends and relatives took the children, Delia falling to the care of Thomas Scott Williams, a leading Hartford lawyer, and his wife Delia Ellsworth. After attending local schools, the girl at fourteen was enrolled in CATHARINE B E E C H E R ' S Hartford Female Seminary, where she received a year of advanced instruction. Early in 1826, making her profession of faith, she joined the First Congregational Church of Hartford. Intellectually prepared and spiritually armed, Delia Bacon at fifteen was considered ready to earn her own living. From 1826 until 1832 she taught with slight success in a series of private schools in Connecticut, New Jersey, Long Island, and upstate New York. A malarial attack in 1828 permanently undermined her health. In 1833, aided by her older brother Leonard, pastor of New Haven's eminent First Church ( Congregational ), she began an experimental class for ladies in his home. Reflecting both her passion for learning and her elocutionary talents, her lectures and dramatic readings ranged broadly over literature, art, and history. Intermittently for the next two decades, a generation before the lyceum movement began to include women lecturers, she delivered her "Historical Lessons" with great success to large, predominantly female audiences in New Haven, Hartford, Boston, and New York. Like her friend H A R R I E T B E E C H E R STOWE, Miss Bacon was also goaded by literary ambition. Her early efforts reflect contemporary sentimental taste and the influence of her schoolgirl idol, LYDIA H. SIGOURNEY of Hartford. Her romantic Tales of the Puritans, published anonymously in 1831, were derived from colonial New England history; the murder of JANE M C CREA by the Indians furnished the theme for "Love's Martyr," a story which won a $100 prize offered by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier in 1831. The tragic McCrea episode also provided the subject for a play, The Bride oj Fort Edward ( 1839), which she tried in vain to place on the New York stage. In 1845 the tenor of her life was permanently disrupted by her friendship with Alexander MacWhorter, a Yale theological graduate ten years her junior. Gossip flourished when, after two years, MacWhorter showed no interest in matrimony, and Delia's brother Leonard brought misconduct charges against

Her life was now dominated by the wish to see her work published. In this quest she won surprisingly influential support. Ralph Waldo Emerson found some plausibility in her ideas, and through his efforts Putnam's Monthly Magazine in January 1856 published her sketchy "William Shakespeare and His Plays: An Inquiry Concerning Them." Emerson's enthusiasm soon cooled, but Miss Bacon found a second important friend in Nathaniel Haw-

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Bagley

thorne, the American consul at Liverpool and brother-in-law of E L I Z A B E T H PEABODY, a staunch Boston supporter. In 1857, through Hawthorne's assistance and financial aid, Miss Bacon's massive and turgid work, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, at last appeared. Though not without passages of critical insight and stimulating speculation, the book as a whole was almost unreadable and revealed distinct signs of a disturbed mind. It was generally ignored, or dismissed in amused and bantering reviews. Shattered by this ridicule, and bereft of the interest which had sustained her for years, Miss Bacon soon slipped into insanity. She was brought back to America in 1858 and spent her final year at the Hartford Retreat for the insane. She died in 1859 at the age of fortyeight and was buried in the Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven. Her enduring importance lies in having founded the Baconian and group theories of Shakespeare authorship, thus setting off a speculative quest that has continued, with scant scholarly encouragement, into the twentieth century. [The principal MS. sources are the Delia Bacon Papers, in family hands; the L e o n a r d Bacon Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale Univ.; and the Theodore B a c o n Papers, N.Y. State Library, Albany. Vivian C. Hopkins, Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon ( 1 9 5 9 ) , is a scholarly biography with a full bibliography; Theodore Bacon, Delia Bacon: A Biog. Sketch ( 1 8 8 8 ) , by a nephew, is the original family statement. Martin Pares, A Pioneer: In Memory of Delia Bacon ( 1 9 5 8 , partially reprinted from Baconiana, 1954—58), is by a believer in the Baconian theory; for earlier comment by another Baconian, see Ignatius Donnelly in North Am. Rev., Mar. 1 8 8 9 . F o r Hawthorne's impressions, see his "Recollections of a Gifted W o m a n , " Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1 8 6 3 (reprinted in his Our Old Home, 1 8 6 3 ) . Richard D. Altick's sketch in William Coyle, ed., Ohio Authors and Their Books ( 1 9 6 2 ) , pp. 2 4 - 2 6 , is a graceful summary; for another recent treatment see Martha S. Bacon, Puritan Promenade (1964).] VIVIAN C. HOPKINS

BACON, Georgeanna Muirson Woolsey. See Abby Howland.

wooLSEY,

BAGLEY, Sarah G. (fl. 1835-1847), labor leader, was apparently born in Meredith, N.H., and received a common school education. Little is known of her life until the fall of 1836, when she secured employment in the Hamilton Manufacturing Company, one of the cotton mills of Lowell, Mass. At first she seems to have enjoyed the experience; as late as December 1840 she described the "Pleasures of Factory Life" for the Lowell Offering, the celebrated

magazine written by the mill girls. Her attitude toward the textile corporations became increasingly critical, however, reflecting a general discontent among mill workers over declining wages and deteriorating working conditions, including a speedup of machine operations. This unrest found expression during the 1840's in agitation for a ten-hour working day. While some of the mill girls supported the view of H A R R I E T F A R L E Y , editor of the Offering , that it was unfitting for mere female employees to question the policies of the Christian gentlemen who owned the mills, Sarah Bagley insisted that the workers must organize and protest. The opportunity came late in 1844 when the Massachusetts legislature set up a special committee to consider the problem—the first governmental investigation of labor conditions in the United States. That December Miss Bagley founded and became first president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, which quickly grew to several hundred members. With its aid she rounded up over 2,000 signatures on petitions to the legislature describing conditions in the mills and calling for a law limiting the working day to ten hours. When the legislative committee opened its hearings in February 1845, Miss Bagley was among those called to testify. Shortly afterward she left her position in the mill, whether or not under pressure is not known. Plunging now into full-time labor activity, Sarah Bagley organized branches of the Female Labor Reform Association in other mill towns, including Manchester, Nashua, and Dover, N.H., and Waltham and Fall River, Mass. Active also as an organizer and speaker for the New England Working Men's Association, she served on the nominating committee at its convention in Boston in May 1845 and was herself made corresponding secretary. In Lowell she helped found an Industrial Reform Lyceum to discuss controversial subjects ignored by the regular town lyceum and to provide a forum for such speakers as Horace Greeley and William Lloyd Garrison. Her Female Labor Reform Association also brought about the defeat of a hostile Lowell legislator in November 1845. Denied access to the timid and genteel Lowell Offering, Miss Bagley denounced Miss Farley's periodical in an Independence Day address in 1845 before 2,000 workingmen in Wobum, Mass.; soon she was calling Miss Farley "a mouthpiece of the corporations." The factory girls apparently agreed, for the popularity of the Offering declined markedly as the ten-hour movement gained strength, and late in

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Bailey 1845 it died for lack of support. Miss Bagley offered instead a series of fiery Factory Tracts attacking the "driveling cotton lords" and demanding reform. She found still greater opportunity for expression when the Voice of Industry, a Working Men's Association periodical, moved to Lowell in October 1845. She served on its publication committee and for a time in 1846, after its purchase by the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, was its chief editor. In 1846 Miss Bagley was a delegate to the National Industrial Congress held in Boston. But despite the high hopes symbolized by this gathering, the fledgling New England labor movement was in a state of disarray. In March 1846, following the example of the lower house, the Massachusetts senate rejected the mill workers' petition. Encouraged, the mill owners attempted to discredit the ten-hour movement by exposing one of its leaders whose moral life was not above reproach. The resultant scandal, although not directly involving Miss Bagley, further weakened her cause. Furthermore, her health, according to her testimony in 1845, had begun to fail. Little is known of her later life. In 1846, sharing the growing interest within New England labor circles in the Utopian social philosophies of Fourier and George Ripley, she was elected vice-president of the Lowell Union of Associationists. In February of that year she took a job as superintendent of the newly opened Lowell telegraph office, thereby becoming, it is said, the nation's first woman telegraph operator. By February 1847 another mill girl had replaced Sarah Bagley as president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. Thereafter she drops from the public record. [Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads: New England's Mill Girls and Magnates ( 1 9 4 9 ) ; Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker 1840-1860 (1924); Madeleine B. Stern, We the Women (1962), chap, iv and notes, pp. 327-34, which marshal the available evidence on Miss Bagley's life; John B. Andrews and W. D. P. Bliss, Hist, of Women in Trade Unions (vol. X of Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the U.S., Senate Doc. No. 645, 61 Cong., 2 Sess., 1911), pp. 71-78; Charles E. Persons, "The Early Hist, of Factory Legislation in Mass.," in Susan M. Kingsbury, ed., Labor Laws and Their Enforcement ( 1 9 1 1 ) ; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle ( 1 9 5 9 ) , pp. 55-60.] GEORGE BOGERS TAYLOR

BAILEY, Florence Augusta Merriam (Aug. 8, 1863-Sept. 22, 1948), ornithologist and nature writer, was born in Locust Grove, Lewis

County, N.Y., some twenty-five miles north of Rome, to Clinton Levi and Caroline (Hart) Merriam. She was the youngest of four children, two boys and two girls; her older sister had died the day before she was born. On her father's side she was descended from Massachusetts colonists who had come to America from Kent, England, about 1636. Clinton Merriam, a native of Leyden, N.Y., had followed a mercantile and banking career in Utica, N.Y., and New York City before returning, about the time that Florence was bom, to Lewis County, from which he soon afterward was elected as a Republican to Congress (1871-75). Florence's mother, a graduate of Rutgers Female Institute in New York City, was the daughter of Levi Hart of Collinsville, N.Y., a judge of the county court and member of the state assembly. Growing up at their country estate, Homewood, in Locust Grove, Florence early developed an interest in natural history, doubtless encouraged by her father and her brother Clinton Hart, eight years her senior, who later became the first chief of the United States Biological Survey. After preparatory training at Mrs. Piatt's, a private school in Utica, she entered the newly founded Smith College in Northampton, Mass., where she spent four years (1882—86); her enrollment was as a special student, but the college later (1921) granted her the bachelor's degree. While at Smith her growing interest in ornithology led her to spend days in the countryside near Northampton, sometimes leading groups of students, and during her last year there she began to publish articles on bird lore in the Audubon Magazine. In a revised form these articles were incorporated into her first book, Birds through an Opera Glass, published in 1889 by Houghton, Mifflin & Company in the Riverside Library for Young People. The book was designed to help "not only young observers but also laymen to know the common birds they see around them." Attracted also to social work, Miss Merriam spent a month in 1891 in the summer school that had been started for Chicago working girls as a branch of JANE ADDAMS' Hull House. The following winter she was employed in one of GRACE DODGE'S working girls' clubs in New York City. But about this time she developed tuberculosis, and, seeking a more favorable climate, she went west in 1893. She spent the summer in a small town in Utah, an experience she recorded in My Summer in a Mormon Village (1894), and then from there went on to Palo Alto, Calif., where she attended six months of lectures at Stanford University. In

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the spring of 1894 she visited Twin Oaks, in a small valley in San Diego County, Calif., to observe and take notes on birds, then had "a final dose of climate" in the San Francisco Mountain country of Arizona. In 1896 she published A-Birding on a Bronco and two years later Birds of Village and Field, a book for beginners in ornithology and one of the first popular American bird guides. After her return to the East she settled in Washington, D.C., at the home of her brother Hart. There she met Vemon Bailey, a young naturalist connected with the U.S. Biological Survey; they were married on Dec. 16, 1899. The marriage, although childless, was a warm companionship of shared interests. Almost immediately Bailey began a series of biological field trips to New Mexico for the Survey on which his wife frequently accompanied him, Bailey collecting and studying mammals, birds, reptiles, and plants while Mrs. Bailey devoted herself to the birdlife. Over the next thirty years, during which Bailey became the Survey's chief field naturalist, they worked also in Texas, California, Arizona, the Pacific Northwest, and the Dakotas. Wagon trips across the prairies and pack-outfit travel in the Western mountains in the early 1900's were arduous, and Mrs. Bailey, no "woman tenderfoot" despite her frail appearance, developed a wonderful vitality, both physically and mentally. Her ornithological observations made on these trips appeared in a long succession of papers in the Auk, Bird-Lore, and the Condor. Her Handbook of Birds of the Western United States, published in 1902 as a counterpart to Frank M. Chapman's Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America (1895), went through many editions and was long a standard work. Under the aegis of the Biological Survey Mrs. Bailey spent several years completing the first comprehensive report on the birdlife of the Southwest, Birds of New Mexico, published in 1928 by the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. For this work she became in 1931 the first woman to receive the Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists' Union; two years later the University of New Mexico awarded her an honorary LL.D. degree. Together with Vernon Bailey's companion volume, Mammals of New Mexico (1931), it constituted a landmark in Western natural history. Mrs. Bailey also contributed the bird sections to some of her husband's books, including Wild Animals of Glacier National Park (1918) and Cave Life of Kentucky (1933). Her last work of any magnitude was Among the Birds in the Grand Canyon National Park

(1939), published by the National Park Service when she was past seventy-five. When not on field trips the Baileys maintained a home in Washington, D.C., that became a mecca for naturalists. Mrs. Bailey was a tireless promoter of the Audubon Society of the District of Columbia, which she had helped found in 1897. In 1898 the first of the society's famous bird classes was organized, their primary aim being to furnish basic instruction in both field and laboratory ornithology at the normal-school level to teachers of nature study; for many years she taught classes and directed the work of the program. Long affiliated with the American Ornithologists' Union, she was its first woman associate member (1885) and its first woman fellow (1929). A gentle, feminine, but forceful personality, Mrs. Bailey maintained her concern with social welfare through membership in such groups as the Playground and Recreation Association of America, the National Housing Association, and the National Child Labor Committee; for many years she served on the board of managers of the Working Boys' Home in Washington. Surviving her husband by six years, she died in Washington of myocardial degeneration at the age of eighty-five. She was buried at the old Merriam home in Locust Grove, N.Y. She was memorialized in ornithology in 1908 when her name was given to a form of chickadee (Parus gambeli baileyae) from the higher mountains of southern California. Florence Merriam's four early books represent a genre of nature writing found among such contemporaries as Bradford Torrey, John Muir, John Burroughs, OLIVE THORNE M I L L E R , NELTJE

BLANCHAN

DOUBLED AY,

AND

MABEL

and she was not the least of this group. In her work as a field naturalist she made no new discoveries, but she combined an intense love of birds, remarkable powers of exact observation, and a high reverence for science with a fine talent for writing. She was one of the most literary ornithologists of her time. OSGOOD WRIGHT;

[Memorial articles by P. H. Oehser in the Auk, Jan. 1952, and Nature Mag., Mar. 1950; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XIII, 263; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15; Charles H. Pope, Merriam Genealogy ( 1906 ) ; early letters of Florence Merriam furnished by the librarian of Smith College; information from Olaus J. Mûrie, T. S. Palmer, and personal acquaintance.] PAUL H. OEHSER

BAILEY, Hannah Clark Johnston (July 5, 1839-Oct. 23, 1923), reformer and peace advocate, was born at Comwall-on-the-Hudson,

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N.Y. Descended from New England stock, she was the oldest of the eleven children of David and Letitia (Clark) Johnston. Her father, a tanner, was a minister of the Society of Friends, and Hannah early became committed to the Quaker principle of pacifism. Growing up in Cornwall and, after 1853, in Plattekill, where her father had become a farmer, she attended both public schools and a New York Friends' boarding school. She herself taught school near Plattekill for nearly ten years, beginning in 1858. She was a serious, devout woman of forbiddingly plain appearance. In 1867, while accompanying a Quaker woman preacher on a religious mission to New England, Hannah Johnston met Moses Bailey of Winthrop Center, Maine, a recent widower whose principal business was the ownership of an oilcloth factory. She quickly developed for the much older man an affection heightened by their common devotion to Quakerism. They were married at Plattekill on Oct. 13, 1868. In 1869 Mrs. Bailey had her only child, Moses Melvin. Illness, however, blighted her happy marriage. Her husband had a worsening lung disease, and she herself was often sick and became too worn to witness his death on June 6, 1882. She expressed her grief by writing a laudatory biography of him, Reminiscences of a Christian Life (1884). The ample income from his investments, which she began to manage, enabled her not only to publish the book and distribute it free as inspirational reading but also aided her later career in reform. For many years Mrs. Bailey remained active in religious work, as Sunday school teacher, board member of Quaker schools, and treasurer of the Woman's Foreign Missionary Society of the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends. But she also supported a variety of causes of special interest to women. In 1883 she joined the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. With her fellow Maine reformer L I L L I A N Μ. Ν. STEVENS, she worked for the establishment of a state reformatory for women (a goal not achieved until 1915) and twice represented Maine at the National Conference of Charities and Correction. A fervent suffragist, she served from 1891 to 1897 as president of the Maine Woman Suffrage Association, and from 1895 to 1899 she was treasurer of the National Council of Women, succeeding Mrs. Stevens. Mrs. Bailey's most important work combined the woman's movement with her Quaker pacifism. In 1887, when the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union instituted a Department of Peace and Arbitration, she became

its superintendent; she afterward accepted a similar position with the World's W.C.T.U. With the enthusiastic and telling assistance of FRANCÉS E . W I L L A R D , the W.C.T.U. president, Hannah Bailey began an energetic drive to spread the pacifist gospel. Using her home as headquarters, she employed a secretary to help her correspond with local units of the then mighty W.C.T.U. She published two monthly periodicals, the Pacific Banner for adults and the Acorn for children, distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets for children in Sunday schools all over the country, sent out lecturers, and herself traveled widely to visit women's groups, whom she interested in working with local ministers, editors, and teachers. Though she opposed all violence, including prizefighting, lynching, and capital punishment, her major target was war. During the 1890's she and other W.C.T.U. officers regularly petitioned Congress for the use of arbitration in settling international disputes, and in the Chilean crisis of 1892 she presented to President Harrison a widely backed protest against American military involvement. As a long-range preventive, she stressed educational work among youth. She urged mothers to banish martial toys, criticized military drill in schools and in juvenile groups, and fought conscription of young men. The outbreak of World War I blasted the aging reformer's hopes. Having retired as superintendent in 1916, she was not head of her paralyzed department when the W.C.T.U. emotionally endorsed United States entry into the war. After a brief interval of mental and physical failure, she died in 1923 in Portland, Maine, at the age of eighty-four. She was buried in Lakeview Cemetery, Winthrop Center. Although her campaign had ended in defeat, Hannah Johnston Bailey had spread doctrines of lasting influence. Transcending her role as an officer of the W.C.T.U., she had directed the greatest women's peace movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [Useful general sketches of Mrs. Bailey are in Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) ; Julia Ward Howe, ed., Representative Women of New England ( 1904); Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., X, 4 2 1 - 2 2 ; and the Union Signal, Nov. 8, 1923. Mrs. Bailey's Reminiscences of a Christion Life supplies details on her married life and religious views. For her peace work, see her reports in Nat. Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Minutes, 1888-1916; and Mary Earhart, Frances Willard ( 1 9 4 4 ) , chap. xvi. Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636-1936 ( 1 9 3 6 ) , places her campaign in a broader perspective. For her husband's business, see Everett S. Stackpole, Hist, of Winthrop,

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Baker soared as high as 1,500 weekly during the summer months. In 1908 she designed an experiment aimed at reducing this shocking toll. With a team of thirty trained nurses, she combed a preselected East Side district, populated primarily by Italian immigrants, where she taught such simple principles of child care as breast feeding (to avoid the hazards of the then unpasteurized bottled milk), ventilation, bathing, and proper clothing. By the end of the hot summer, infant deaths in the district had dropped 1,200 from the previous year, while the mortality rate in other areas showed no significant change. This achievement led to the establishment that August of a Division (later Bureau) of Child Hygiene in the health department with Dr. Baker as director. This was the world's first tax-supported agency devoted exclusively to improving the health of children. Lacking precedents, at a time when preventive medicine was still little known, she established her own. She pioneered particularly in what later became known as public health education, devising effective and influential means of bringing existing medical knowledge and techniques to the people who needed them. Hygiene pamphlets were distributed, a free training school and licensing procedures for midwives were established, "Baby Health Stations" dispensing pure milk and good advice were set up, procedures for referring sick babies for care were streamlined, and school tests for diphtheria, influenza, and other infectious diseases were instituted. As an administrator Dr. Baker was characterized by a pragmatic willingness to improvise and by an interest in even minor improvements. A new foolproof container which she helped design for eye medications used at birth aided in reducing infant blindness, and her patterns for sensible and healthful baby clothing were adapted for commercial use by the McCall Pattern Company. Noting the high hospital death rate among foundlings, she tried boarding them with foster mothers, and saw the mortality drop. While deploring the fact that working mothers had to leave their babies for long hours, she accepted it as unavoidable and organized "Little Mothers' Leagues" to spread the gospel of proper child care among the young girls left to tend their baby brothers and sisters. To marshal public support for her Bureau, and to coordinate the work of private organizations interested in children, she organized in 1911 the Babies Welfare Association (later Children's Welfare Federation of New York), which she served first as president and later (1914-17) as executive committee chairman. Amidst all these

Maine, with Genealogical Notes ( 1 9 2 5 ) . Death record from Winthrop, Maine, town records. There is a small collection of Mrs. Bailey's papers in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.] FRANK L .

BYRNE

BAKER, Sara Josephine (Nov. 15, 1873-Feb. 22, 1945), physician, public health administrator, and child health pioneer, was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the third daughter and third of the four children of Orlando Daniel Mosher Baker and his wife Jenny Harwood Brown. Her father was a well-to-do lawyer of Quaker stock; her mother, a descendant of Samuel Danforth, one of the founders of Harvard College, had been a member of the first class to enter Vassar College. Josephine (she began adding her first initial only in later life, to distinguish herself from a famous singer) later recalled her father as "quiet, taciturn and withdrawn" and her mother as "gay, social and ambitious" (Fighting for Life, p. 20) and noted these conflicting traits in her own personality. Her childhood was happy, and largely given over to tomboy activities before her entry into the Misses Thomas' school in Poughkeepsie. When she was sixteen both her brother and her father died, the latter a typhoid victim. With the family in financial straits, Josephine abandoned plans to attend Vassar and decided instead to become a doctor. Discouragement from physicians of her acquaintance, from relatives, and, at first, from her mother only hardened her resolution. In 1894, after a year's private study, she passed the state regents' examination and entered the Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. She received her M.D. degree four years later, second in a class of eighteen. While interning for a year at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, she worked part time in a Boston slum clinic. Dr. Baker then began private practice in New York City; but after making only $185 the first year, she secured an appointment in 1901 as a medical inspector for the city health department at a salary of $30 a month. The next summer she was commissioned to seek out sick babies among the Negro and Irish immigrant families living in the old "Hell's Kitchen" area on New York's West Side. Appointed assistant to the health commissioner in 1907, she was one of those who apprehended the notorious disease carrier "Typhoid Mary" Mallon. While she maintained a private practice until 1914, Dr. Baker was increasingly drawn into public health work, particularly into the attack on New York's infant mortality rate, which

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achievements, Josephine Baker preserved a rigidly unsentimental, but never cynical, attitude. Of her first encounter with slum babies she wrote: "I had a sincere conviction that they would all be better off dead than so degradingly alive." But, she added, "Here was a great waste. My problem was how to prevent it" (Fighting for Life, pp. 59, 2 4 0 ) . As she became increasingly recognized as an authority, Dr. Baker spoke widely throughout the United States. For fifteen years, beginning in 1916, she lectured annually on child hygiene at the New York University-Bellevue Hospital Medical School. She accepted this invitation initially on the condition that she be permitted also to enroll as a student in the school's new public health course; her Doctorate of Public Health ( 1917) was the first awarded to a woman. Her thesis was a study of the relation between classroom ventilation and respiratory diseases among school children. In 1920 Dr. Baker published three books—Healthy Babies, Healthy Mothers, and Healthy Children—to which she subsequently added The Growing Child ( 1 9 2 3 ) and Child Hygiene ( 1 9 2 5 ) . She contributed some 200 articles to the popular periodical press and another fifty-odd to the American Journal of Public Health and similar professional publications. She was also a founder, in 1909, and president ( 1 9 1 7 - 1 8 ) of the American Child Hygiene (later Health) Association. By the time of her retirement in 1923, a Children's Bureau had been created within the United States Department of Labor, and similar agencies were functioning in every state and in several foreign countries. Most important, the New York City infant mortality rate had dropped from 111 to 66 per 1,000 live births—the lowest achieved up to that time by any of the major cities of America or Europe. Her retirement from the Child Hygiene Bureau did not mark the end of her career, for she continued active in local, state, and national medical societies, as a member of over twenty-five committees, and as a consultant to the federal Children's Bureau and Public Health Service and to the New York State Department of Health. From 1922 to 1924 she represented the United States on the Health Committee of the League of Nations, and in 1 9 3 5 - 3 6 she served as president of the American Medical Women's Association.

American Woman Suffrage Association) she marched in Fifth Avenue parades, delivered lectures for the cause to lunch-hour crowds on Wall Street, and on one occasion was a member of a suffrage delegation received by President Wilson. Politically, she was a Democrat with something of a reputation for "radicalism," based in large part, apparently, on her membership, with ROSE PASTOR STOKES, CRYSTAL EASTMAN, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and other unconventional women, in a discussion group known as the Heterodoxy Club. Characteristically, however, she preferred to work under Tammany politicians rather than reformers, believing that the uplifters spent too much time in ineffectual debate. Josephine Baker was an attractive, friendly, and determined woman who never lost her suspicion of high-flown rhetoric. She had a gift for the pungent and telling phrase: her observation during the First World War that "It's six times safer to be a soldier in the trenches of France than to be born a baby in the United States" was widely quoted. Having encountered prejudice among male co-workers early in her career, she de-emphasized her femininity while on the job, affecting a rimless pincenez, tailored suits, and neckties. She was pleased, however, when newspapers played up the novelty of a woman heading a municipal bureau, recognizing that such publicity could be translated into larger appropriations. Never marrying, she lived with a fellow woman physician in New York City. Her final years were spent at her home, Trevenna Farm, in Bellemead, N.J. Her witty and vigorous autobiography, Fighting for Life, was published in 1939. She died of cancer in New York Hospital in 1945, at seventy-five. Although she had been a Unitarian for many years, funeral services were held in the First Presbyterian Church of New York City; interment was in the Rural Cemetery, Poughkeepsie.

Although not by nature a militant feminist, Dr. Baker was drawn, as she put it, by "psychological suction" into the woman suffrage movement. As an original member of the College Women's Equal Suffrage League (founded in 1908 under the auspices of the National

LEONA BAUMGARTNER

[Dr. Baker's Fighting for Life is the basic source. See also Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXXVI, 91; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15; Who Was Who in America, vol. II (1950); and obituary in Jour. Am. Medical Assoc., Mar. 17, 1945. (The obituaries in the N.Y. newspapers are inaccurate in many respects.) A feature story on Dr. Baker appeared in the N.Y. World-Telegram, Jan. 21, 1942. There are numerous references in the N.Y. Times Index, 1913^5.]

BALDWIN, Maria Louise (Sept. 13, 1 8 5 6 Jan. 9, 1922), educator and civic leader, the first Negro woman school principal in Massachusetts, was born in Cambridge, Mass., one of

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Baldwin her calmness and beautiful voice." She moved rather easily in the more or less nonsegregated Greater Boston of her day, where racial feelings were not overtly hostile. Active in a number of well-known community organizations such as the Twentieth Century Club, the Cantabrigia Club, and the Teachers' Association, she served on the council of the Robert Gould Shaw House, a Boston social settlement for Negroes. Among her friends were President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard (who called her both the best teacher in New England and one of the most charming women of his acquaintance), Edward Everett Hale, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ALICE F H E E M A N P A L M E R ,

three children, two daughters and a son, of Peter L. and Mary E. (Blake) Baldwin. Her father, a seaman, emigrated from Haiti to Cambridge and for many years served as a letter carrier in Boston; her mother was a native of Baltimore, Md. Maria's sister became a high school teacher, her brother a lawyer. Maria received all her education ii/ the schools of Cambridge. She graduated from the Cambridge High School in 1874 and a year later from the city's teacher training school. Unable to find employment at home, she began her career as a teacher in Chestertown, Md. In 1882, evidently as the result of pressure from the Negro community, the Cambridge School Committee appointed her a primary grade teacher, assigning her to the staff of the Agassiz Grammar School, situated near Harvard University. She was appointed principal in 1889. In 1916, when a new and larger building which she had helped plan was erected, she was made master, becoming one of two women in the Cambridge school system and the only Negro in New England to hold such a position. As master of the Agassiz School, Maria Baldwin supervised twelve teachers—all white—who had in their charge more than 500 children, 98 per cent of them white, who came both from old Cambridge and university and from working class families. To keep up with her field she took courses at Harvard and other institutions, and she in turn taught in the summer normal courses for teachers held at Hampton Institute in Virginia and the Institute for Colored Youth in Cheyney, Pa. Her service at the Agassiz School lasted for four decades. Upon hearing the news of her death, the first thought of every mother in the district, one of them said, was "How can I bring up my children without her help?" Parents accustomed to the often arbitrary school discipline of the day marveled at Miss Baldwin's methods. "She had a remarkable power of enlisting the child's cooperation. . . . She never felt, and she never failed to tell the child so, that it was any victory to impose her will upon him. The child must make the decision and take the action himself" (Brown, pp. 188, 189 ). Two generations later a Cambridge family could recall how one of its youngsters had said that he wished the Agassiz School went all the way through college and that Miss Baldwin taught every grade. Maria Baldwin was of medium height and rather stocky build, with a dark complexion and sharp features. People who met her were immediately struck, like Alice Mary Longfellow, the poet's daughter, with her "dignity,

EDNAH DOW CHENEY,

JULIA WARD HOWE,

and

In 1907 the preaching of the Rev. Charles Gordon Ames, minister of the Church of the Disciples in Boston, influenced her to become a member of that society, whose services she attended regularly, "contributing her own gifts of enlightened and persuasive speech at many of its meetings" (Boston Transcript, Jan. 10, 1922). Miss Baldwin counted among her close friends a small group of prominent Negroes in the community, through whom she became associated with the Woman's Era Club (see JOSEPHINE ST. P I E R R E R U F F I N ) , the Banneker Club, a literary society of scholarly bent, and the "Omar Circle," a group of Negro intellectuals including William Monroe Trotter which met under her leadership to discuss poetry. Her home on Prospect Street was headquarters for various literary activities. There for years she held a weekly reading class for Negro students attending Harvard University where she read, among other selections, Tennyson's "In Memoriam," which typified her philosophy of life. Discussions on these occasions often grew spirited, but W. E. B. DuBois later remembered that though "I was then in my hottest, narrowest, self-centered, confident period," Maria Baldwin was "always serene, just slightly mocking, refusing to be thundered or domineered into silence and answering always in that low, rich voice—with questionings, with frank admission of uncertainty. . . ." An elocutionist of note, Maria Baldwin became a popular lecturer. She spoke throughout the country on Negro figures like Paul Laurence Dunbar, and on Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, Webster, and other historical personages. In 1897 she was the first woman to be invited to deliver the annual Washington's Birthday memorial address before the Brooklyn Institute, choosing as her subject "The Life and Service of Harriet Beecher Stowe." E L I Z A B E T H CARY AGASSIZ.

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Barnard

During her last years she lived in worsening health at Franklin Square House in Boston, commuting to her post in Cambridge. During this period she was active in the League of Women for Community Service, a group of prominent Negro women in Greater Boston. She was president of the league at the time of her death. She died in 1922, at sixty-five, of heart disease, just after addressing the council of the Robert Gould Shaw House Association in the Copley-Plaza Hotel in Boston. Following funeral services at the Arlington Street Church (Unitarian), her ashes were buried in Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston. Many tributes were paid Miss Baldwin. A girls' dormitory at Howard University was named for her. Her friends, pupils, and colleagues at the Agassiz School established a scholarship in her honor and placed a memorial tablet in the school's auditorium. On this occasion several speakers remarked on her steadfast idealism in the face of "the difficulties that were around her and around the people of her own race." It was recalled that she had been deeply disturbed by the portrayal of the Negro in the film The Birth of a Nation, feeling that "an insult had been offered to the race itself." Yet she held to her conviction that, as she once wrote, the tide was running "against isolation, against segregation." To the community in which she worked she had passed on something of her own sense of the oneness of human society.

BANCROFT, Jane Marie. See Marie Bancroft.

ROBINSON,

BANISTER, Zilpah Polly Grant. See Zilpah Polly. BARBER, Alice. See

STEPHENS,

Jane

GRANT,

Alice Barber.

BARNARD, Hannah Jenkins (1754P-1825), Quaker minister and "heretic," was born of Baptist parents, probably in Nantucket, Mass. Little is known of her background and early life. She apparently had no schooling, for she was illiterate until she reached maturity, though she afterward displayed evidence of much reading and considerable native intelligence. She became a Friend about 1772. She was married before 1780 to Peter Barnard of Nantucket (1748-1830), a widower with three children; she herself apparently had none. British devastation of the whale fisheries during the American Revolution stimulated migration from Nantucket, part of which carried the Barnards to the Quaker colony of Hudson, N.Y., in the early 1780's. Peter Barnard built a frame house, the first on Main Street. A carter of modest means, he was an elder and his wife Hannah a minister of Hudson Monthly Meeting when it was formed out of Creek Monthly Meeting in 1793. Beginning in 1786, Hannah was eight times a representative to Nine Partners Quarterly Meeting (covering the Hudson Valley north from Millbrook) and in 1793, 1794, and 1796 to the New York Yearly Meeting. In 1793 she visited western Connecticut and was authorized to travel as a minister in the Genesee, Cherry, and Champlain valleys. She served on the Nine Partners Boarding School Committee and, in 1795-96, on the Yearly Meeting Visiting Committee. In 1794 and 1796 she visited meetings in New England. She was called an eloquent speaker, highly esteemed for her ministry. In the fall of 1796 Hannah Barnard asked her meeting's support for a religious visit to Friends in Great Britain and Ireland. Whether because of some doubt about her qualifications or because of the Anglo-French war, it took nearly two years for her mission to win approval, but she eventually embarked on the trip in company with Elizabeth (Hosier) Coggeshall, a young mother whose gift in the ministry had recently been recognized in Rhode Island. Landing in Falmouth in July 1798, they visited nearly all the Friends' meetings in Scotland, England, and Ireland. They found British Friends in a "low state," with tension between the well-to-do and the poor. Many were uneasy over the war trade

[Miss Baldwin contributed an essay, " T h e Changing Ideal of Progress," to the Southern Workman, Jan. 1900. Useful biographical accounts are: Crisis, Apr. 1 9 1 7 , p. 2 8 1 , and tribute by W . Ε . B. DuBois in ibid., Apr. 1 9 2 2 , pp. 2 4 8 - 4 9 ; George Forbes in A.M.E. Church Rev., Apr. 1 9 2 2 , pp. 2 1 6 - 2 0 , 2 2 9 - 3 0 ; obituary and tributes in Boston Transcript, Jan. 10, 12, 19, 1 9 2 2 , and Boston Herald, Mar. 18, 1 9 2 2 ; Hallie Q. Brown, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction ( 1 9 2 6 ) , pp. 1 8 2 - 9 3 ; Olivia Stead Solomons in Negro Hist. Bull, Oct. 1 9 4 1 , pp. 1 9 - 2 1 ; Dorothy B. Porter in Jour, of Negro Education, Winter 1952, pp. 9 4 - 9 6 . See also: Southern Workman, Jan. 1 8 9 0 , p. 11, and Aug. 1 8 9 9 , p. 2 8 4 ; Benjamin G. Brawley, Negro Builders and Heroes (1937), pp. 2 7 7 - 7 9 . Information on particular points from Adelaide Cromwell Hill, " T h e Negro Upper Class in Boston" ( P h . D . thesis, Badcliffe College, 1 9 5 2 ) , opposite p. 1 4 5 ; annual Reports of Cambridge School Committee; William F . Bradbury, The Cambridge High School: Hist, and Catalogue ( 1 8 8 2 ) , on her graduation date; Boston and C a m bridge city directory listings of her father; death record of her mother ( N o v . 16, 1 8 8 4 ) and birth and death records of Miss Baldwin from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics.] DOROTHY B. PORTER

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Barnard and the slave trade, as well as over the concentration of control in the hands of elders, especially those in London. While the elders ruled, and watched their war profits, the itinerant ministry was largely left to women. Irish Quakers, furthermore, were in disunity and disorder, with one group of influential members, to some extent affected by eighteenthcentury rationalism, emphasizing the inward light as against evangelical doctrine. Representative of this eventually defeated and excommunicated faction was Abraham Shackleton of Ballitore, an impoverished schoolmaster and elder of independent and inquiring mind who had recently risked his life during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, seeking to check the excesses on both sides. Contact with those of Shackleton's temperament apparently encouraged Hannah Barnard to state more openly and emphatically what had long informed her public ministry. Some Quakers, including David Sands, an American minister of evangelical bent then in Ireland, were already alarmed at her teachings, but she left Ireland early in May 1800 with the approval of the general meeting of Irish Friends on her certificate. In the London Yearly Meeting, however, when she asked approval a few weeks later to travel with Elizabeth Coggeshall to Germany, she was charged with heresy and investigated. After fourteen months of trials, at each of which she repeated her case at length, the London Yearly Meeting censured her views and ordered her to withdraw from the ministry within its limits and go home. Hannah Barnard wrote a synopsis of her beliefs, but she was less concerned with theology than with ethics. She believed men should obey the Holy Spirit and square their actions with their words. Her revulsion from the Anglo-French war led to a belief in a God of love who could not have sanctioned the wars of the Old Testament Jews any more than the current conflict. Her enemies were shocked that she did not believe God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac. They could not accept her view that belief in the virgin birth and other miracles was a matter of private judgment. To them such selective belief in Scripture was tantamount to infidelity, which they associated with wicked French democratic ideas of liberty and equality. The thing for which she stood abundantly convicted before British elders accustomed to rank and deference was "a caviling, contentious disposition of mind, disclaiming the authority of the monthly meeting," as the final British committee and its spokesman, Joseph Gurney Bevan, expressed it.

Barnard nah Barnard permitted the publication of an Appeal from the London proceedings without the approval of a Friends' meeting. This provoked a pamphlet war in which Joseph Gumey Bevan and John Bevans, Jr., argued the official case, while William Matthews of Bath and John Evans took Hannah Barnard's side. The London Friends offered her the passage money customarily given to returning American ministers, but she refused it and sailed on Aug, 30, 1801. Letters exaggerating her "infidelity" had already prejudiced her case when she reported back to her local meeting in November. Armed with copies of the English proceedings, the meeting appointed a committee which after six long interviews persuaded the January 1802 meeting to silence her as a minister. The harassed and travel-worn Hannah had insisted on reading interminably her own account of the English trial, with long quotations to prove her agreement with earlier Quakers. " I know I am right," she insisted, ". . . for I keep minutes of these things, as correctly as I am able" (Foster, p. 3 8 ) . Here was a woman of humble origin in her late forties, with the enormous respect for the written word common to the selftaught, and with ill-concealed contempt for the rich, aristocratic elders. They, on the other hand, while ostensibly fearing the consequences of her disbelief in the whole of Scripture, felt her implied criticism of their behavior, especially their commercial implication in the European war. When she appealed, the decision was confirmed and the right of further appeal to the New York Yearly Meeting denied. Meanwhile, the local meeting went further and disowned her. Thereafter she almost disappears from the record. Sometime in 1818 or after, the local editor's wife described the elderly Mrs. Barnard in her diary as "dignified in appearance and manners, a tall spare person with slim features and lively intelligent dark eyes." Elias Hicks, storm center of the 1 8 2 7 - 2 8 Quaker separation, spoke at the Hudson Friends' meeting in February 1819; afterward he was told that Hannah Barnard had been present and had said that she had been disowned for what he preached that day. Hudson Friends, a majority of whom became Hicksite, recorded Peter Barnard's death in 1830 but not Hannah's in 1825. Presumably she continued attending that meeting with her husband but was not restored to membership. [An Appeal to the Soc. of Friends, on the Primitive Simplicity of Their Christian Principles and Discipline (1801), and A Narrative of the Pro-

In 1801, contrary to Friends' practice, Han-

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ceedings in America, of the Soc. Called Quakers, in the Case of Hannah Barnard (1804), are both substantially Hannah Barnard's writings in her own defense, although the second is attributed to Thomas Foster. Her church activities are recorded in the MS. minutes of N.Y. Yearly Meeting (1793-1803), of Nine Partners and Stanford Quarterly Meetings (1783-98, 1802), and of Hudson Monthly Meeting ( both Men's and Women's, 1793-1802), in the Haviland Records Room of N.Y. Yearly Meeting, N.Y. City. New England Yearly Meeting minutes, now deposited in the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, R.I., record travel certificates of Hannah Barnard and Elizabeth Coggeshall. In the Friends Hist. Library of Swarthmore College is a microfilm of James Jenkins, "Records and Recollections" (MS. in Friends House Library, London), in which (pp. 427-543) is the most detailed British account of the Barnard case. Also at Swarthmore are letters of Thomas Hazard, Jr., to Elias Hicks, Nov. 30, 1825, confirming Hannah Barnard's death; and from Elias to Isaac Hicks, Feb. 20, 1819 (photostat), on her attending Hudson meeting. See also, for glimpses of Peter and Hannah Barnard, Gorham A. Worth, "Recollections of Hudson," in his Random Recollections of Albany, from 1800 to 1808 (2nd ed., 1850); reminiscences of Mrs. William L. Stone in Robert M. Terry, comp., The "Hudsonian" (1895), pp. 165-75; and Franklin Ellis, Hist, of Columbia County, N.Y. (1878), pp. 152-72. On the state of Ireland in 1798-1800, see William Rathbone, A Narrative of Events . . . in Ireland among the Soc. Called Quakers ( 1804), and David Sands, Jour, of the Life and Gospel Labors of David Sands (1848), especially pp. 208-42. For a Quaker historian's view of Hannah Barnard and her influence, see Rufus M. Jones, The Later Periods of Quakerism (1921), I, chap, ix, especially pp. 299-307.] T. D. SEYMOUR

BASSETT

BARNARD, Kate (May 23, 1875-Feb. 23, 1930), Oklahoma welfare leader and political reformer, was born in Geneva, Nebr., the only child of John P. and Rachel (Shiell) Barnard. Her father, a surveyor and lawyer of Irish background, had come to Nebraska after wanderings which had taken him from his boyhood home in Mississippi to Canada, where he had married. After his wife's death, Barnard left his eighteen-month-old daughter with Kansas relatives. In 1889 a tract of land in the Indian Territory south of Kansas was opened to white settlement, and Barnard was attracted to this new frontier, soon organized as Oklahoma Territory. His daughter joined him there, where she attended St. Joseph's parochial school in the new town of Oklahoma City. After the former Pottawatomie Reservation was opened for settlement in 1891, he acquired a 160-acre homestead east of Oklahoma City. Here Kate lived alone for long periods during her father's

surveying trips. They returned to Oklahoma City around 1892, taking a house in the city's slum district, where Kate daily saw the effects of joblessness and unrelieved poverty. She taught for three years in rural schools; then, feeling dissatisfied and aimless, she took a short business course and thereafter worked as a stenographer in various Oklahoma City offices. The foundations of her later political career were laid when she won a coveted appointment as clerk and stenographer to the Democratic minority in the territorial legislature sitting at Guthrie. Here she lived politics and made many valuable friends and contacts. In 1904, while doing clerical-publicity work for the Oklahoma Commission at the St. Louis World's Fair, she wrote a series of chatty letters for the Daily Oklahoman which attracted the attention of editor Roy Stafford, who thereafter took an active interest in her career. In St. Louis Miss Barnard was appalled by what she saw of unemployment, long working hours, and intolerable working conditions, and she became convinced that Oklahoma should strive to avoid these evil side effects of industrialization. Upon returning to Oklahoma City she began to write letters to the Daily Oklahoman describing the plight of the city's poor. These generated great interest and led to her appointment in December 1905 as matron in charge of the Provident Association of Oklahoma City, a benevolent organization maintained by local church and business leaders. It soon became clear, however, that Kate Barnard had no intention of limiting herself to the dispensing of charity. She campaigned to raise the wages of city workers, personally went security for striking carpenters, and organized the city's unemployed into a Federal Labor Union which was chartered by the American Federation of Labor and became a force in municipal elections. Her friend Roy Stafford, an ardent Democrat as well as a believer in social reform, recognized the political potential of such zeal and sent Miss Barnard on an Eastern tour where she interviewed J A N E ADD A M S , Edwin Markham, Jacob A. Riis, officials of the National Child Labor Committee, and others, securing from them letters urging reform legislation which Stafford published in the Daily Oklahoman. Kate Barnard first won territory-wide attention through her role in the so-called "Shawnee Convention." There in 1906, on the eve of statehood for the "Twin Territories"—Oklahoma Territory and what remained of the Indian Territory—a joint meeting was held by the Oklahoma Fanners' Union, the Twin-Territorial Federation of Labor, and the four railway

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Barnard brotherhoods to hammer out common demands for presentation to the forthcoming constitutional convention. Attending as an A.F. of L. delegate, Miss Barnard took an active part in the bargaining and persuasion required to hold this heterogeneous group of diverse interests together. Some contemporary writers even credited her with originating the whole idea of a farmer-labor coalition to work for a progressive state constitution. At her urging the convention endorsed compulsory education and the abolition of child labor, the two welfare planks in which she was particularly interested. Recognizing Miss Barnard's growing influence, Democratic party leaders incorporated her reform proposals in their platform, in return for which she campaigned actively for Democratic candidates to the constitutional convention, which convened in November 1906 with a heavy Democratic majority. The resulting constitution not only provided for compulsory education and prohibited child labor in mines, mills, and factories, but also at her urging created the elective office of Commissioner of Charities and Corrections. Resigning from her Provident Association position, Miss Barnard announced her candidacy for this post. Oklahomans were at this time divided in their attitude toward the national progressive reform movement. Social justice legislation had wide emotional appeal, but at the same time these individualistic pioneers were intensely capitalistic in their hopes, if not in fact, and were in some respects less receptive to reform than the residents of the more industrialized states of the East. In such a situation, Miss Barnard's personal appeal proved decisive. She conducted an arduous campaign and became known as an eloquent, emotional orator. A tiny figure, always very feminine in dress, with olive skin, dark blue eyes with long black lashes, dark hair, and an appealing and vibrantly earnest voice of rare carrying power, she held and won her audiences. She vividly described the horrors of uncontrolled industrialism and insisted that Oklahoma could prevent them if it chose. In the initial state election of 1907 she led the Democratic ticket and became, at thirty-two, the first woman to win statewide elective office in the United States. During her two terms in office (she won reelection in 1910), Kate Barnard worked mightily to translate her personal popularity into a lasting body of reform legislation. Her method, which proved remarkably successful, was to ask a nationally known expert to draw up a bill which she would first submit to her farmerlabor backers for endorsement and then to the legislature, meanwhile utilizing her oratorical

gifts to generate popular support. She was a key figure in the enactment of a compulsory education law with provision for state payments to widows dependent on their children's earnings, of legislation implementing the constitutional ban on child labor, of laws aimed at unsafe working conditions and the "blacklisting" of union men. She introduced procedures for the more enlightened care of prisoners and the mentally ill, including the separation of the feebleminded from the insane and of first offenders from hardened criminals. Her attack on the "contract" system, whereby Oklahoma convicts were being exploited and often cruelly mistreated in Kansas penitentiaries, was typical. In 1908 she appeared at the state prison in Lansing, Kans., identified herself, and demanded a tour of the entire institution, including the prison-operated coal mine and the punishment rooms. Despite public and official apathy, her revelations not only stimulated Oklahoma to build its own penitentiary but also brought reforms in the Kansas penal system. For a brief period in this progressive heyday Miss Barnard became a focus of national interest. She was in constant demand to address student groups, teachers' organizations, state government leaders, prison officials, social workers, and union officials throughout the country. It was at her urging that the governor of Tennessee called the first Southern Sociological Congress (1912) to promote progressive legislation and racial understanding. She addressed the National Conference of Charities and Correction in 1907 and the National Governors' Conference in 1913. Staid Eastern social workers were somewhat taken aback by her "humanitarian spread-eagleism," but generously recognized that "here was a woman who had had the wit . . . to grasp the opportunity offered by the new constitution of a new and promising commonwealth; and had done at a stroke many things, for some of which they had worked . . . for years" (Charities and the Commons, July 6, 1907, pp. 390-91). Unlike many reformminded women of her day, she had no interest in woman suffrage. Her adored father opposed it, and she felt (as one reporter paraphrased her comments) "that the boys have always done what she asked them to do without her needing any vote for herself" (McKelway, p. 593). "The boys," however, proved less cooperative when their interests were vitally threatened. In 1908 the United States government had transferred to the Oklahoma courts responsibility for dependent Indian minors, and

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soon thousands of these children fell into the hands of white "guardians" whose only interest was in defrauding them of valuable oil and gas deposits, timber, and rich farm lands. Miss Barnard launched an investigation. One "guardian," she found, had over fifty children in his care and no idea where any of them were. Her authority to intervene was limited, but in 1911 she was able to add an attorney to her staff, and the next year he reported the recovery of $ 9 4 9 , 3 9 0 for 1,361 orphan minors. Retaliation was immediate. Early in 1913 the legislature cut Miss Barnard's staff, drastically reduced her funds, and launched a series of harassing investigations of her office. She did not seek reelection in 1914. Acting as a private citizen, she raised some funds to finance her campaign for an official investigation of the Indian land scandals, but without success. Refusing offers from labor organizations to work as a lobbyist in Washington, Kate Barnard at thirty-nine retired from public life. She spent her remaining years managing the rental properties her father had left her in 1909 and traveling to clinics and hospitals seeking relief from hay fever and an irritating, disfiguring skin disease. She suffered from heart trouble as well, and in February 1930 was found dead in the Oklahoma City hotel where she lived. Fourteen hundred persons attended the funeral mass, but no stone marks her grave in the city's Rosehill Cemetery.

articles by Miss Barnard see Survey, Oct. 2, 1909, pp. 1 7 - 2 0 , and Nov. 7, 1914, pp. 1 5 4 - 5 5 , 1 6 1 - 6 4 ; Independent, Nov. 28, 1907, pp. 1 3 0 7 - 0 8 ; and Good Housekeeping, Nov. 1912, pp. 6 0 0 - 0 7 . Published biographical material includes: Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XV, 1 1 0 - 1 1 ; Joseph B. Thoburn, A Standard Hist, of Okla. ( 1 9 1 6 ) , III, 1 3 2 9 - 3 3 ; A. J. McKelway in American Mag., Oct. 1908; Julian Leavitt, "The Man in the Cage," ibid., Mar. 1912, pp. 5 3 8 - 4 2 ; Charities and the Commons, July 6, 1907, pp. 3 8 9 - 9 1 ; Daily Oklahoman, Feb. 24, 1930; and C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South ( 1 9 5 1 ) , p. 423. An account of the Indian guardianship frauds and Miss Barnard's futile attempt to correct them is given in Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run ( 1 9 4 0 ) . Birth date from Kate Barnard's death record, Okla. State Dept. of Health.] EDITH COPELAND

B A R N E S , Mary Downing Sheldon (Sept. 15, 1850-Aug. 27, 1 8 9 8 ) , educator, pioneer in the source method of teaching history, was born in Oswego, N.Y., the oldest of five children of Frances Anna Bradford (Stiles) and Edward Austin Sheldon, both of western New York. Sheldon, the head of a private school in Oswego, later founded ( 1 8 6 1 ) and directed the famous Oswego State Normal and Training School, for years the center of Pestalozzian influence in American education. Mary Sheldon was educated in the public schools of Oswego until she was sixteen. She completed the classical and advanced courses at the Normal School in 1868 and 1869 respectively, staying on to teach for about two years. In September 1871 she entered the University of Michigan—newly opened to women— as a sophomore. Although her chief interest at the time was in the natural sciences, she enrolled in a classical course. Together with two friends who were also to pioneer in history teaching in women's colleges—LUCY MAYNARD

[There are letters of Kate Barnard, both personal and official, in the Okla. state archives, Okla. City, and an important personal collection in the possession of Col. Hobart Huson of Refugio, Texas, son of Miss Barnard's assistant as Commissioner of Charities and Corrections, which includes as well an unpublished, fragmentary autobiographical memoir. Also of value are the papers of Edith Johnson of the Daily Oklahoman, a longtime friend of Miss Barnard's, at the Univ. of Okla.; a collection of interviews and periodical material made by Mrs. Polly Jamerson of Columbus, Ohio, and Washington, D.C.; and interviews with Miss Barnard's friends and acquaintances, including Mabel Bassett (Miss Barnard's successor in office), Fred Wenner, Henry S. Johnston, Miss Dora Findlay, and Miss Angie Debo. Parts of Miss Barnard's story were authenticated from the published reports of the governors of Okla. Territory, the journal of the Constitutional Convention, Okla. house and senate journals, and Miss Barnard's reports as Commissioner of Charities and Corrections. Other information from files of the Daily Oklahoman, Okla. City Times, Guthrie Leader, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch; city directories of Okla. City and Guthrie; and county and probate court records in Okla. City, which record the Barnards' real estate holdings and the extensive litigation in which they were involved. For

SALMON a n d A L I C E F R E E M A N

(PALMER)—Miss

Sheldon took some work in history with Prof. Charles Kendall Adams, a pioneer in the introduction of the German seminary method of instruction. After her graduation, in 1874, she returned to Oswego Normal to teach "History, Latin, Greek, and Botany for $ 1 0 0 0 a year and fun," instead of the physics and chemistry she would then have preferred. But as she sought to apply scientific methods to history she became so interested that she soon afterward turned down a chance to teach chemistry at Wellesley, going there, late in 1876, only when invited to teach history. During her two and a half years at Wellesley, Mary Sheldon followed what she later called the "seminary" or "source" method of teaching. Using no textbook, she had sets of

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primary sources duplicated each week for her students. Classes were small—twenty or fewer —and most of the time in class was used for discussion of historical problems. Internal conflicts at Wellesley and a breakdown in health led her to resign her position in 1879. After a year of rest and two years of travel abroad, where she studied at Newnham College, Cambridge, under Prof. John R. Seeley, she returned in 1882 to teaching at Oswego Normal School. There she worked out her first book, the groundbreaking Studies in General History ( 1 8 8 5 ) , intended for high and normal schools. On Aug. 6, 1885, she was married to Earl Barnes, a former student eleven years her junior. Her husband taught in an academy in Hoboken, N.J. ( 1 8 8 4 - 8 6 ) , studied history and psychology at Cornell and spent a year at the University of Zurich in "pedagogics," then taught history at Indiana University ( 1889— 91 ). During these years Mary Barnes concentrated on writing and lecturing, along with some research for the historian Andrew Dickson White, recently retired as president of Cornell. In 1891 Earl Barnes was appointed head of the department of education at the newly founded Stanford University, where he applied the source method to intellectual and educational history and initiated studies in child development and in extension teaching. Mary Barnes joined the Stanford history department in March 1892 as assistant professor. "A frail, dark woman," whose "give-and-take discussions were disconcerting to precise notetaking pupils" (in the recollection of Henry D. Sheldon), she taught nineteenth-century European history and a new course on the history of the Pacific slope. Together the Barneses wrote Studies in American History ( 1 8 9 1 ) for eighth graders, and in 1896 Mrs. Barnes published her Studies in Historical Method, directed toward teachers and other nonhistorians who wanted to understand and apply to some degree the historical method. Mary Sheldon Barnes and her husband resigned their posts at Stanford in 1897 and went to Europe for two years of travel and writing. But her chronic illness, diagnosed as organic heart disease, recurred, and after some weeks of suffering and an unsuccessful operation she died in London in August 1898. In accordance with her wish Barnes took her body to Rome for burial in the Protestant cemetery there. The importance of Mary Sheldon Barnes in American educational history rests chiefly upon her often misunderstood source method. She intended that students should study the primary sources (which in her two main works

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were linked together by secondary material) in an "independent and solitary" way, using her questions as guides to problem solving. In class a "free and talkative" discussion was to take the place of the traditional "recitation" of facts and conclusions memorized. Always to be kept in mind was the main aim: not the acquisition of historical information, but the development of the student's abilities to observe, to weigh evidence, to generalize, and to exercise creative historical imagination. This was a far more progressive approach than many teachers, of her time or later, could understand or apply; and her ideas ran counter to the leading notions among both educators and professional historians of what was suitable for school history. Yet the agitation over the "source method" did hasten the improvement of more conventional history textbooks. In her philosophy of history teaching she anticipated, to a considerable extent, the emphasis upon critical thinking which came to characterize some of the better "general education" courses a half-century later. [For biographical information, see Hist. Sketches Relating to the First Quarter Century of the State Normal and Training School at Oswego, N.Y. (1888), pp. 135-44, 160-61; and memorials by Katharine Lee Bates in Wellesley College Mag., Oct. 1898; by Will S. Monroe in Jour, of Education, Sept. 15, 1898; and by Edward Howard Griggs in the Sequoia (Stanford Univ.), Sept. 30, 1898. See also Griggs' Earl Barnes: A Life-Sketch and an Address (1935); Mary Sheldon Barnes, ed., Autohiog. of Edward Austin Sheldon (1911); and Dorothy Rogers, Oswego: Fountainhead of Teacher Education (1961). Helpful for the Stanford years are recollections of Prof. Henry D. Sheldon of the Univ. of Oreg. in Stanford Alumni Rev., Feb. 1947; and, for background, Ellen Coit Elliott's delightful It Happened This Way (1940). The most thorough study of Mrs. Barnes' educational methods and ideas is contained in the author's "Mary Sheldon Barnes and the Origin of the Source Method of Teaching History in the Am. Secondary School, 1885-1896," Am. Heritage, Oct. and Dec. 1948. Hundreds of her letters, diaries, pictures, and other sources are in the possession of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Barnes, Cornwall Bridge, Conn.; other papers relating to the Sheldons are in the N.Y. State Univ. College at Oswego, N.Y. Mary Barnes' marriage date, sometimes given as 1884, is confirmed by the records of the N.Y. State Dept. of Health.] ROBERT

B A R N E T T , Ida Wells. See Ida.

E.

KEOHANE

WELLS-BARNETT,

BARNUM, Gertrude (Sept. 29, 1866-June 17, 1 9 4 8 ) , social worker and labor reformer, was

Barnum bom in Chester, 111., the second daughter and second of four children of William Henry and Clara Letitia (Hyde) Barnum. Her father's family had come to southern Illinois by way of Michigan from Onondaga County, N.Y. Miss Barnum grew to maturity in Chicago, where her father was a prominent attorney, a member of the Union League Club, a leading Democrat, and a judge of the Cook County circuit court. She entered the suburban Evanston Township High School in 1883 and took a rigorous course of studies in literature and languages, but school records reveal no date of withdrawal or graduation. In September 1891 she matriculated in the University of Wisconsin's college of letters and science to pursue an "English course," but despite an excellent firstyear record did not continue. A growing alienation from conventional upper-class mores is suggested by her eschewing a formal debut in Chicago society. Stirred, like other comfortably situated Chicagoans, by the city's surge of reform in the 1890's, Miss Barnum developed a social conscience. For several years in the 1890's she served an apprenticeship in reform with JANE ADDAMS at Chicago's famous Hull House, and from January 1902 to June 1903 she was head worker of Henry Booth House, another Chicago settlement. Becoming convinced, however, that the conditions making social settlements and charity necessary must be eradicated, she decided to take up the cause of labor. Soon after the National Women's Trade Union League was formed in 1903, Miss Barnum, an attractive woman with reddish gold hair and a commanding figure, became a national organizer. In this capacity, in 1905, she supervised the strike activities of female textile mill operatives in Fall River, Mass., laundry workers in Troy, N.Y., and corset workers in Aurora, 111. In each case Miss Barnum brought the facts of the dispute to the public's attention, thereby engendering sympathy for the strikers. In 1911 she became directly associated with trade unionism as a special agent of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, a position she held until 1916. Here she performed various organizing and publicity functions. In January-February 1913, during the course of strikes by New York white goods workers and other women in the garment trades, Miss Barnum obtained aid from prominent New York socialites, civic leaders, and college girls, and even succeeded in persuading Theodore Roosevelt to visit the neighborhood and speak sympathetically of the strikers. While approaching "respectable" citizens for aid, Miss Barnum succinctly summarized her

Bansocial philosophy: "Society is in disgrace for its apathy under conditions which threaten the very lives of the future mothers of the race. . . . The leisure class should not be outdone by the workers in courage and self-sacrifice" (New York Times, Feb. 10, 1 9 1 3 ) . In 1914 she served as a special agent for President Wilson's newly created United States Commission on Industrial Relations and in 1 9 1 8 - 1 9 as assistant director of the investigation service of the federal Department of Labor. She supported the cause of woman suffrage, serving as an officer in HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH'S Equality League of Self-Supporting Women. Miss Barnum retired from union activities in 1919 and moved to California, making her home for a time in Berkeley. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Los Angeles in 1948, at the age of eighty-one. Her ashes are in the Inglewood crematory there. By her career she had demonstrated that the socially conscious individual could aid the less fortunate through trade union service as well as through settlement and charity work. [Miss Barnum contributed articles to Charities and the Commons (1905-08), Survey (May 6, 1911), the Independent (1905-15), and Outlook (191317). Biographical information was drawn from scattered sources: The Book of Chicagoans: A Biog. Diet. (1917); Who Was Who in America, Vol. Ill (1960), p. 952 (partly inaccurate); Eben L. and Francis Barnum, Genealogical Record of the Barnum Family ( 1912 ) ; Hull-House Bull., Jan. 1896 to Apr.-May 1899; Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Handbook of Settlements (1911), p. 53; Gladys Boone, The Women's Trade Union Leagues in Great Britain and the U.S.A. (1942); Alice Henry, Women and the Labor Movement ( 1923 ) ; Louis Levine, The Women's Garment Workers: A Hist, of the Internat. Ladies' Garment Workers' Union ( 1924 ) ; Hyman Berman, "Era of the Protocol: A Chapter in the Hist, of the Internat. Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, 1910-1916" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia Univ., 1956); Harriot Stanton Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years (1940), pp. 10910; obituary in N.Y. Times, June 19, 1948; death certificate, Los Angeles Dept. of Health; records of Evanston Township High School and Univ. of Wis.; correspondence with Miss Barnum's sisterin-law, Mrs. Harry H. Barnum, Winnetka, 111.] MELVYN DUBOFSKY

BARR, Amelia Edith Huddleston (Mar. 29, 1831—Mar. 10, 1919), novelist, was born in Ulverston, Lancashire, England. Her father, William Henry Huddleston, was a minister in the Methodist Church; her mother, Mary (Singleton) Huddleston, came of a Quaker family in Kendal, England. The second daughter and second of six children, of whom the three boys

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Barr died in early childhood, Amelia grew up in the north of England, the family moving every two or three years as Huddleston was appointed to churches at Penrith, Shipley, and Ripon in the Yorkshire and Cumberland regions and Castletown on the Isle of Man. Her father had income independent of his parish salary, and Amelia was educated in private schools in these towns. When she was sixteen her father lost a large portion of his private income, and Mrs. Huddleston and the two older daughters decided to open a girls' school. In preparation, Amelia taught at a private school in Norfolk for a year. Although the family's fortunes improved, she decided to continue teaching and secured an appointment from the Wesleyan Board of Education, which sent her to the Normal School in Glasgow, Scotland, to prepare for work in Methodist schools for the poor. She left before completing the course, however, to marry, on July 11, 1850, Robert Barr, son of a Scottish Calvinist minister and the owner of a prosperous woolen business in Glasgow. Late in 1851, shortly before the birth of their first child, Mary, Barr went bankrupt. A second daughter, Eliza, was bom in May 1853, and that summer the family emigrated to the United States, settling in Chicago. There Barr found employment as an accountant and his wife opened a school for girls. Their third child, Edith, bom in December 1854, died within a year. Meanwhile the outspoken Barr had made an enemy of a powerful Chicago politician, and in November 1855, after a threat on his life, he hurriedly left the city. His family followed him the next year to Memphis, Tenn., but in the summer of 1857 an outbreak of yellow fever drove them to Galveston, Texas, and then inland to Austin, where Barr found a position as an accountant in the state comptroller's office. During their nine years in Austin, Mrs. Bantaught her two daughters and a few other children at her home and enjoyed the social life of the new capital. Five more children were bom: Calvin (1857), Alice (1859), Ethel (1861), Alexander Gregg (1863), and Archibald (1865); Ethel and Archibald died before their first birthdays. During the Civil War the Barrs, still British citizens, lived quietly in Austin; they seem to have kept apart from the conflict, though Mrs. Barr was not altogether sympathetic with what she called her husband's "unreasonable detestation of slavery." In 1866 Barr took a job in a cotton house in Galveston. There, the following summer, the whole family contracted yellow fever and Barr and the two boys died. A last child, Andrew, was bom three months later and lived only five days.

Aided by the large community of Scots in Galveston, Mrs. Barr pulled the remnants of her family together and on the advice of a friend set up a boardinghouse, which promised well but failed after its patrons scattered during the yellow fever scare of 1869. That fall, in obedience to "a peremptory voice," she sailed for New York with her three daughters. Throughout her life Amelia Barr was guided by her dreams and premonitions; and though she was never seriously attracted to the cult of spiritualism, she believed in the ability of departed souls to communicate with the living and in reincarnation. Whether with or without spiritual aid, her luck now turned. A Mr. Libbey, whose name had been given her by a Galveston friend, engaged her to teach music and drawing to his sons at his home in Ridgewood, N.J., and encouraged her to open a small private school there. He was also responsible for selling her first literary effort, an article describing Texas after the Civil War, to D. Appleton & Company. With this encouragement Mrs. Barr in the fall of 1870 moved to New York and embarked on a successful career as an author. The Brooklyn clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, whom she had met years before in Glasgow, suggested that she write for the Christian Union, of which he was editor, and during the next decade Mrs. Barr supported herself and her daughters by writing more than a thousand articles and poems for the Union, the Christian Herald, and Robert Bonner's New York Ledger. Her first novel, "Eunice Leslie," was serialized in the Working Church, a New York religious weekly for which she was writing in the early 1870's. Her first book, Romances and Realities: Tales of Truth and Fancy, appeared in 1875. The success of Cluny McPherson (1883) convinced her that she had found her vocation, and Jan Vedder's Wife (1885) placed her in the front rank of popular American novelists. From that time until her death she wrote more than two novels a year, mostly historical romances which she painstakingly researched in her alcove in the Astor Library. With their pleasantly sentimental plots, strong religious tinge, and natural portraits of folk characters, the books were widely read. The best was probably The Bow of Orange Ribbon (1886), set in Dutch New York; other popular tales were Remember the Alamo (1888), which took place in Sam Houston's Texas; The Lions Whelp (1901), which dealt with Cromwell's England; and A Daughter of Fife (1886), one of her many novels set in Scotland. Her last and most serious, The Paper Cap (1918), pictured the industrial struggle in England be-

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tween the hand loom and the power loom. Meanwhile her poems, short stories, and articles appeared in the Delineator, the Ladies' Home Journal, and Lippincott's Magazine, and in the London publications the Sunday Magazine and the Leisure Hour. After fifteen years in New York, Mrs. Barr in 1885 rented a house in Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y.; in 1891 she bought "Cherry Croft," a comfortable cottage on Storm King Mountain. She frequently summered in England and Scotland. Mary and Eliza ("Lilly") lived with her until they married, in 1883 and 1895; Alice, frail and probably mentally retarded, stayed at home or with one of her sisters. During the last few years of her life Mrs. Barr lived at Richmond Hill, Long Island, where she died of cerebral apoplexy shortly before her eighty-eighth birthday. She was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, N.Y. The material of her own life was more exciting than her fiction, and her autobiography, All the Days of My Life ( 1 9 1 3 ) , is the best of the eighty-one volumes she authored. [Mrs. Barr's autobiography is the principal source. See also Oscar Fay Adams in Andover Rev., Mar. 1889; Hamilton W. Mabie in Bookbuyer, Sept. 1891; Hildegarde Hawthorne in Bookman, May 1920; Kate D. Sweetser in ibid., Oct. 1923; Grant

M. Overton, The Women Who Make Our Novels (1918); Woman's Who Who of America, 191415; N.Y. Times, Mar. 12, 1919 (obituary) and Mar. 16, 1919, sec. VIII, p. 128 (editorial); death record from N.Y. City Dept. of Health, Queens Borough. There are letters and MSS. of Mrs. Barr in the State Archives Library, Austin, Texas, and in the Univ. of Texas Library, Austin.] PHILIP

GRAHAM

B A R R E T T , Janie Porter (Aug. 9, 1865-Aug. 27, 1948), Negro social welfare leader, was born in Athens, Ga., the daughter of former slaves. Little is known of her father; her mother, Julia Porter, was employed in Macon, Ga., as a housekeeper and seamstress by a Mrs. Skinner, a New Yorker who had moved south after her marriage. Janie was reared as a member of the Skinner household in an atmosphere of culture and gentility. Even after her mother's marriage to a relatively prosperous railway worker named Jackson (by whom she had two more children, a son and a daughter), Janie remained with the Skinners. When she reached the age of fifteen, Mrs. Skinner proposed to send her to school in the North, where she could pass for white. Her mother, however, wished her to be more closely associated with her own people and enrolled her at Hampton Institute in Hampton, Va.

Janie at first felt alien among the Hampton students, most of them from rural backgrounds, but she was naturally high-spirited and soon adjusted to her new environment. Influenced by Walter Besant's novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men, in which the well-born heroine chooses a life of social service, she became fired with the desire to help her race. After graduating in 1884, she taught for a year among sharecroppers in Dawson, Ga., and then at L U C Y C R A F T L A N E Y ' S Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Ga.; from 1886 to 1889 she taught night school classes at Hampton Institute. On Oct. 31, 1889, she was married to Harris Barrett of the Hampton business staff. They had four children: May Porter, Harris, Julia Louise, and Catherine. Soon after her marriage, Mrs. Barrett began inviting neighborhood girls into her home for weekly meetings. From this informal beginning grew the Locust Street Social Settlement, founded by Mrs. Barrett in October 1890, the first in Virginia and one of the first for Negroes in the country. The undertaking flourished, and in 1902, with money they had originally set aside for home improvements, the Barretts built a separate structure on their property to house the settlement. Funds for furnishings and maintenance came chiefly from Northern philanthropists to whom Mrs. Barrett had access through Hampton Institute. The settlement's clubs, led by Hampton students and designed for all ages and interests, offered instruction in cooking, sewing, child care, gardening, and poultry raising. In 1908 Janie Porter Barrett became the first president of the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, in whose founding she had played a large part. Like many women's groups in this Progressive era, the federation under Mrs. Barrett's leadership turned to social service projects. A particular need in Virginia was for a rehabilitation center for female Negro minors who had run afoul of the law; in one instance Mrs. Barrett discovered an eightyear-old girl who had been thrown into jail. After three years of fund raising, the federation in 1914 purchased a 147-acre farm in Peake (also known as Peaks Turnout), Va., eighteen miles north of Richmond, and the following January the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls was opened there. A Hampton graduate, Mrs. Ethel G. Griffith, was the first superintendent, with Mrs. Barrett secretary of the board of trustees. Later that year, when a state maintenance appropriation was delayed because the residents of Peake were protesting the presence of the school in their community, Mrs. Barrett concluded that the

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Barrett success of the undertaking required her fulltime involvement. Her husband had recently died, after several years of invalidism, and now, declining an offer to become dean of women at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, she moved to Peake as resident superintendent. Under her leadership a regular state appropriation was secured, and susbtantial sums were raised from local benefactors and Northern philanthropists for the construction of residence cottages. Temperamentally well fitted for her post, Mrs. Barrett possessed a rare gift for conveying to each girl her interest and understanding. She also sought the advice of social welfare experts, including Hastings Hart of the Russell Sage Foundation, in formulating her program. Viewing the school as a "moral hospital where each girl is studied and given individual treatment" (Daniel, p. 6 8 ) , she played down punishment and strove to develop individual responsibility. Honor clubs and a "big sister" plan were instituted for this purpose, as was a regular "open forum," at which the girls were given the opportunity to air their grievances freely. In addition to an eight-grade elementary curriculum, training was offered in laundry, sewing, and housekeeping, to fit the girls for the positions they were likely to secure when they left the school. Under the institution's parole program, girls with a twoyear good behavior record were placed in homes approved by the state welfare board, while Mrs. Barrett, in the absence of a regular parole officer, maintained close contact with each parolee and the family with which she was living. Under her leadership, the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls achieved a high reputation: a Russell Sage Foundation survey in the early 1920's placed it among the top five institutions of its type in the nation. In 1929 Mrs. Barrett was awarded a William E . Harmon Award for Distinguished Achievement among Negroes, and the following year she was asked to participate in the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection. She was active in the National Association of Colored Women, serving for four years ( 1 9 2 4 2 8 ) as chairman of its executive board. Her work in interracial affairs included membership on the executive board of the Richmond Urban League and on the Southern Commission on Interracial Cooperation. Emphatic in her view that "we cannot do the best social welfare work unless . . . the two races undertake it together" (Ovington, p. 1 9 0 ) , she unfailingly strove for biracial support of the Virginia Industrial School, having persuaded Mrs. Henry

Barrett Lane Schmelz, a white civic leader of Hampton, Va., to serve as first president of its board of trustees. Mrs. Barrett retired in 1940. Her final years were spent in Hampton, where she died in 1948, of diabetes mellitus accompanied by arteriosclerosis. After services at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, she was buried at Elmerton Cemetery in Hampton. The institution she had served for twenty-five years was in 1950 renamed the Janie Porter Barrett School for Girls.

t

[Sadie I. Daniel, Women Builders (1931), pp. 53-78; Mary White Ovington, Portraits in Color (1927), pp. 181-93; Eleanor Sickels, Twelve Daughters of Democracy (1941), pp. 191-208; Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Handbook of Settlements (1911), p. 298 (includes a list of further references); Winona R. Hall, "Janie Porter Barrett, Her Life and Contributions to Social Welfare in Va." (unpublished M.A. thesis, Howard Univ., 1954); Elizabeth L. Davis, Lifting as They Climb ( 1933), a history of the Nat. Assoc. of Colored Women; Who's Who in Colored America, 1941-44; Crisis, Nov. 1915, pp. 1 3 - U r J a n . 1943, p. 15; Southern Workman (Hampton Institute), Sept. 1912, Nov. 1915, Aug. 1916; Norfolk (Va. ) Jour, and Guide, Aug. 30, 1948; death record from Va. Dept. of Health; information from Miss J. Louise Barrett, Petersburg, Va., and from Hampton Institute.] SADIE DANIEL S T .

CLAIR

B A R R E T T , Kate Harwood Waller (Jan. 24, 1 8 5 7 - F e b . 23, 1 9 2 5 ) , leader in the National Florence Crittenton Mission for unwed mothers, was born in Falmouth, Va., a village across the Rappahannock from Fredericksburg. She was the first of ten children of Withers Waller, a lawyer, and Ann Eliza (Stribling) Waller, both of old Virginia families. Although their thousand-acre Potomac estate, Clifton, had been granted to a Waller ancestor by Charles II, the marshy land was Door, and Withers Waller found his herring fishery more profitable than either farming or the law. When the Civil War broke out he became a Confederate colonel; his wife and daughter, forced to flee Clifton, spent the war years following the army. Three more children were born during this period, of whom a son and one of the two daughters died of camp measles. In 1865 the family resumed its life at Clifton, where six more daughters were bom. Katherine, as she had been christened, was educated at home, except for a year at a neighborhood school and two years at the Arlington Institute for Girls in Alexandria. Although the tight proprieties imposed on adolescent girls in that conservative section of Virginia at times

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seemed unbearable to the adventurous and fun-loving Kate, she later recalled her childhood warmly. On July 19, 1876, she was married to the Rev. Robert South Barrett of Milton, N.C., rector of the Episcopal church at nearby Aquia, Va. They had seven children: Robert South, Withers Waller (who died in infancy), John Barker, Lila Waller, Rebecca Harvey, Charles Dodson, and Katherine Steele. The first four years of their married life were spent in Richmond, where Barrett served a church in a slum area. One stormy night an unwed mother with her baby appeared at the rectory door and asked for help. In talking with her, Mrs. Barrett found the woman's background remarkably like her own. "It was all so different from what I had thought and imagined," she later wrote. "Where was the terrible degradation, the hopeless depravity . . . with which I had always been taught to associate the fallen woman?" Almost unconsciously, she resolved to aid this "outcast class" (Wilson and Barrett, pp. 154-56).

eral missioner of the Protestant Episcopal Church (an office concerned with doctrinal interpretation) and the family moved to Washington, D.C., settling in nearby Alexandria, Va. He died two years later at forty-five, leaving his widow with six children and limited financial resources. To eke out a small income, but primarily because of a growing dedication to the work, she began to devote increasing amounts of time and energy to the rapidly expanding National Florence Crittenton Mission, established in 1895 and chartered by Congress three years later. Charles Crittenton was president and financial backer, but he was completely committed to evangelism, and it fell to Mrs. Barrett, as vice-president and general superintendent, to supervise and guide the movement, now numbering over fifty homes across the country. Though these institutions were largely autonomous, Mrs. Barrett's national office was the heart of the undertaking, offering the local homes not only financial aid, but also moral support, advice, and a sense of continuity in times of difficulty. As a consequence, the movement came largely to reflect her philosophy, as conveyed in countless personal visits, annual conferences (started in 1897), the Florence Crittenton Magazine, a Washington training course for workers, and her book, Some Practical Suggestions on the Conduct of a Rescue Home (1903). Initially, her outlook, like Crittenton's, was intensely evangelical. "The only power that can save a fallen woman is the blood of Jesus Christ," she declared in 1897, and warned rescue workers against listening to the "nauseating details" of a girl's experience, since "Sin is sin, and it doesn't matter an iota what the particular circumstances . . . are" (Fourteen Years' Work, pp. 23, 26).

During six years at a parish in Henderson, Ky., Mrs. Barrett joined her husband in pastoral work among local prostitutes, and in 1886, when he became dean of St. Luke's Cathedral in Atlanta, she undertook to broaden her efforts. To learn more about the problem, she enrolled in the three-year course at the Women's Medical College of Georgia, receiving the M.D. degree in 1892. Next year, with a like-minded woman from New Orleans as superintendent, she opened a home for unmarried mothers in Atlanta. A hostile public, however, viewed the establishment as a haven for loose women, and four successive locations had to be abandoned before the city council, in a change of heart occasioned partly by a favorable resolution of the local ministerial union, not only endorsed the project but provided land and a small monthly appropriation as well. While seeking building funds, Mrs. Barrett late in 1892 wrote to Charles N. Crittenton, the "millionaire evangelist" who ten years before, upon the death of his little daughter Florence, had given up a business career to devote himself to preaching and to the rescue of "fallen women." Beginning with a mission in New York's "red light" district in 1883, he had subsequently opened several homes in California, named for his daughter, to aid reclaimed prostitutes. Crittenton at once contributed $5,000 to Mrs. Barrett's establishment, which thereupon became the fifth in a growing chain of Florence Crittenton homes. In 1894 Robert Barrett was appointed gen-

At the same time, her religious fervor was tempered by a "vigorously sane and practical bent of mind" (Wilson and Barrett, p. 9), and under her guidance the Florence Crittenton homes gradually gave up the effort to convert prostitutes and concentrated instead upon the needs of young unmarried mothers-to-be, particularly those pregnant for the first time, offering them a residence and maternity care, as well as training in baby care and vocational guidance. Mrs. Barrett firmly avowed the principle, accepted by all Florence Crittenton homes, that infants should remain with their mothers rather than be taken for adoption or placed in institutions. She did not, however, extend this belief in the value of family ties to the young mothers themselves. "I am Virginian enough to believe that a name should

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Barrows attending its conferences in London ( 1 8 9 9 ) , Toronto ( 1 9 0 9 ) , and Rome ( 1 9 1 4 ) . Now a public figure of the first rank, Kate Waller Barrett was eagerly sought by many groups. She was Virginia regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution, vice-president of the Virginia Equal Suffrage League ( 1 9 0 9 20) and of the Virginia Conference of Charities and Correction, a delegate to the National Democratic Convention of 1924, president of the National Women's Auxiliary of the American Legion ( 1 9 2 2 - 2 3 ) , and a member of the board of visitors at William and Mary College (where Kate Waller Barrett Hall, a women's dormitory, was dedicated in 1927). With all her executive ability, she remained a friendly and cheerful person, interested in life and readily sympathetic to any form of human difficulty. She died at her home in Alexandria of diabetes mellitus in 1925. After services in St. Paul's Church in Alexandria, she was buried in the Aquia Cemetery near her birthplace. Her son Robert South Barrett succeeded her as president of the Florence Crittenton Mission, serving until his own death in 1959.

be protected," she said, which in practice meant that upon leaving the Crittenton homes all girls were urged to move to an unfamiliar area where they might live "without bringing disgrace upon those they love" ( F o u r t e e n Years' Work, p. 6 1 ) . In 1909 Charles Crittenton died, and Mrs. Barrett, while continuing as general superintendent, succeeded him as president of the National Florence Crittenton Mission. She held both positions until her death. In the course of her career she had witnessed a major change in the public's attitude, in which hostility had given way to increasing interest and support. Indeed, the Progressive period of the early twentieth century saw a great wave of antivice enthusiasm, coupled with sensational revelations of an alleged "white slave" conspiracy. Mrs. Barrett welcomed the greater freedom of public discussion, but worked to combat the more lurid aspects of the "white slave" hysteria. In particular, she urged superintendents of local Florence Crittenton homes to give all possible aid to girls who had been uprooted in hastily conceived municipal campaigns against prostitution. A side effect of the antivice movement was that the National Florence Crittenton Mission won full acceptance as a worthwhile philanthropy, and Mrs. Barrett's public stature grew accordingly. In 1909 she was a delegate to the White House Conference for Dependent Children; in 1914 she traveled abroad as a special representative of the Labor Department to investigate the treatment of women deported from the United States on morals grounds; and in the First World War she helped the Florence Crittenton homes located near military installations to meet the greatly expanded demands placed upon them.

[The fullest source of information about Kate Waller Barrett is Fifty Years' Work with Girls, 1883-1933 (1933), by Otto Wilson in collaboration with Robert South Barrett. Mrs. Barrett's Some Practical Suggestions on the Conduct of a Rescue Home and her chapters in Fourteen Years' Work Among "Erring Girls" as Conducted by the Nat. Florence Crittenton Mission (1897) offer valuable insights into her attitude toward her work. Emma O. Lundberg has written an excellent summary of her life in Unto the Least of These: Social Services for Children (1947), pp. 212-16. Genealogical information can be found in Hugh M. McIlhany, Jr., Some Va. Families (1903). For references to her suffrage work, see Ida H. Harper, ed., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, vol. VI (1922). Many newspapers carried obituary notices, the most complete being in the Alexandria (Va.) Gazette, Feb. 24, 1925. Wilson and Barrett and the Mcllhany genealogy, above, give Mrs. Barrett's birth year as 1857; her death certificate (for which a son supplied data) has 1855 (copy from Va. State Board of Health).]

Having seen the Florence Crittenton movement well launched and widely accepted, Mrs. Barrett in her later years devoted increasing time to other interests, notably the National Council of Women, an association of women's organizations formed in 1888 to work for reforms of mutual interest. Elected corresponding secretary in 1899 and vice-president-atlarge in 1903, she was elevated to the presidency in 1911. During her five years in this office she worked strenuously to bring about a rapprochement between the National Council of Women and the younger, rapidly growing General Federation of Women's Clubs. This was accomplished in 1916 when the General Federation applied for membership in the National Council, at which time Mrs. Barrett stepped aside as president. She was also active in the International Council of Women,

CAROL

BARROWS, Bella S. See Isabel Hayes Chapin.

BARROWS,

L.

URNESS

Katharine

BARROWS, Katharine Isabel Hayes Chapin (Apr. 17, 1845-Oct. 25, 1 9 1 3 ) , ophthalmologist, stenographer, and reformer, was bom in Irasburg, Vt., the third daughter and fifth of seven children of Henry Hayes (originally Hay), a physician, and Anna (Gibb) Hayes, a former schoolteacher. Both parents were

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Barrows emigrants from Scotland and Presbyterians. Dr. Hayes, a temperance advocate and a Grahamite devoted to health through diet, moved his family about to several New England towns before settling down to a comfortable living in Derry, N.H. Here Isabel often accompanied her father on his calls as lay nurse and dental assistant. She attended village schools and at seventeen graduated from Adams Academy in Derry. On Sept. 26, 1863, at eighteen, she was married to a young Congregational minister, William Wilberforce Chapín. The couple sailed to India, prepared for a ten-year missionary assignment, but in a year and a half Chapin was dead of diphtheria. His young widow continued teaching Hindu girls for another six months, meanwhile determining to study medicine in America and return as a medical missionary. Back in the United States, Isabel Chapin took a job as bath assistant at a water-cure sanatorium in Dansville, N.Y., run by Dr. James Caleb Jackson, with whom she studied hydropathy. There she met and became engaged to Samuel June Barrows (1845-1909), a native of New York City and an expert in shorthand who had become a stenographer but hoped to study for the ministry; in ill health, he was paying for his cure by working as Jackson's secretary. In the fall of 1866 they moved to New York City, where Isabel Chapin continued her medical studies and her fiancé worked as a reporter for the Tribune and other New York newspapers. After their marriage, on June 28, 1867, she mastered shorthand. When Barrows was offered the position of stenographic secretary to Secretary of State William H. Seward in the fall of 1867, they moved to Washington. Next summer Barrows fell ill and for several weeks his wife took his place, the first woman to work for the State Department. Isabel Barrows and her husband had married with the understanding that she should complete her studies before he began his training for the ministry. In the fall of 1868, accordingly, she returned to New York to enroll in the newly founded Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children while her husband continued as a government stenographer in Washington. Next fall, with his encouragement, she embarked with a friend, Dr. MARY J. SAFFORD, on a year of advanced study at the Univerity of Vienna; specializing in ophthalmology, she learned to perform delicate eye operations. On her return, as Dr. Bella C. Barrows, she began private practice, clinical work, and teaching at the School of Medicine of Howard Uni-

versity. In addition, she found time to work as a stenographer for Congressional committees, the first woman so employed. In the fall of 1871 Samuel Barrows entered the Harvard Divinity School, he and his wife having recently become Unitarians. For a year and a half, or until shortly before the birth of their only child, Mabel Hay, Isabel Barrows continued her work in Washington, then moved to Cambridge. In 1875-76, bringing their daughter with them, they spent a longplanned year of general study in Leipzig, where Mrs. Barrows took up Italian, French, and German. On their return Barrows became pastor of the First Parish Church in the Boston suburb of Dorchester. Four years later he resigned to become editor of the Unitarian weekly, the Christian Register. Isabel Barrows shared fully in her husband's new work, spending her days at the Register's Boston office as unofficial assistant editor, while her sister and a maid cared for her daughter and for the infant nephew, William Burnet Barrows, whom they adopted in 1885. By that year she had given up further medical practice. In the office, at their Dorchester home, and at their summer camp on Lake Memphremagog in Canada, Samuel and Isabel Barrows gathered around them a variety of reformers, foreign visitors, and needy immigrants. One member of their circle, A L I C E STONE BLACKW E L L , recalled Mrs. Barrows' "extreme warmth of heart" and her "keen blue eyes under the forest of curling hair, the bright smile that lit up her strong Scotch features" (Woman's Journal, Nov. 8, 1913, p. 357). She accompanied her husband to many reform conventions, where her skill at shorthand found good use. For twenty years (1884-1904) she was the official reporter and editor of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, and for much of this time she served in a similar capacity in the National Prison Association and at the Lake Mohonk conferences on the Indian, the Negro, and international arbitration. Election to Congress as a Republican in 1896 ended Samuel Barrows' editorial work but not his devotion to reform. Defeated for reelection, he accepted the position of secretary of the Prison Association of New York and in 1900 moved with his wife to Staten Island, their home for the rest of his life. Isabel Barrows traveled with her husband to penal congresses and inspected women's prisons, at the same time carrying on with her other reform interests. In 1909 she journeyed to St. Petersburg in an attempt to win freedom for the Russian revolutionist Catherine Bresh-

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Barry kovsky. News of her husband's illness reached her there, but Samuel Barrows died on Apr. 21, 1909, before she could arrive home. A month later she returned to Russia and then, undaunted by the failure of her mission, went on to Paris to take her husband's place at the International Prison Congress. In the last years of her life she made his work her own, writing and editing, especially interested in women's prison reform, still working to wipe out injustice and bring dignity and opportunity to all mankind. She died at sixty-eight of cirrhosis of the liver at the home of her daughter near Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y. Her ashes were buried in a private burying ground near Georgeville in Quebec. [The principal sources are Mrs. Barrows' MS. autobiog., in the possession of the family; Isabel C. Barrows, A S tinny Life: The Biog. of Samuel June Barrows (1913); Samuel J. and Isabel C. Barrows, "Personal Reminiscences of William H. Seward," Atlantic Monthly, Mar. 1889; and autobiographical articles in the Student's Jour., Devoted to Graham's Standard Phonography, June, July 1891. See also "A Lady Oculist," Revolution, Jan. 5, 1871, p. 3; Samuel J. and Isabel C. Barrows, The Shaybacks in Camp (1887), on their summer life at Lake Memphremagog; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15; obituaries in Woman's Jour., Nov. 8, 1913 (by Alice Stone Blackwell), Christian Register, Nov. 13, 1913, and Survey, Nov. 1, 1913. Mr. William Burnet Barrows of Magog, Quebec, Canada, also provided information. Death record from N.Y. State Dept. of Health. For a fuller account and bibliography, see Madeleine B. Stern, We the Women ( 1963) and So Much in a Lifetime: The Story of Dr. Isabel Barrows (1964).] MADELEINE

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STERN

BARRY, Leonora Marie Kearney (Aug. 13, 1849-July 15, 1 9 3 0 ) , labor organizer and lecturer, was born at Kearney, County Cork, Ireland, the only child of John and Honor Granger (Brown) Kearney. In 1852 the family emigrated to the United States and settled on a farm in Pierrepont, a tiny rural community in St. Lawrence County, N.Y., near the Canadian border. The mother died, and when her father remarried, the fifteen-year-old girl decided to become a teacher. Supplementing the education she had received at the local district school by taking private instruction from the head of a girls' school in nearby Colton, she secured a teacher's certificate at the age of sixteen and taught in a rural school for several years. On Nov. 30, 1871, in Potsdam, N.Y., she was married to William E. Barry, a native of Ireland who had emigrated to Canada and then moved across the line to New York state.

A painter by trade, he also played the cornet and gave lessons on that instrument. The couple had three children, whose birthplaces reveal the family's peripatetic life: Marion Frances ( 1 8 7 3 ) , born in Potsdam; William Standish ( 1 8 7 5 ) , in Haydenville, Mass.; and Charles Joseph ( 1 8 8 0 ) , in Amsterdam, N.Y. There Barry died, in 1881, having contracted lung trouble which may have been either tuberculosis or lead poisoning; four months later Mrs. Barry also lost her little girl. She was now left with the support of two young children. After surveying the scant possibilities open to someone of her limited training and education, she tried sewing, but the work proved too much of a strain on her eyes. Amsterdam was a center for the manufacture of hosiery and men's underwear, and she accordingly took a position as an unskilled hand in one of the mills. The experience proved the determining force of her life. Rebelling against the hard conditions and low pay—her first week's wages amounted to sixty-five c e n t s she turned to the Knights of Labor, an organization just entering its brief heyday. In the spring of 1884 she joined an assembly of some 1,500 women and rapidly rose to leadership, first as "master workman" (president) of her assembly, then in District Assembly 65, comprising fifty-two locals with a reported membership of 9,214. In 1886 she was sent to the district convention in Albany and then as one of the district's five delegates to the General Assembly (national convention) of the Knights in Richmond, Va. That year marked the short-lived peak of the Knights of Labor, a loosely organized association drawing its membership not only from industrial and craft workers but also from among shopkeepers, farmers, housewives, and even some professionals. The previous year the General Assembly, responding to the growing number of women members, had appointed a committee to gather facts on the condition of women in industry. From its report came the demand that a department of women's work headed by a general investigator be set up, and when the Assembly of 1886 accepted the proposal, the factory hand from Amsterdam was elected to the position. Lacking any previous experience except what she had gained in her own assembly, Mrs. Barry suddenly found herself a traveling organizer, reformer, and troubleshooter on a nationwide scale for the women members of a turbulent organization. She was also the eloquent voice of the working woman at innumerable public meetings. For four years she had no permanent home of her own, being obliged

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to leave one child in a convent school in Philadelphia and the other with sisters of her late husband. Her reports to the General Assembly in 1887, 1888, and 1889 give a vivid picture of the deplorable conditions prevailing in the sweatshops of the period and of the widespread use of child labor. Mrs. Barry, however, found herself unable to build up a stable membership, in part because of apathy and timidity among the women operatives, but also because of the dissensions which rent the Knights of Labor and soon caused its permanent decline. Though she organized several short-lived cooperative factories and a working women's benefit fund, her most enduring contribution was the passage of the first Pennsylvania factory inspection act of 1889, for which she made great efforts, although she had refused to lobby among the members of the legislature on the grounds that it would be unladylike. Believing that women should not work outside the home except in case of economic necessity, she gave up her labor duties when, on Apr. 17, 1890, she was married to Obadiah Read Lake ( 1 8 4 6 - 1 9 2 3 ) of St. Louis. A native of Smith's Falls, Ontario, and a printer by training, Lake served for thirty-seven years on the staff of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the last twenty-five years as proofreader and telegraph editor. After her marriage, Mrs. Lake became an active figure in Catholic charity organizations, in temperance work, and in the suffrage movement. She took part in the successful campaign of 1893 for woman suffrage in Colorado; that year she also addressed the congress of women at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago on "The Dignity of Labor." Her greatest efforts, however, were made on behalf of temperance and, later, for enforcement of the Volstead Act. She was for many years a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and an officer of and speaker for the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America. Tall, with a commanding presence, contagious smile, and flashing blue eyes under a broad brow, gifted with characteristically Irish humor, pathos, and spontaneity (she never used a prepared text), Mrs. Lake became widely sought after on the Chautauqua circuit and as a lecturer for the Redpath and Slayton agencies. Sometimes she was known as Mrs. Barry-Lake, or "Mother Lake." In 1916 she moved with her husband from St. Louis to Minooka, 111., a small community near Joliet, to live with her sister. An ardent baseball fan, she often visited Chicago to attend ball games. Lake died on July 18, 1923. Sur-

viving him by seven years, Mrs. Lake continued to speak in public until two years before her death, when she was stricken with cancer of the mouth. She died in Minooka at the age of eighty and was buried there in St. Mary's Cemetery. [Reports of the Gen. Investigator of Women's Work, in Knights of Labor Gen. Assembly, PTOC., 1887-89; obituaries of William E. Barry in Amsterdam (N.Y. ) Daily Democrat, Apr. 30, 1881, of Obadiah R. Lake in St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 20, 1923, and of Mrs. Lake in Joliet (111.) Herald-News, July 16, 1930; Who's Who in America, 1914-15, and Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15 (under Lake); John B. Andrews and W. D. P. Bliss, Hist, of Women in Trade Unions (vol. X of Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage-Earners in the U.S., Senate Doc. No. 645, 61 Cong., 2 Sess., 1911), pp. 116-23; Mrs. Barry's address to the Internat. Council of Women, 1888, in its Report, pp. 153-56; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the U.S. (1959), pp. 196-200; Standard Encyc. of the Alcohol Problem, IV (1928), 1499; correspondence with Leonora Barry (Mrs. Emmet P.) Forrestel of Lake Bluff, 111., a granddaughter. There are a few letters by Mrs. Barry in the Terence V. Powderly Papers at Catholic Univ. of America, Washington, D.C.] ELEANOR FLEXNER

BARRYMORE, Georgiana Emma Drew (July 11, 1854-July 2, 1 8 9 3 ) , actress, was born in Philadelphia, the second daughter and youngest of three children of John Drew and his wife LOUISA L A N E D R E W , both actors. Mrs. John Drew began to manage the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia in 1861, the year before her husband's death, and continued to operate it successfully for thirty-one years. There Geòrgie Drew made her professional debut at the age of seventeen in The Ladies' Battle. From this youthful role as a minor support to her mother, she grew into important parts which gave free play to her vivacity and spontaneous humor. After three years in her mother's stock company, she joined Augustin Daly's Fifth Avenue Theatre company in New York, following a path trod three months earlier by her brother, John Drew, Jr. Her first appearance under Daly took place May 6, 1875, as Clara in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Money. Remaining with Daly for more than a year, she played a number of roles popular at that time, including Celia in As You Like It to FANNY DAVENPORT'S Rosalind, Louise in Frou-Frou, Grace in Divorce, Maria in The School for Scandal, and Mary Standish in Pique. In the cast of the last, a long-run hit, she met Maurice Barrymore (born Herbert Blythe), a

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Barrymore handsome young Englishman who had come from his American debut in Boston. They were married in Philadelphia on Dec. 31, 1876. Although she made a number of appearances under various managers in the years following her marriage, Mrs. Barrymore turned her attention principally to rearing a family. At her mother's home on Twelfth Street in Philadelphia she bore her three children, Lionel in 1878, Ethel in 1879, and John in 1882. Meanwhile she played brief seasons, appearing with her husband in some of his theatrical ventures, joining A. M. Palmer's company, and supporting leading stars such as Edwin Booth, Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough, and HELENA MODJESKA. Her growing friendship with Madame Modjeska moved her to give up the Episcopal faith in which she had been reared and become a Catholic. Leaving the children under the watchful, stern, but loving care of her mother, Geòrgie Barrymore acquired a following and a reputation in such popular plays as Diplomacy, Moths, The Wages of S in, and L'Abbé Constantin. In her New York flat on East 59th Street she exercised her wit and charm as an accomplished hostess, dazzling her friends as surely as she touched her audiences. She scored her greatest success on Jan. 13, 1890, as Mrs. Hilary, a susceptible young widow, in The Senator, written for the robust comic talents of W. H. Crane. The theatre historian George Odell later remembered her volatile, effervescent performance as "one of the finest bits of comedy acting that I ever saw." Mrs. Barrymore continued to win applause in a second season of The Senator, but three months' poor health forced her to withdraw from the cast in December 1891. During the next season she joined Charles Frohman's Comedians, playing in Settled out of Court and The Sportsman. While appearing in the first of these productions in San Francisco late in 1892, she became seriously ill, being subject to "nervous prostration" and fainting at rehearsals. Returning to the East, she remained in New York until May 1893, making her final stage appearance at the Standard Theatre in February. Mrs. Barrymore then sought to regain her health through a trip to California with her daughter, Ethel. After three weeks in Santa Barbara her health seemed much improved, but she died there suddenly from a hemorrhage of the lungs, still only thirtyeight. With the help of Madame Modjeska and her husband, the resourceful fourteen-year-old Ethel brought her mother's remains home to Philadelphia for burial in Glenwood Cemetery. The tall, graceful, blond, and statuesque Geòrgie Barrymore cut a fine figure off as

well as on the stage. With a fund of animal spirits and unexcelled powers of repartee, she possessed an infectious gaiety. Blessed with only a thin voice that occasionally broke and reminded one contemporary "a little of the chirps of a canary bird," she was not the great actress who, by the breadth and depth of her art, moved whole audiences. Rather, her quick, spontaneous gestures and movements convulsed her audiences, who found her élan and comic sense remarkable. Cut off before she could develop these powers to the fullest, she left behind memories of beauty and charm, as well as a family that would one day write a brilliant chapter in stage history. [Robinson Locke Collection of Scrapbooks in the Theatre Collection, N.Y. Public Library at Lincoln Center; obituary in N.Y. Dramatic Mirror, July 15, 1893; George C. D. Odell, Annals of the N.Y. Stage, vols. X, XIV, XV (1938-49); Ethel Barrymore, Memories, An Autobiog. (1955). Date of birth supplied by Hist. Soc. of Pa. from baptismal register of St. Stephen's Church, Phila.] H. L. KLEINFIELD

BARTLETT, Caroline Julia. See CRANE, Caroline Julia Bartlett. BARTON, Clara (Dec. 25, 1821-Apr. 12, 1912), founder and for twenty-three years president of the American Red Cross, was born in North Oxford, Mass., the third daughter and fifth and last child of Stephen and Sarah (Stone) Barton, both of old New England stock. Named Clarissa Harlowe, after the heroine of Richardson's novel, she preferred to be known simply as Clara. She was deeply influenced by her family. Her father, to whom she was especially close, was a veteran of the Indian wars and a substantial farmer and sawmill owner who inspired his daughter with patriotism, a love of military lore, and a broad humanitarian interest. From her mother, a practical, hot-tempered, and warm-hearted woman, she acquired a lifelong interest in the household arts. Her four considerably older brothers and sisters also played important parts in her education, guiding her in mathematics, literature, and out-of-doors activities, including horsemanship. "I had no playmates, but in effect six fathers and mothers," she later wrote (W. E. Barton, I, 22). For two years, beginning at the age of eleven, she spent all her time as the devoted nurse and companion of her brother David during a stubborn illness, an experience which later stood her in good stead. She was an eager pupil in local schools, finding an occasional able teacher willing to take her through such advanced subjects as

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Latin, chemistry, and philosophy. Though not a church member, she shared the Universalist principles of her family. A girlhood visit from the phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler and a reading of his writings she later accounted an important influence which had taught her much about herself and others. Despite the affection lavished on her, Clara was a shy, lonely child given to timidity and even to panic. "[I]n the earlier years of my life I remember nothing but fear," she recalled (The Story of My Childhood, pp. 15-16). Plain in feature, almost neurotically sensitive, and endowed with an abundance of nervous energy, she early evidenced a strong will, a determination to surmount obstacles, and a capacity to identify herself with needy sufferers. At eighteen, little more than five feet tall, she began to teach in neighboring schools, her early success giving her increasing selfconfidence and poise. Her patience, integrity, sense of fun, and ability to inspire won the lifelong devotion of many of her pupils. A spirited, keen-eyed young woman with lovely waving brown hair, she received three proposals of marriage, but seemingly never had a real love affair; still, she never ceased to be liked by and in turn to like men. Demanding and giving unstinted loyalty in friendships, she enriched her life by many close relationships with both men and women. In 1850 a growing restlessness and inner depression led her to enroll for a year in the Liberal Institute of Clinton, N.Y. She then resumed teaching, this time in New Jersey, where a classmate lived. In 1852 she persuaded the Bordentown school board to let her found one of the state's first "free" or public schools; this quickly became a success—so much so that a man was placed over her. That winter (February 1854) she resigned and went to Washington, where through a Massachusetts Congressman she secured a clerkship in the Patent Office, becoming perhaps the first regularly appointed woman civil servant. The rudeness of her resentful male colleagues made her position uncomfortable, but her efficiency was appreciated by her superiors. Among those who recognized her ability was Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who more than once was to prove an influential friend. Overcoming her sense of uselessness, she filled her spare hours in Washington with various small deeds of charity. In 1857, deprived of her position after the Democratic victory, she returned to North Oxford for three aimless years. Late in 1860, however, she was called back to the Patent Office. In the confused days that marked the begin-

nings of the Civil War, Clara Barton found an opportunity to aid and befriend homesick Massachusetts soldiers in the capital. Later, witnessing the almost total lack of first-aid facilities at the battle of Bull Run, she advertised in the Worcester (Mass.) Spy for provisions for the wounded. Using her own limited quarters as a storeroom, she accumulated bandages, medicines, and food. Despite initial opposition in the War Department and among field surgeons, she and a few friends began in the summer of 1862 to distribute these supplies by mule team to ill-equipped hospitals and camps and on the battlefields themselves. Ranging over Virginia and Maryland, with intervals of rest in Washington, she ministered to the wounded and dying at Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run, Chantilly, South Mountain, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. Insistent on keeping her operations independent of the United States Sanitary Commission and of DOROTHEA DIX'S division of female nurses, Clara Barton short-circuited military routine and again and again appeared at military engagements with desperately needed supplies. Adaptable and cooperative, she was able to commandeer army mules and wagons for transport. It was her genius to blend sympathy with efficiency and neverfailing resourcefulness. Once, encountering a surgeon who was trying to care for more than a thousand wounded and dying men with only a two-inch candle for light, she amazed him by bringing out four boxes of candles. She gave first aid and prepared soup and coffee almost miraculously for thousands of men, sometimes under fire. However grim the suffering or disheartening the disaster, her will and spirit sustained her. The fear-ridden girl had become a woman whose courage knew no limits. "I wrung the blood from the bottom of my clothing," she wrote home matter-of-factly, "before I could step, for the weight about my feet." Increasingly she won the respect and admiration of commanding officers and surgeons, one of whom wrote, after seeing her in action at a critical juncture, that "if heaven ever sent out a holy angel, she must be one, her assistance was so timely" (Dulles, pp. 22— 2 3 ) . She always insisted that she was only one of hundreds of women who had rendered such service, yet by thousands of soldiers she was remembered as the Angel of the Battlefield. Sensitive to the importance of organization and prompt action, she let nothing stand in the way of her mission of mercy. Nor was she one to suffer inefficiency or selfishness gladly. Once, having failed to convince those in command that the quartermaster corps and the

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Barton surgeon-general's division were guilty of shocking neglect in their care of the wounded, she hurried from the battlefield to Washington to report to Senator Wilson, who prodded reluctant officials to investigate. "Everybody's business is nobody's business," she said; . . nobody's business is my business." As the press publicized her requests and as soldiers wrote to their families about her, she received more and more supplies, but she did not hesitate to spend her own savings for what she could not otherwise get. As the Sanitary Commission and other agencies grew in experience, Clara Barton's role diminished, and the exertions of 1862 yielded to a period of relative inactivity. After spending much of 1863 quietly in Port Royal, S.C., during the protracted siege of Charleston and Fort Wagner, she returned to Washington for further frustrating months on the sidelines. In June 1864, following brief service at Fredericksburg during the Wilderness campaign, she accepted appointment as head nurse in Benjamin Butler's two-corps Army of the James. Hitherto less concerned with hospitals than with providing succor during and immediately after a battle, she now cheerfully accepted her new role as nurse, cook, and general amanuensis at various corps hospitals in Virginia. In February 1865, with President Lincoln's approval and the limited cooperation of the War Department, she established at Annapolis an office where she and a few assistants sought to piece together information concerning missing men. Drawing upon letters from distraught relatives, she prepared lists of such men for distribution to newspapers throughout the North. As information in response to these published requests poured in from returned soldiers and ex-prisoners of war, it was classified and forwarded to the families concerned. In July 1865, with the help of a young man who during his imprisonment at Andersonville had been ordered to keep the death roll, she directed the marking of the graves of almost 13,000 men in that notorious Georgia prison. Through the efforts of Senator Wilson, Congress next year appropriated $15,000 to reimburse her for the heavy expenses involved in these activities. From 1866 to 1868, while continuing her missing-persons work on a reduced scale, Clara Barton described her war experiences on some 300 lecture platforms throughout the North and West. Overcoming her timidity, she developed into an effective speaker. Her accounts were concrete, vivid, and enlivened by human touches. Generous toward others, she spoke with patriotism and humanitarianism. Not

only the soldiers whom she had helped and their grateful families, but the nation as a whole, acclaimed her as a great war heroine. Late in 1868, however, worn out and voiceless under the heavy strain of travel and speaking, she suffered a breakdown. On the advice of a physician she went to Europe in 1869 for rest and recuperation. In Switzerland, Clara Barton learned for the first time of the International Committee of the Red Cross, formed in 1863 at a convention in Geneva under the leadership of Jean Henri Dunant, a Swiss banker who had been appalled by the suffering and hunger of wounded soldiers on the battlefield of Solferino in 1859. The new organization had been given official status in 1864 when eleven governments ratified the Geneva Treaty. By its terms, the wounded soldiers of future wars, as well as the ambulance and sanitary personnel of both belligerent and noncombatant countries, were neutralized under the emblem of a red cross on a white background (the reverse of the Swiss flag). Learning that the American State Department had refused to recommend ratification of the treaty—despite the efforts of two Americans who had unofficially taken part in the organizing convention and of Henry W. Bellows, former president of the Sanitary Commission—Clara Barton determined to align her country with this effort to bring a modicum of humanity to the battlefield. This campaign, however, lay in the future. In 1870—71, during the Franco-Prussian War, at the invitation of Dr. Louis Appia, she took part in the work of the International Red Cross Committee. Under the patronage of the Grand Duchess of Baden, who became her warm friend, Miss Barton established in Strassburg a workshop in which needy women victims of the war could support themselves by sewing garments. She also distributed funds provided by American relief committees in Paris and other French cities. Suffering another breakdown, she spent much of 1872 in England, and the following year returned to America to live in semiretirement in Dansville, N.Y., first in a water-cure sanatorium and then in a house of her own. But with the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877, her interest in the Red Cross movement revived. Undismayed by governmental and public apathy, she initiated what was to prove a five-year campaign for the organization of an American Red Cross Society and the adherence of her country to the Geneva Treaty. Her friends in the International Committee gave her every encouragement. In a letter to President Hayes, the chief officer at Geneva commended her as "an able and de-

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voted assistant" well qualified to present the request for American affiliation. Spending increasing periods of time in Washington (her permanent home after 1884), she worked indefatigably, though often in a mood of profound discouragement, to persuade the State Department, the White House, and Congress to ratify the treaty. Miss Barton sought to enlighten the public as well, through her pamphlet The Red Cross of the Geneva Convention: What It Is (1878) and in newspaper articles and public talks. She made much of the need for organized relief in domestic disasters—yellow fever scourges, droughts, floods, fires, and railway accidents. This proposal, originally made by Dunant but as yet ignored in Europe, had more appeal for Americans than plans for relief in battle: few anticipated American involvement in war or felt any need to organize in advance such charities as might be offered to other nations in time of combat. Put off again and again in the nation's capital with the argument that the Monroe Doctrine forbade adherence to international engagements, Miss Barton still refused to give up. At last President Garfield promised to recommend American affiliation with the International Red Cross, but his assassination brought further delay. Finally, on Mar. 1, 1882, with the approval of Secretary of State James G. Blaine and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, President Arthur signed the Geneva Treaty. Two weeks later the Senate ratified it. Both at home and abroad, it was generally agreed that American adherence could not have been effected had it not been for Clara Barton's persistent campaign. Meanwhile, in May 1881, Miss Barton, with the help of a handful of associates, some of considerable prominence, had organized the American Association of the Red Cross. The constitution provided for an executive committee and a prominent "Board of Consultation" headed by the president of the United States. Clara Barton was chosen president. Though chartered in the District of Columbia in 1893 as the American National Red Cross, the organization was national in name only. Its relations with more or less autonomous state and local auxiliaries, some of which rivaled the central organization in strength and prestige, remained ambiguous. Only in 1900, after years of effort, did Miss Barton persuade Congress to issue a federal charter. Except for six months in 1883 when she served at the request of Gov. Benjamin Butler as superintendent of the Woman's Reformatory Prison at Sherbom, Mass., Clara Barton devoted all her energies between 1881 and 1904

to Red Cross work. During these years the national organization provided relief in twentyone disasters, domestic and foreign. These included a forest fire in Michigan in 1881; heavy floods on the Ohio and the Mississippi in 1884 and in Johnstown, Pa., five years later; the Russian famine of 1892; a devastating hurricane in the Sea Islands in 1893; a yellow fever epidemic in Florida; and the atrocities against the Armenians in 1896. Adamantly opposed to government subsidies for the Red Cross—her commitment to the voluntary principle made her fear official control—Miss Barton appealed to the public for funds at the time of crisis. Accepting no salary, she even used her own personal savings when these were needed. The organization was without endowment or a regular budget, Miss Barton personally managing all finances. Frugal in what she spent in an emergency, she expended approximately $2,000,000 for relief during her regime. No field operation was begun unless Clara Barton was convinced that the need and the desire for help were genuine. With a skeleton staff and a minimum of administration, she herself took the field with her trusted lieutenant, Dr. Julian B. Hubbell, in almost every emergency to which the Red Cross responded. Aware of the tendency of some philanthropic organizations to remain in operation longer than the situation warranted, she made a point of leaving when the main work was done. Although she cooperated with local relief groups and with government agencies when these were involved, she insisted on keeping tight rein over whatever was done. Her program consisted of getting as speedily as possible to the scene of the emergency with relief—food, clothing, medicine, materials for shelter. Anticipating a later emphasis, she was concerned with rehabilitation as well as with relief. The river boats she chartered during the Ohio and Mississippi floods carried not only emergency relief but also materials for rebuilding houses and barns, agricultural tools, kitchenware, and hay for starving livestock. Armenian victims of Turkish persecution were given sewing materials, seeds, and agricultural tools as well as food and medical aid. In the Galveston hurricane disaster of 1900 the Red Cross provided 1,500,000 strawberry plants to enable destitute farmers to resume the daily job of making a living. In contrast to the candid expressions of discouragement and frustration she confided to her diary, Miss Barton's outward behavior was marked by calmness, kindness, and efficiency. Despite advancing years and periods of ill health, her zest, tenacity, and ability to with-

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Barton stand hardships amazed those with whom she worked. Increasingly sensitive to the growing criticism of her methods, she professed to view it as the inevitable lot of one in her position. In recounting the story of Red Cross participation in the Johnstown flood, she wrote: "The paths of charity are over roadways of ashes; and he who would tread them must be prepared to meet opposition, misconstruction, jealousy, and calumny. Let his work be that of angels, still it will not satisfy all" ( W . E. Barton, II, 2 3 5 ) . During the Spanish-American War the Red Cross provided invaluable aid to Cuban civilians and to American soldiers. The utterly inadequate facilities of the quartermaster's corps and the medical corps opened a wide but difficult area for service. At the age of seventyseven, Clara Barton took to the field both before and during hostilities, riding mule wagons, as she had in the Civil War, on all but impassable roads under a tropical sun. The Red Cross distributed over 6,000 tons of provisions valued at half a million dollars at the low administrative cost of $11,706. But there was serious criticism, both from within the organization and from outside, of Miss Barton's management. Many felt that her place was at her desk in Washington rather than in the field preparing soup for soldiers or establishing orphan asylums for Cuban waifs. So ill-defined were relations between the national Red Cross organization and its nominal auxiliaries that much of the most useful Red Cross war work, particularly in the training of nurses, was wholly independent of the national office. That the federal charter granted by Congress in 1900 did not bring about the muchneeded reorganization was largely owing to Miss Barton's unwillingness and inability to adapt herself to new needs and conditions. She could not delegate authority. Any criticism of her informal method of handling finances, which was without benefit of acceptable bookkeeping or audits, seemed to her to impugn her integrity. T h e truth was that she clung to power when it was clear to all but her most devoted supporters that new methods and new leadership were required. In December 1902, confronted by an open rebellion fomented within her own board of directors by M A B E L THORP BOARDMAN, Miss Barton had herself declared lifetime president of the American Red Cross; after the crucial board meeting she wrote melodramatically in her diary: "[V]ictory after victory was won through the long, hard warring day, till at length . . . our foes were slain at our feet . . ." (Dulles, pp. 70— 7 1 ) . The internal division continued to widen,

however, and in 1903 President Roosevelt, upon appeal from Miss Boardman, withdrew the vital patronage of the federal government. At length in 1904 Miss Barton reluctantly resigned, crushed by what she regarded as lack of appreciation. Under the leadership of Mabel Boardman, the Red Cross rapidly regained the confidence of the government and the public. Clara Barton's last years were spent at her home in Glen Echo, Md., near Washington, to which she had moved in 1897 and which had served as Red Cross headquarters during the later years of her presidency. She interested herself in Christian Science and in spiritualism, appeared now and then in public, and kept up her voluminous diaries and correspondence. In 1906, acting upon a long-time concern, she organized the National First Aid Association of America in Boston. A feminist by lifelong conviction, she also enjoyed the friendship of leaders in the woman's rights movement and on many occasions made clear her support of suffrage and equal pay for equal work. Retaining her physical vigor, youthful appearance, and mental alertness to the end, she died in 1912 at the age of ninety-one. She was buried in North Oxford, Mass. Clara Barton's high personal reputation was little affected by the controversies of her final years with the Red Cross. She was, perhaps, better known and more frequently honored at home and abroad than any other American woman of her generation. The medals and honors she received from the rulers of Germany, Russia, Turkey, Serbia, and other countries gave her understandable, if somewhat naive, satisfaction. Frequently she represented the American Red Cross at meetings of the International Committee in Europe, where she was invariably acclaimed as the great American leader who had brought her country into the world Red Cross movement. The adoption by the international organization of the socalled American amendment, which provided for relief in peacetime catastrophes as well as in war, further testified to her reputation and influence. Whatever her failings, the honors were unquestionably merited. In a public career spanning over forty years, she had not only performed outstanding humanitarian services at home and abroad, but, above all, she had made the emblem and meaning of the Red Cross familiar to her countrymen. [The careers of few American women are as well documented as is that of Clara Barton. Her diaries (35 vols., 1866-1910) are in the Library of Congress, together with her correspondence, letter books, account books, notes, scrapbooks, clippings, and photographs. There are also some Barton pa-

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pers in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; and the national headquarters of the Am. Red Cross has personal as well as archival material. Contemporary criticisms are explicit in the Robert C. Ogden Papers in the Pa. Hist. Soc. Varying estimates by contemporaries can be found in Fitzhugh Lee's Cuba's Struggle Against Spain (1899), George Kennan's Campaigning in Cuba (1899), and Charles M. Pepper's Life-Work of Louis Klopsch (1911). Clara Barton's own books -The Story of My Childhood ( 1 9 0 7 ) ; The Red Cross ( 1898, later reprinted as The Red Cross in Peace and War); and A S tory of the Red Cross (1904)—are indispensable for an understanding of her character and labors. The biographies include the highly sympathetic Life of Clara Barton (2 vols., 1922) by a kinsman, the Rev. William E. Barton; Blanche Colton Williams, Clara Barton, Daughter of Destiny ( 1941 ) ; and Ishbel Ross, Angel of the Battlefield (1956). Of outstanding importance are Gustave R. Gaeddert's unpublished monographs covering the history of the Am. Red Cross from 1859 to 1918-well documented and not uncritical—and Mabel A. Elliot's "Am. Nat. Red Cross Disaster Services, 18811918." Foster Rhea Dulles, who made use of these and other unpublished monographs at Am. Red Cross headquarters, succeeds nicely in relating Clara Barton to the larger story in The Am. Red Cross: A Hist. (1950). See also L. P. Brockett and Mary C. Vaughan, Woman's Work in the Civil War (1867); Clara Barton and Dansville (privately published, 1966); biographical sketches by Richard J. Hinton in Mrs. E. R. Hanson, Our Women Workers (1882), and by Lucy Larcom in Our Famous Women (1884); and, on Miss Barton's feminism, Woman's Jour., Jan. 29, 1881, p. 33 (letter to Lucy Stone), and Aug. 20, 1898, p. 265.] MERLE CURTI

B A S C O M , Florence (July 14, 1 8 6 2 - J u n e 18, 1 9 4 5 ) , geologist, was born in Williamstown, Mass., the second daughter and youngest of John Bascom's three children by his second wife, E m m a Curtiss. The descendant of New England Calvinists, she traced her ancestry on her mother's side to Miles Standish of the Plymouth Colony; her father's family had settled in Massachusetts in 1634. John Bascom, a native of Genoa, N.Y., and a graduate of Williams College and Auburn Theological Seminary, had considered the Congregational ministry before becoming a professor of oratory and rhetoric at Williams. Undoubtedly a decisive influence upon his daughter's career, he was far more liberal than many of his contemporaries both in his social views and in his educational policies. As a religious leader he worked to reconcile science with traditional Christianity; and as an educator, both at Williams and the University of Wisconsin, of which he became president in 1874, he sought

to liberalize the college curriculum, gain research opportunities for the faculty, and secure equal education for women. H e supported the temperance and woman suffrage movements, in which his wife took an active part. E m m a Bascom, a former schoolteacher who had studied at the Patapsco Institute of A L M I R A HART LINCOLN P H E L P S , was a charter member and for some years an officer of the Association for the Advancement of Women. Florence was twelve when the family moved to Madison, Wis., and four years later she enrolled as a freshman in the university. Coeducation in those days was still young and precarious. T h e university had not admitted women as regular students until 1 8 7 2 ; men and women were still required to use the library on separate days; and women were not admitted to lectures if the classroom was already filled with male students, though one geology professor, with uncommon courtesy, seated his students alphabetically regardless of sex. T h e 1870's were also a time of hesitant experimentation with a traditionally rigid curriculum. This was encouraged by President Bascom, and his daughter was quick to take advantage of a more flexible choice of courses. Enrolling in the newly organized modern classical curriculum, which stressed German, French, and English literature, she was by her junior year turning toward the sciences. So unorthodox was her selection of courses that when she graduated in 1882 she received two bachelor's degrees, one in Letters and one in Arts. Following graduation she took further science courses and in 1884 received a Bachelor of Science degree. Miss Bascom's interests soon centered on geology. Two of the finest American geologists were then resident in Wisconsin: Thomas Chamberlin, director of the state geological survey, and Roland D. Irving, professor at the university. Irving influenced Miss Bascom not only directly, as her professor, but also through his student, assistant, and successor, the equally eminent geologist Charles R. Van Hise, who as assistant professor worked closely with her, particularly during the years ( 1 8 8 4 - 8 7 ) when she studied for a master's degree. During these years the state geological survey was completed and published and a division of glacial geology was established in the United States Geological Survey in Washington with Thomas Chamberlin as director. Undoubtedly these events drew Florence Bascom into the field of genetic petrography and structural geology and led her to choose " T h e Sheet Gabbros of Lake Superior" as the subject of her master's thesis.

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After receiving the A.M. degree in 1887, Miss Bascom accepted a teaching position at Rockford College in Illinois, which she held for two years. In 1891 she returned to graduate work, this time at the Johns Hopkins University as one of the few women permitted, without formal enrollment, to attend lectures and participate in classes. Despite her unofficial status, she was awarded a Ph.D.—that university's first to a woman—upon completing her studies in 1893. Her thesis, carried out under the direction of George H. Williams, was an analysis of formations in the South Mountain in Maryland which had formerly been regarded as sediments but which her study with the pétrographie microscope proved to be altered volcanics. In 1895, after two years of teaching at Ohio State University, Miss Bascom joined the science department of Bryn Mawr College, where she was to remain until her retirement in 1928. Appointed a reader in geology, she became a lecturer the next year, associate professor in 1903, and professor in 1906. Miss Bascom introduced geology at Bryn Mawr as an undergraduate major and ultimately created a graduate program of national and even international reputation, but such success did not come easily. Her appointment had been secured by Bryn Maw's first president, James Rhoads, who was deeply committed to establishing a strong science program at the college. He died that same year, however, and the new president, M . CAREY THOMAS, was loath to devote much money to what seemed to her a rather esoteric science for a women's college. When Miss Bascom arrived at Bryn Mawr she found the main floors of the science building already occupied by the physics, chemistry, and biology departments and had to make room for geology in the building's crowded storage floor. The college possessed no geological library, no specimens, and no laboratory equipment. Working toward what she hoped would become a research-oriented department, Miss Bascom bought, traded, and begged rock and mineral sections to build up a collection; in 1899 she acquired a pétrographie microscope and began teaching petrography. Her classes were always popular, especially her more advanced courses, and geology quickly attracted sufficient students to become a major. When President Thomas at this point reduced it to a science elective, Miss Bascom submitted her resignation; the trustees of the college, alarmed at the prospect of losing her, restored the major. Although deeply involved in teaching, Miss Bascom continued the active research program

she had begun at Wisconsin and continued at Hopkins. In 1896 she was appointed assistant geologist with the United States Geological Survey, the first woman to receive such an appointment; she was later promoted to geologist and assigned the Mid-Atlantic Piedmont as her area of investigation. For years she spent her summers climbing through these mountains on horseback or with horse and buggy, returning in the winter to her laboratory to evaluate specimens and to write her reports. The results of this work, her most important contribution as a geologist, were published in the United States Geological Survey Folios for Philadelphia (1909), Trenton (1909), and Elkton-Wilmington (1920), and in two bulletins, Quakertown-Doylestown (1931) and Honeybrook-Phoenixville (1938). Miss Bascom was an associate editor of the American Geologist from 1896 to 1905. The first woman elected a fellow of the Geological Society of America (in 1894), she was named a councilor in 1924 and a vice-president in 1930. She was also a member of the National Research Council and of the Geophysical Union. Miss Bascom had planned to retire to her farm on Hoosac Mountain in western Massachusetts, where she vacationed each year with her collie and riding horse; but true to her character, she did not lay aside her work until her health failed. She died in the Northampton (Mass.) State Hospital at the age of eighty-two, of a cerebral hemorrhage, and was buried in the Williams College Cemetery in Williamstown. [No collection of Miss Bascom's papers exists; the notebooks of her field work while at Bryn Mawr are in the Dept. of Geology there. The archives of the Univ. of Wis. contain a transcript of her courses and ( in the Regents' files ) the title of her master's thesis. Useful biographical accounts appear in: Science, Sept. 28, 1945 (by Ida H. Ogilvie); Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bull., Nov. 1945 (by Miss Ogilvie and by Howard L. Gray); and in the Faculty Minutes, Bryn Mawr College, Mar. 25, 1946, pp. 2090-91. See also Miss Bascom's listing in Am. Men of Science, 1st through 7th editions; and the sketch of her mother in Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893). Miss Bascom's reminiscences of her youth in Madison may be found in the Wis. Mag. of Hist., Mar. 1925. For this period see also John Bascom, Things Learned by Living (1913), and the sketch of Bascom in the Diet. Am. Biog. For background material on her education see Merle Curti and Vemon Carstensen, The Univ. of Wis., 1848-1925 (1949); and John C. French, A Hist, of the Univ. Founded by Johns Hopkins (1946). Cornelia Meigs discusses Miss Bascom's career at Bryn Mawr in What Makes a College?

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Bateham

(1956). Death record from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics.] C A R R O L L S.

ROSENBERG

BATEHAM, Josephine Abiah Penfield Cushman (Nov. 1, 1829-Mar. 15, 1901), temperance and Sabbatarian reformer, was born in Alden, N.Y., the daughter of Anson and Minerva (Dayton) Penfield. In 1834 the family moved to Oberlin, Ohio, where Penfield was a mechanic and a manufacturer of "edge tools." Four years later he was killed in a machinery accident, leaving his wife, two daughters, and four sons. Mrs. Penfield in 1844 was married to the Rev. Henry Cowles, professor of Greek and Latin and the literature of the Old Testament at Oberlin Collegiate Institute (Oberlin College), whose first wife had died late in 1843. This union brought together the five children of Professor Cowles and the four children of Mrs. Penfield, a son and daughter having died since their father's death. The Cowles family lived comfortably and pleasantly in close association with Oberlin College, Cowles as professor, trustee, and editor (1844-62) of the Oberlin Evangelist, his wife as a contributor to the Evangelist and as a member of the "Female Board of Managers," a group of faculty wives responsible for governing the college's female department. Josephine Penfield herself attended Oberlin. For a year after her graduation in 1847 she taught school locally until her marriage, on July 20, 1848, to the Rev. Richards Cushman of South Attleboro, Mass., a recent graduate of the Oberlin theological seminary. The couple left immediately for missionary work in Haiti; but after eleven months' service Cushman died. Returning to Oberlin, Mrs. Cushman soon remarried; on Sept. 27, 1850, she became the wife of Michael Boyd Bateham, founder (1845), editor, and publisher of the Ohio Cultivator at Columbus and for nearly forty years one of the most influential figures in Ohio agriculture and horticulture. The new Mrs. Bateham, who had already contributed to the Oberlin Evangelist, now became editor of the ladies' department of the Cultivator and also wrote numerous articles on woman's rights, education, peace, health, exercise, dress, housekeeping, home training of children, flower gardening, and other subjects. Though Bateham sold the Ohio Cultivator at the end of 1855 to go into the nursery business in Columbus, he and his wife continued to contribute to the magazine, which merged with the Ohio Farmer (Cleveland) in 1864. Josephine Bateham and her husband were active in some of the reform movements that

found enthusiastic support and leadership at Oberlin College. Both participated in the Ohio State Peace Society, organized in Columbus in 1850, and both were sent as delegates to the international peace congress in London in 1851, although, since the British barred women representatives, Mrs. Bateham had to watch the proceedings from the gallery. The couple also joined the temperance movement. In 1853 Mrs. Bateham was president of the State Temperance Society of the Women of Ohio, which had been formed that January at a convention presided over by her mother. The Batehams moved in 1864 to Painesville, Ohio, where they ran a fruit farm, continued their writings for agricultural and horticultural papers, and reared their seven children: Anson P., Minerva (Minnie) D., Josephine Boyd, Lizzie L., Sarah Cushman, Henry C., and Charles S. Bateham. When the women's temperance crusade swept through Ohio in 1874, Mrs. Bateham became its leader in Painesville. She subsequently took part in the state and national Woman's Christian Temperance Union, becoming increasingly active after her husband's death in 1880. From 1884 to 1896 she served as superintendent of the national W.C.T.U.'s Department for the Suppression of Sabbath Desecration. She traveled widely—in one year, reportedly, visiting nearly every state and the Hawaiian Islands and giving some 300 lectures—and published many leaflets and a Sabbath Observance Manual (1892). In 1888 Senator Henry W. Blair, a friend of temperance, introduced a Sunday Rest bill which would have prohibited all secular work and amusements in federal territory and barred the movement of mail or interstate commerce on the Sabbath. Mrs. Bateham testified at Senate hearings in behalf of this measure, and, in cooperation with other organizations, the W.C.T.U. circulated a mammoth petition in support of the bill, which, however, never reached a vote. The Union did succeed in tacking a Sunday closing requirement onto a Congressional grant to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, though this provision was subsequently circumvented. In her later years Mrs. Bateham lived in Asheville, N.C. (1890-92); with her daughter Sarah in Williamsburg, Ky. (1892-97); and, from 1897, in Norwalk, Ohio, where another daughter and son lived. She was a handsome woman, with finely molded features. Recognized as a natural leader and organizer, she was loved and respected for her "kindness of heart" and her "sociability." Earlier a member of the Congregational Church, she later became a Presbyterian. She died in Oberlin at

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Bateman the age of seventy-one and was buried in Painesville. [Robert S. Fletcher, A Hist, of Oberlin College (2 vols., 1943); Albert L. Demaree, The Am. Agricultural Press, 1819-1860 (1941); In Memoriam, Rev. Henry Cowles, D.D. (1883); James H. Fairchild, In Memoriam, Mrs. Minerva Dayton Penfield Cowles (1880?); [Minerva D. P. Cowles], Grace Victorious; or, the Memoir of Helen M. Cowles (1856), on Mrs. Bateham's foster sister, to whom she was very close; Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893); Samuel Unger, "A Hist, of the Nat. Woman's Christian Temperance Union" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State Univ., 1933), pp. 156-62; Daily Reflector (Norwalk, Ohio), Mar. 15, 1901; Oberlin Evangelist, Sept. 27, 1848, and July 18, 1849; Ohio Farmer (Cleveland), Aug. 14, 1880; files of the Ohio Cultivator, 1845-64; General Catalogue of Oberlin College, 1833-1908 (1909); alumni records, Oberlin College. The names of the Bateham children are given in the 1870 federal census schedules for Painesville.] JAMES H. RODABAUGH

BATEMAN, Kate Josephine (Oct. 7, 1842Apr. 8, 1917), actress, was born at Baltimore, Md., into a talented theatrical family. Particularly influential in her life was her mother, Sidney Frances Cowell Bateman (Mar 29, 1823-Jan. 13, 1881), actress, playwright, and manager. Mrs. Bateman was the daughter of Joe Cowell, a well-known English low comedian, by his marriage to Frances Sheppard not long after his arrival in America in 1821; she was born either in New York or in New Jersey. On Nov. 10, 1839, two years after beginning her acting career, she was married to a fellow player, Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman (18121875), a native of Baltimore. Kate was the second (possibly third) of at least six children and the oldest of the Batemans' four daughters: Kate, Ellen, Virginia, and Isabel. Bateman, a mediocre actor but an excellent manager, was a man of iron will and ruthless determination; aided by his wife, he devoted his entire life to exploiting the theatrical talents of his daughters. Kate began her stage career at the age of four or five, appearing with her sister Ellen (1844-1936) in Louisville, Ky., in Thomas Morton's Children in the Wood. The two little girls performed extensively thereafter in the Middle West and East. Their first New York engagement took place at the Broadway Theatre on Dec. 10, 1849, with a repertoire that included Act V of Richard III, the trial scene of The Merchant of Venice, Bombastes Furioso, and selections from Macbeth, not to mention comical afterpieces like The Spoiled Child

and The Swiss Cottage. Child prodigies were something of a vogue at the time. P. T. Barnum thought so much of the popular appeal of the Bateman sisters that he disbursed the munificent salary of $1,000 a week for their appearance at his Museum and in 1851 took them on a tour of the British Isles, where they were received with wild acclaim; they made their bow at St. James's Theatre, London, on Aug. 23. In September 1852 they were back in New York at the Astor Theatre. They then proceeded on a long tour of America, which included a successful season in San Francisco and the California interior (April—November 1854). Here they added to their regular repertoire Young America, a sentimental piece about a newsboy, understood to have been written by Mrs. Bateman. Kate and her sister retired as child actresses in 1856. That year marked the production of Mrs. Bateman's most important play, a social satire on life in New York entitled Self, performed on June 18 in St. Louis, Mo., where her husband was managing a theatre. In 1859 he moved his family to New York City. There Mrs. Bateman's next play opened that same year at Wallack's Theatre: Geraldine, or, Love's Victory, a tragedy, with MATILDA HERON in the principal role. On Mar. 19, 1860, Kate Bateman, now sixteen, returned to the stage at the Winter Garden, New York, in her mother's dramatization of Longfellow's Evangeline. She was supported by an excellent cast headed by Joseph Jefferson. Well launched in her new stardom, Kate was graduated to the usual romantic roles of Julia in The Hunchback, Shakespeare's Juliet, Pauline in The Lady of Lyons, and Bianca in Fazio, often playing opposite the popular Edwin Adams. Her greatest dramatic triumph came a few years later in the role of the Jewess in Leah the Forsaken, adapted by the fledgling playwright Augustin Daly from the German of Salomon H. von Mosenthal's Deborah. Again she was supported by a superior cast, including J. W. Wallack, Jr., Edwin Adams, and Mrs. Henrietta Chanfrau. After first appearing in Boston (Dec. 8, 1862), the play opened at Niblo's Garden, New York, on Jan. 19, 1863, where it proved a great success, despite the acerb attacks of Daly's fellow dramatic critics. For years Kate Bateman was identified with the emotional role of Leah and the bloodcurdling curse she hurled at her faithless Christian lover. Later in 1863 the play began a long run at the Adelphi Theatre, London, and in the same vehicle Kate returned to Niblo's Garden in New York in January 1866. After her marriage (Oct. 13, 1866) to George Crowe, a phy-

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sician, son of the English historian and novelist Eyre Evans Crowe, she established her residence more or less permanently in London. She revived Leah at the Haymarket in 1868 and later appeared in Mary Warner, a new play by the English playwright Tom Taylor, both in England and in America. During these years the rest of the family remained active in the theatre, save for Ellen, who had retired permanently from the stage after her marriage to Claude Greppo in 1860. The indefatigable H. L. Bateman, having introduced opéra-bouffe to New York in 1867 with Offenbach's La Grande Duchesse, moved to England and turned his attention to the career of his youngest daughter, Isabel ( 1854— 1934). Mainly for her advancement, he took over the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1871, where on Sept. 11 she made her debut in Fanchette; or The Will o the Wisp, her mother's adaptation from the German Die Grille. The Lyceum, however, did not prosper until some two months later when, on the insistence of Henry Irving, a relatively unknown actor in his company, Bateman put on The Bells, a melodramatic piece which brought fame and fortune to both Irving and his manager. Isabel Bateman became Irving's leading lady in productions of Richelieu, Charles I, and Hamlet. After Bateman died of a heart attack on Mar. 22, 1875, Mrs. Bateman took over management of the Lyceum. Later the same year Kate Bateman played Lady Macbeth to Irving's Macbeth. Irving appeared in Alfred Tennyson's Queen Mary (Apr. 18, 1876) with three Bateman sisters in the cast—Kate, Virginia (under the name "Virginia Francis"), and Isabel—and the next year Kate and Isabel supported him in Richard III. Dissatisfied with the Bateman control, however, Irving in 1878 acquired the Lyceum lease from Mrs. Bateman, who then proceeded to renovate and reopen the old Sadler's Wells Theatre, which she managed until her death. Her first production, in October 1879, was a revival of Rob Roy, with Kate as Helen Macgregor. This new venture did not prosper, but some interest attaches to Mrs. Bateman's presentation of Joaquin Miller's The Danites there with an entire American company, headed by Mr. and Mrs. McKee Rankin. Sidney Bateman's long theatrical career ended with her death in London from pneumonia in January 1881. A facial disfigurement caused by illness forced Kate Bateman's retirement from the stage for some years, but she played in Henry James' The American in London in 1891, and the next year she opened a school of acting. Later stage appearances included David

(1892), Colonel Newcome (1906), Euripides' Medea (1907), and The Younger Generation (1912). She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in London in 1917 and was buried in Hendon Churchyard after a Gregorian mass at St. Cuthbert's, Kensington. The most capable of the Bateman daughters, Kate was an emotional actress of some stature, though her acting was sometimes described as artificial and overdramatic. William Winter said of her that she was "austere, intellectual, and fierce, and at the same time . . . cold." The London Times obituary noted that her defects "were slight in comparison with the force of passion and emotion which caused her Leah and Medea to stand out so prominently among the best stagecreations of her time." The Bateman story in the theatre did not stop with Kate's death. Her daughter, Sidney Crowe, her son-in-law, and her granddaughter, Leah Bateman Hunter, were all actors. The son of Ellen, Francis Greppo, and his wife also went on the stage. Isabel Bateman retired from the theatre in 1898 to join an Anglican sisterhood, the Community of St. Mary the Virgin, of which she became Reverend Mother General. Bateman's third daughter, Virginia, married an actor-manager, Edward Compton, and was leading lady in her husband's Compton Comedy Company. One son, Compton Mackenzie, became a novelist, but four of Virginia's other children followed acting careers; the best known of these, Fay Compton, was a leading lady in several Sir James Barrie plays and acted Ophelia to the Hamlet of John Barrymore and Sir John Gielgud. [There is no biography of Kate Bateman except for a thin and early pamphlet written by Augustin Daly as press agent for the Batemans and entitled A Memoir of Miss Bateman; Being a Brief Chronicle of the Early Successes and Later Triumphs of the Great American Tragic Artiste (1863). Contemporary information about the Cowell and Bateman families appears in Joe Cowell, Thirty Years Passed among Players in England and America (1844); Noah M. Ludlow, Dramatic Life as I Found It (1880); Walter M. Leman, Memories of an Old Actor (1886); and T. Allston Brown, Hist, of the Am. Stage (1870). Kate Bateman's New York performances are recorded in Joseph Ireland, Records of the N.Y. Stage (1867), and George C. D. Odell, Annah of the N.Y. Stage, vols. V-VIII (1931-36). For an account of the Batemans in California see George R. MacMinn, The Theater of the Golden Era in Calif. ( 1941 ). References to Kate Bateman's later career may be found in Joseph Francis Daly, The Life of Augustin Daly (1917); Marvin Felheim, The Theater of Augustin Daly (1956); William Winter, Brief Chronicles (1889), The Wallet of Time (1913), and Vagrant Memories (1915); H. Barton Baker,

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Bateman Hist, of the London Stage and Its Famous Players (1904); and Austin Brereton, The Life of Henry Irving ( 1908 ). Mrs. Sidney Bateman's play Self; a Comedy in Three Acts was published in 1856. Numerous clippings, including obituaries, are available in the Harvard Theatre Collection, and a genealogical table of the Bateman family appears in John Parker, Who's Who in the Theatre (5th ed., 1925). The Memoir of Miss Bateman, above, and T. Allston Brown's Hist, of the Am. Stage give her year of birth as 1843. William Winter's sketch in Eminent Women of the Age (1869), p. 468, makes it 1842, and this seems confirmed by her death record (Gen. Register Office, London), which gives her age at death as 74.] EDMOND M .

BATEMAN, Sidney Frances Cowell. See MAN, Kate Josephine.

CAGEY BATE-

BATES, Blanche Lyon (Aug. 25, 1873-Dec. 25, 1941), actress, was born in Portland, Oreg., where her parents were then acting with a traveling stock company. Her mother, Eliza Wren, had left her home in Buffalo, N.Y., at seventeen to join a theatrical company in Richmond, Va. There she met Francis Marion Bates, a rising young actor from Baltimore. Married soon afterward, they played stock in Mobile, Ala., during the Civil War and then traveled through the West, settling in San Francisco, where Bates managed a stock company and his wife played the leading lady. When, however, he attempted to open a chain of stock companies in the Northwest, Bates lost his San Francisco theatre. At this juncture his first child, Blanche, was born, and in search of a fortune Bates took his family to Australia. His death seven years later left his dependents penniless, and Mrs. Bates brought her two young daughters home to San Francisco. Here Blanche received an education in the public schools. Although Mrs. Bates was prominent in the city's theatrical life, her daughter at first showed no inclination for the stage. After two years as a kindergarten teacher, however, she turned to acting, making her first appearance in 1894 in a benefit performance for an old friend of her mother, L. R. Stockwell, a popular theatre manager. Soon she became a serious member of a local stock company, playing a variety of roles. She added another role by marrying Milton F. Davis, a cavalry lieutenant, but the union lasted only four weeks. "At this period of my life," she later said, "I seem to have had a fad for brief engagements." She then decided to go to the East to pursue her career, but her hearty selfconfidence and small store of money proved an inadequate defense against the cold reception of New York theatre managers, and after

three weeks she accepted an offer from T. Daniel Frawley, whom she had known in California with the Stockwell Company, to become the leading lady in a company he and James Neill were planning for Denver. Playing stock throughout the West over the next three years gave Blanche Bates the experience and recognition she needed. By 1897 she felt secure enough to again tackle the nation's theatre capital, and here, early in 1898, she obtained a place in Augustin Daly's company at $35 a week. With Daly's polished actors she gained the experience she sought; nevertheless, in February 1899 she resigned after two performances of The Great Ruby. To the press she explained that "the atmosphere was not congenial," meaning that she disliked Daly's autocratic manner; it was also rumored that Daly's leading lady, ADA R E H A N , was jealous of her. Under other auspices, Miss Bates played additional roles in 1899. As Miladi in The Musketeers she scored so great a success that one New York newspaper reported that the producers, Liebler & Company, had signed her to a five-year contract at the startling salary of $20,000 a year. More important, as Hannah Jacobs in Israel Zangwill's Children of the Ghetto she caught the attention of David Belasco. Belasco quickly cast her as Cora, a hosiery model, in his farce Naughty Anthony (January 1900), and when he supplemented this ineffectual comedy with a one-act afterpiece, he gave Blanche Bates her first historic role. As Cho-Cho-San, the original Madame Butterfly —a role later immortalized in Puccini's operashe won national fame. With a five-year contract from Belasco, she next appeared as Cigarette in Under Two Flags, a dramatization of Ouida's romance of the French Foreign Legion. After a brilliant season and a prosperous tour, she played Yo-san in The Darling of the Gods (December 1902), a full-length Japanese drama by Belasco and John Luther Long, the author of the short story on which Belasco had based Madame Butterfly. A successful New York season and two years of touring engagements went by before Blanche Bates appeared in her next play, The Girl of the Golden West (November 1905). A sentimental melodrama, this was the most stunning of Belasco's spectacular creations. But its three years of unparalleled success bred discontent in the star, who grew restive after playing only three roles in some eight years. With The Fighting Hope and Nobody's Widow Belasco supplied her with new parts, but neither play had the fascination of the wizard's earlier efforts. When, on Nov. 28, 1912, she was mar-

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Bates ried to George Creel, a Denver newspaper editor, later chairman of the Committee on Public Information in World War I, her strained relationship with her employer finally ended. After leaving Belasco's management she remained a competent actress, but the magic he spun around his stage and his stars no longer enveloped her. She gave her family and home life her devoted attention, happy to prove to the public that maternal cares and a career did not conflict. Even while unmarried she had avoided the sophisticated life commonly associated with actresses, abjuring late suppers and social gatherings and devoting much of her time to her seventy-seven-acre farm near Ossining, N.Y., especially to the horses she took such delight in raising. She continued to act for fourteen years, preserving her stellar rank, whether in melodrama, such as Witness for the Defense (1913), costume drama, such as Philip Moeller's Molière (1919), or domestic drama, such as The Famous Mrs. Fair (1919) and Mrs. Partridge Presents (1925). In 1926 she retired from the stage to live with her husband in San Francisco, acting only twice thereafter, in supporting roles in 1933. In 1941, at sixty-eight, she died at her home in San Francisco of a stroke; following cremation, her ashes were placed at nearby Mount Olivet Memorial Park. She was survived by her husband and their two children, Frances Virginia (Creel) Lubliner and George Bates Creel. When Belasco created for her the role of Minnie Smith, the Girl of the Golden West, he had instinctively grasped the means of exploiting his protégée's qualities to the fullest, for all who wrote of Blanche Bates described her determination, energy, magnetism, spontaneity, beauty, and sympathy. William Winter of the New York Tribune spoke for the public at large when he hailed her Yo-san—for him her greatest success—as "an entirely lovely image of ardent, innocent, ingenuous, noble womanhood." In the theatre these traits became the tools of her success. She believed the best drama was that closest to real life and strove to portray emotions in a truthful way. Depending upon her playwright-director to authenticate the scene, the story, and the character, she gave it all the life she could. Within the simple premise of popular theatre, the formula could not fail. [No satisfactory account of Blanche Bates' life and career has been published. Who's Who in the Theatre (9th ed., 1939) lists the numerous roles she played. For her obituary, somewhat erroneous, see N.Y. Times, Dec. 26, 1941. The most copious material relating to her can be found in three volumes of the Robinson Locke Scrapbooks and in

Bates other, unclassified matter in the Theatre Collection, N.Y. Public Library at Lincoln Center. H. L. Kleinfield, "The Theatrical Career of David Belasco" ( unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard Univ., 1956), pp. 273-303, analyzes the plays in which she won her major triumphs.] H . L.

KLEINFIELD

BATES, Katharine Lee (Aug. 12, 1859-Mar. 28, 1929), poet, professor of English, and author of "America the Beautiful," was born in Falmouth, Mass., the fifth child and second daughter of the Rev. William and Cornelia Frances (Lee) Bates. On her father's side she was descended from Clement Bates of Kent, England, who had settled in Hingham, Mass., in 1635; her mother's family was of English and Irish descent. William Bates, a Congregational minister, had attended Middlebury College, of which his father, the Rev. Joshua Bates, was president, and Andover Theological Seminary; his wife, who came from Northampton, Mass., was a graduate of Mount Holyoke Seminary. When Katharine was a month old her father died, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. The two surviving brothers were forced to go early to work, but Katharine, the gifted youngest, received the best education then available to women. The family moved to Wellesley (then Grantville), Mass., and Katharine, after graduating from both the Wellesley and the nearby Newton high schools, entered the recently founded Wellesley College, from which she received the B.A. degree in 1880. After a year of teaching at the Natick (Mass.) High School and four years at Dana Hall, a preparatory school in Wellesley, she was called to her alma mater as instructor in English literature. In 1888 she was promoted to the rank of associate professor, and in 1891, after a year of study at Oxford and the degree of M.A. conferred that year by Wellesley, she became professor and permanent head of her department. The remainder of her life was spent in service to the college. Her publications were many and varied, including travel books, children's tales, and textbooks, undertaken to supplement her slender salary. Her one venture into rigorous scholarship was her able edition (1917) of two plays by Thomas Heywood, Fair Maid of the West and A Woman Killed with Kindness. The center of her inner life, however, was poetry, to which she devoted her creative energies throughout her life. The New England poets were her early models. While she was still an undergraduate the Atlantic Monthly published her poem "Sleep," and when, soon afterward, the college literary club visited

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Longfellow, the great poet singled her out to speak approvingly of it. Six volumes of her verse appeared in her lifetime, and two, America the Dream and Selected Poems, were published posthumously in 1930. Her devotion to poetry made her the friend of all poets, particularly young ones, who turned to her for criticism and encouragement. She was a founder of the New England Poetry Club in 1915 and one of its presidents. Her colleague Vida D. Scudder (d. 1954) wrote of her: "Hers was a singing soul; I can hardly imagine what it must be like so to have one's inner consciousness constantly ripple, as hers must have done, in melody." Her best-known poem, "America the Beautiful," which made her nationally famous, was written in Colorado in the summer of 1893, inspired by the view from the top of Pikes Peak. It was laid aside for two years, then published in the Congregationalist on July 4, 1895. A revised version appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript on Nov. 19, 1904. It struck an immediate response in American hearts and soon became an unofficial national anthem. Miss Bates divined that its adoption was "clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood." Intense idealism and stern rectitude combined in Katharine Lee Bates with great human warmth. Her unwieldy body and slow movements were in Falstaffian contrast with her agile, almost legendary, wit. Penetrating dark eyes dominated her round, benevolent face, and her muffled contralto voice broke often into infectious chuckles. Her religion, though deep, was private. Since she could not achieve certainty of faith she joined no church. A number of Katharine Bates' Wellesley colleagues, among them her close friend K A T H A R I N E C O M A N , were active in social reform movements, and some of their enthusiasm inevitably infected her. Thus she joined the Consumers' League and the American Association for Labor Legislation and helped Vida Scudder formulate plans for the College Settlements Association in 1887. The Wellesley English department, however, was always her main interest. Under her direction an integrated program of studies was developed and a distinguished group of instructors assembled. Because of declining health she gave up administrative duties in 1920, and in 1925 retired. Wellesley gave her the honorary degree of LL.D. at her last commencement. Her chronically weak heart could not survive a bout with pneumonia, of which she died, at

her Wellesley home, in her seventieth year. She was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery, Falmouth, Mass.; a tablet to her memory stands in Boston's Fenway. Her fame as a poet rests chiefly on her "America the Beautiful." Her achievement as an educator lay in her clear vision that literature must be taught neither as an adjunct to philology nor as an exercise in dilettante "appreciation" but as our chief revealer of humane values. She and her able colleagues were among the pioneers who so taught it. [Dorothy Burgess, Dream and Deed: The Story of Katharine Lee Bates (1952), based on family documents, diaries, and letters owned by the author, her niece; Miss Bates' own Autobiography in Brief and account of "America the Beautiful" (privately printed ) ; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914—15; Florence Converse. Wellesley College (1939); Alice P. Hackett, Wellesley (1949); Vida D. Scudder, On Journey (1937); records of Wellesley College; accounts and memories of friends and colleagues.] KATHARINE C. BALDERSTON

BAYER, Adèle Parmentier (July 1, 1814-Jan. 22, 1892), pioneer Catholic welfare worker, was born in Enghien, Belgium, the eldest of five children, of whom only two lived to maturity. Her parents, André (later Andrew) and Sylvia Marie (Parmentier) Parmentier, were distant cousins with aristocratic Walloon connections. In 1824 they came to the United States and settled in Brooklyn, N.Y., where Parmentier, a well-known horticulturist, purchased a twenty-five-acre tract and laid out his own botanic garden, designed to exemplify his belief in the superiority of a naturalistic treatment in landscaping. Though he died in 1830, he is credited by Andrew Jackson Downing with having had more influence on landscape gardening in the United States than any other man of his time. In the absence of a Catholic school, Adèle was privately educated. Fluent in German, Italian, Spanish, and English as well as French, she became the "sprightly" assistant and interpreter for her father. Following his untimely death, she assisted her mother in administering the botanic garden until its sale two years later; and she long retained an interest in horticulture. From her earliest years, Adèle Parmentier was influenced by her devoutly Catholic surroundings. The family home on Bridge Street served as a way station for Catholic pioneers. Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, the Jesuit missionary to the Indians, Mother Theodore Guérin, foundress of a girls' academy at St.Mary-of-the-Woods, Ind., and Father Edwin

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Sorin, founder of Notre Dame University, were among the religious who benefited from her family's hospitality and financial support. Adèle's marriage on Sept. 8, 1841, to Edward Bayer, a German-born merchant and later a director of the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank of New York, reinforced her religious zeal. They were married in St. Paul's Church in the first nuptial mass to be celebrated in Brooklyn. Together, in the later 1840's, the Parmentiers and the Bayers helped to found "Vineland," a Catholic colony in the Sylco Mountains of southeastern Tennessee, designed apparently along idealistic communitarian lines, with some twenty settlers drawn from France, Germany, and Italy. But Vineland soon lost its religious unity, and the dislocations of the Civil War led to its dissolution. In the course of the 1850's the childless Mrs. Bayer sought personal fulfillment in religious work. She began ministering to the needs of merchant seamen—many of them foreigners—in Brooklyn and New York hospitals, where her familiarity with several languages made her welcome. Her most memorable achievement, however, was among naval rather than merchant seamen. Stirred by the Civil War, she began to visit the Brooklyn Navy Yard and other points of embarkation, where she acquired a considerable following among the sailors, many of whom were Catholics. Her heavy bag laden with scapulars, rosaries, prayer books, and holy water marked her as a zealous Catholic missionary, but she became known as well for her welfare work. Distressed by the spendthrift habits of her adopted sons, Mrs. Bayer established a private allotment system and became their banker and confidante, holding their pay for safekeeping and sending regular installments, if desired, to their families. She corresponded with hundreds of sailors, both Catholic and non-Catholic, throughout the world, informing them of the state of their accounts and the disbursements she had made. But she never let pass an opportunity to proselytize. At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, her efforts led to the regular celebration of Sunday mass and, it is said, to the appointment in 1888 of the first Roman Catholic chaplain by the United States Navy. When she died four years later, a requiem mass was celebrated in her honor on the ship Vermont in the Navy Yard. She was buried (as was her husband on his death in 1894) in the family vault behind St. Paul's Church, Brooklyn. On Oct. 17, 1925, the ParmentierBayer Centenary Commission, of which Herbert Hoover and Mayor John F. Hylan of New York were members, erected a tablet in the

Navy Yard to "the Guardian Angel of the Sailors," Madame Bayer. [Sister Mary James Lowery, S.S.J., Model Lay Activity: The Brooklyn Parmentier Family ( 1940), an M.A. thesis at St. John's Univ.; Thomas F. Meehan, "Andrew Parmentier, Horticulturalist, and His Daughter, Madame Bayer," U.S. Catholic Hist. Soc., Hist. Records and Studies, Dec. 1904 (with portrait), a sympathetic study by a Catholic historian who knew her personally; Ben H. McClary and LeRoy P. Graf, eds., " 'Vineland' in Tenn., 1852: The Journal of Rosine Parmentier," East Tenn. Hist. Soc., Publications, no. 31 ( 1 9 5 9 ) , pp. 95-111. There is an article on Andrew Parmentier in the Diet. Am. Biog., Suppl. I. Family papers and related material are deposited in the Hall of Records, Brooklyn, N.Y.] B E N HARRIS M C C L A R Y

BAYES, Nora (1880?-Mar. 19, 1928), musical comedy and vaudeville singer, popular in America and England during the first quarter of the twentieth century, was the daughter of German Jewish parents, Elias and Rachel (Miller) Goldberg. Her birthplace is variously listed as Milwaukee, Chicago, and Los Angeles; according to her own account, for which no confirmation has been found, she was bom and spent her first eighteen years in Joliet, 111. Originally named Dora, she used Leonora, Eleanor, Nora, and even Elinore as her first name at various stages of her career. Little is known about her background and early life. In 1899-1900 she was apparently living in Joliet with her first husband, Otto Gressing, an undertaker. Petite, sparklingeyed, and fun-loving, she ventured into Chicago's theatrical world, where, according to one account, she started her career as a vaudeville singer at Hopkins' Theatre and at the old Chicago Opera House (Green Book Magazine, April 1914). It seems likely that not long after this she sang at the Olympic and at the Hyde and Behman theatres in that city, but whether this was before or after her appearance on the variety stage and with the Fischer Stock Company in San Francisco, or whether she was then using her maiden name of Goldberg or that of Nora Bayes—which she is said to have adopted along with Irish ballads—is not clear. At any rate, she was soon on the regular vaudeville circuit, and at Percy Williams' Orpheum Theatre in Brooklyn, N.Y., she turned Harry von Tilzer's ballad "Down Where the Würzburger Flows" (written in 1902) into a hit. When she opened at the Palace Theatre in London in November 1905 this song was part of her repertoire. Not long after her return to the United States, Florenz Ziegfeld, always on the alert

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for new talent, put her into his first Follies in 1907 and made her a star. By the next year she had divorced Gressing, was married to Jack Norworth, a song-and-dance man, and had teamed up with him to score a sensation in the Follies of 1908, especially with the song "Shine On, Harvest Moon," which they wrote together. Thereafter she bounced in and out of the Follies. When she deserted the 1909 show to appear under the management of Lew Fields in The Jolly Bachelors (January 1910), in which she sang "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?" Ziegfeld served her with an injunction and for some months she was idle; but when she returned to vaudeville she commanded a salary of $2,500 a week. In April 1911 she starred with Norworth in Little Miss Fixit, and in November 1912 they opened at Weber and Fields' new Music Hall in a double bill, the musical play Roly-Poly and the burlesque Without the Law, in which they introduced the song "When It's Apple Blossom Time in Normandy." By March of the following year they were divorced and Miss Bayes had married her new partner, Harry Clarke (real name, Prince); two years later that marriage also ended in divorce. As "The Greatest Single Woman Singing Comedienne in the World," she began a thirty-week vaudeville tour at the Palace Theatre in New York in September 1914. When she encountered difficulty with her booking office in 1917, she put on a twohour entertainment of her own in which she was "a whole cabaret show in herself" (Life, May 17, 1917) and in which she popularized, at his request, George M. Cohan's "Over There." In October of the next year she opened at the Broadhurst Theatre, New York, in the musical play Ladies First, which was transferred the following January to the Nora Bayes Roof atop the 44th Street Theatre before going on tour. George Gershwin accompanied her on the piano as she introduced the first song he wrote in collaboration with his brother Ira, "The Real American Folk Song."

lived extravagantly and generously, and despite repeated bookings she died insolvent. She was given a Christian Science funeral. After Friedland's death in 1946, they were buried together at Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City. One of the earliest of the low, husky contraltos so popular in the period following World War I, Nora Bayes had a flair for dramatizing a song and a remarkable gift for burlesque and imitation. "It is the tone of her speaking voice . . . that is first of all arresting," wrote a critic in 1918, "and then the camaraderie of her smile, and then the beauty of her gesture and her dress. . . . Sound intelligence and vigorous judgment have coped with a rich vulgarity and tempered it. There is taste, a thorough artist's taste, in every spacing and movement of her act . . ." ( N e w Republic, Apr. 6, 1918). Above all, Nora Bayes loved her audiences, and the glow of her personality warmed them and made them feel that life was good.

On Feb. 24, 1920, in Springfield, 111., Nora Bayes was married to Arthur A. Gordon (Paul Gordon or Gordoni), her leading man at the time. He was granted a divorce in October 1922. Her fifth and last marriage, on Feb. 28, 1925, aboard the Leviathan on one of her many trips to England, was to Benjamin L. Friedland, president of Affiliated Garages in New York. She had no children of her own, but adopted two boys and a girl. Nora Bayes died in 1928, following abdominal surgery, at the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn. During the height of her success she is reported to have earned as much as $100,000 a year, but she

BEACH, Amy Marcy Cheney (Sept. 5, 1867Dec. 27, 1944), composer and pianist, better known as Mrs. H. H. A. Beach, was born in Henniker, N.H., the only child of Clara Imogene (Marcy) and Charles Abbott Cheney. Both parents were descended from long-settied New England families who enjoyed cultural interests in their spare time. Mrs. Cheney, a singer and pianist, exerted a strong musical influence during her daughter's childhood and was her first teacher as well. Her father, educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Bates College, maintained a lifelong interest in mathematics while pursuing an active career, first in

[Douglas Gilbert, Am. Vaudeville—Its Life and Times ( 1 9 4 0 ) ; Joe Laurie, Jr., Vaudeville (1953); Sigmund Spaeth, A Hist, of Popular Music in America ( 1 9 4 8 ) ; James J. Fuld, Am. Popular Music ( 1 9 5 5 ) ; David Ewen, Complete Book of the Am. Musical Theatre (rev. ed., 1 9 6 5 ) ; Marjorie Farnsworth, The Ziegfeld Follies ( 1956 ) ; Nora Bayes, "Holding My Audience," Theatre, Sept. 1917; Rennold Wolf, "Nora Bayes, an Expert in Songs and Matrimony," Green Book Mag., Apr. 1914; Life, May 17, 1917, pp. 8 6 2 - 6 3 ; New Republic, Apr. 6, 1918, p. 2 9 7 ; John Parker, ed., Who's Who in the Theatre (5th ed., 1 9 2 5 ) ; clippings in Harvard Theatre Collection; obituaries of Mar. 20, 1928, in N.Y. Times, Chicago Tribune (courtesy of Chicago Hist. Soc.), and Joliet Herald News (courtesy of Joliet Public Library); marriage record (to Gordon) from County Clerk, Sangamon County, 111.; death record from N.Y. City Dept. of Health (Brooklyn office); information from Woodlawn Cemetery.] JAMES

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Beach his father's papermaking business and later as a paper importer in Boston, where the family moved in 1870. A precocious child, Amy could sing many tunes accurately and on pitch when she was only a year old. By the time she was four she had begun composing simple waltzes. Her mother answered her questions about musical notation but deferred regular lessons until Amy, at six, insisted on them. For the next two years she received three piano lessons a week from her mother, progressing to the early Beethoven sonatas and Chopin waltzes, although her hands were still too small to encompass all the full chords. Various plans for her education were considered, including European training, but her parents decided to keep her at home. She was enrolled in a private school in Boston directed by W. L. Whittemore, where she especially enjoyed natural science, French, and German. Her piano instruction was continued by Ernst Perabo and later by Junius W. Hill and Carl Baermann. In the winter of 1881-82 Hill gave her a course in harmony, the only formal instruction in music theory she ever received. On Oct. 24, 1883, at sixteen, she made her first public appearance in Boston as a pianist, playing Ignaz Moscheies' G minor concerto (Op. 60), with orchestra, and Chopin's Rondo in E flat as a solo. She later gave several recitals, followed by a performance of Chopin's F minor concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Wilhelm Gericke on Mar. 28, 1885. The critic of the Boston Evening Transcript was impressed with her "thoroughly artistic, beautiful and brilliant performance," commenting that she played "with a totality of conception that one seldom finds in players of her sex." The momentum of her concert career, however, was interrupted by her marriage on Dec. 2, 1885, at eighteen (in Boston's Trinity Church), to Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, an eminent surgeon twenty-four years her senior. A member of the Harvard medical faculty and a widower, Dr. Beach had been associated for fifteen years with Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in his lectures on practical anatomy. Significantly, Dr. Beach had also a comprehensive knowledge of music and a developed critical sense. He and her mother were, said Mrs. Beach, "the kindest, most helpful, and most merciless critics I ever had." Although the marriage was childless, Mrs. Beach's concert appearances now became relatively infrequent, while her interest in composition increased greatly. Her husband opposed formal study in composition for her, believing that it might rob her work of some of its free-

dom and originality, but he encouraged her to continue studying by herself. Either before or after her marriage, she set herself a rigorous program of study in counterpoint, fugue, musical form, and instrumentation, making her own translations of the treatises of Berlioz and François Gevaert. She studied fugue by writing out from memory much of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavichord and comparing her version with Bach's. Similarly, she taught herself orchestration by reconstructing from memory themes she had heard at concerts, with their proper instrumentation, and then comparing her work with the original score. Composition she studied by composing, working and reworking a phrase until it sounded "right." Her first four opus numbers were for small works: two sets of songs, a cadenza to Beethoven's C minor concerto, and a "Valse Caprice" for piano. But Opus 5, begun the year following her marriage, was a Mass in E flat major, for vocal quartet, chorus, orchestra, and organ, which required three years' work for its completion. An ambitious undertaking for any composer, it was first performed by the Handel and Haydn Society with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Feb. 7, 1892, the first work by a woman performed by this oldest and most conservative of American choral organizations. On the same evening Mrs. Beach played the piano part in Beethoven's Choral Fantasia, for which she received an ovation. The Mass was well received by the public, the critics, and the participating artists. So well pleased was Mrs. Carl Alves, the alto soloist, that she asked Mrs. Beach to write an aria for her based on Schiller's Mary Stuart. "Eilende Wolken" (Op. 18) was introduced that same winter, 1892, in New York by Mrs. Alves with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra, the first work by a woman to be performed by them. Mrs. Beach's position as the most prominent American woman composer of her time was confirmed in 1892 by a commission to write a work for the dedication of the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; this was the Festival Jubilate (Op. 17), for chorus and orchestra. Soon afterward she began composing her Gaelic Symphony (Op. 32), based on a number of Gaelic themes. Completed in the spring of 1896, it was first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Emil Paur in October and was subsequently played in New York, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Kansas City, San Francisco, and Chicago. In the six weeks following its completion she wrote a sonata in A minor for violin and piano (Op. 34 ), which she played with Franz Kneisel at one of his quartet concerts in January 1897.

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In 1900 she completed her piano concerto (Op. 45) and played it for the first time with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Gericke in April. A remarkably energetic yet never hasty composer, she also wrote in a variety of smaller forms: church music, piano pieces, choral works, and over 150 songs, several of which became widely popular. On June 28, 1910, Dr. Beach died, bringing to an end the most prolific period of her career. After his death, when her production had reached about Opus 70, she made her first trip to Europe. There she remained from 1911 to 1914, playing her piano concerto in Hamburg, Leipzig, and Berlin, and other works in various cities. She received considerable recognition, particularly in Germany, adding an international éclat to her already enviable reputation at home. After her return in 1914 she divided her time between concert appearances and composition, making her home in New York City and spending her summers in Centerville, Mass., on Cape Cod or at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. In mid1938 she completed Opus 150, a trio for piano, violin, and cello. Only three of her opus numbers remained unpublished, a remarkable record for an American composer. Historically Mrs. Beach has been grouped with the Boston classicists, such as Arthur Foote, George W. Chadwick, and Horatio Parker, although she worked independently of them. Her music was typical of the late romantic period, with broad lines of melody and many altered chords and enharmonic modulations, a style much in vogue in the 1890's. The sentiment of much of her work seems perfectly sincere, an expression of the feelings of a woman of her period. Her larger works—the Gaelic Symphony, the piano concerto, the Mass, and the violin sonata—are solidly constructed and would still give pleasure to an audience. A lovable person, Mrs. Beach seems to have lived a charmed life, surrounded by a sympathetic and understanding family. First her mother and later her husband provided the sort of informed criticism she needed for stimulus, while the public and critics were friendly from the first and often enthusiastic. Financial worries and struggle were unknown to her; yet she was never satisfied with less than her best efforts. One of the first American composers to be wholly trained in this country, she was certainly the first woman to write successfully in the larger forms; thus she prepared the way for others, not only by her example but also by her sympathetic encouragement. The Master of Arts degree awarded by the University of New Hampshire in June 1928 culminated a long list

of honors given her by clubs and societies. She died of heart disease, aged seventy-seven, in New York City. By the general public she was best remembered for her three songs to words by Browning: "Ecstasy," "Ah, Love, but a Day," and "The Year's at the Spring." [MS. letter by Mrs. Beach in John Tasker Howard Collection, Newark (N.J.) Public Library; interviews with Mrs. Beach in the Musician, Jan. 1912 (by Arthur Wilson), and Etude, Mar. 1943 (by Benjamin Brooks); articles about her in Musikliterarische Blätter, May 21, 1904, and Musical Quart., July 1940 (by Burnet C. Tuthill); John Tasker Howard, Our Am. Music ( 1 9 3 0 ) , pp. 3 4 4 47; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XV, 164-65; obituary in Musical America, Jan. 1945; clipping file in Music Division, N.Y. Public Library at Lincoln Center. See also obituary of Dr. Beach in Boston Transcript, June 28, 1910; Charles H. Pope, The Cheney Genealogy ( 1 8 9 7 ) , pp. 547-48; and Boston city directory listings for Charles A. Cheney, 1870 ff.] DENA J. EPSTEIN

BEATRICE, Ann.

Sister.

See

ROGERS,

Elizabeth

BEAUX, Cecilia (May 1, 1855-Sept. 12, 1942), portrait painter, christened Eliza Cecilia, was bom in Philadelphia, Pa., the youngest of three daughters (the first died in infancy) of Jean Adolphe and Cecilia Kent (Leavitt) Beaux. Beaux had come to the United States from Provence in France to establish a silk factory, but he was not a successful businessman. When his wife died twelve days after Cecilia's birth he sent the two children to New York City to the home of their maternal grandmother, Mrs. John Wheeler Leavitt. Business failure had cost the Leavitts their former wealth, but Cecilia and her sister Ernesta were brought up in an atmosphere of culture and refinement. While Cecilia was still a small child the family moved to West Philadelphia, where she was taught at home by her aunts Eliza and Emily. By her own account, however, she was most influenced by her grandmother, of Connecticut Puritan descent, who passed on to her granddaughter her own qualities of industry and frugality, and by her Aunt Emily's husband, William Foster Biddle. Her father, who apparently remained a member of the household, seems to have occupied a less important position in her life, although she was always proud of her French heritage. In this carefully sheltered existence, which she later confessed she hated, Cecilia Beaux had no education outside the family circle until she was fourteen, when she was enrolled in the fashionable Miss Hill's School for Girls in

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Beaux Philadelphia. An undistinguished student, she spent two winters there, after which she began serious training as a painter at the Philadelphia studio of Catharine Ann Drinker (later Mrs. Thomas A. Janvier), a cousin of her uncle. She had early shown a talent for drawing and had received drawing lessons from her aunts; she had also frequented art exhibitions and galleries, including the private collection of Henry C. Gibson, where she became acquainted with French art. In Miss Drinker's studio she first became aware of "miracles of light . . . what they could develop and hide," a discovery that was to prove a controlling factor in her own art. At the age of seventeen, accompanied by her uncle, who, as she recalled, "decided, and with great generosity gave me, everything that related to my art education," she entered the Philadelphia art school of Adolf Van der Whelen, a Dutch painter under whom Mrs. Janvier had studied. Because of her uncle's conservatism, especially in the matter of life drawing classes, she could not attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; thus she never studied with Thomas Eakins, although she admired him and was influenced by his work. When Mrs. Janvier succeeded Van der Whelen as director of his school, Miss Beaux took over Mrs. Janvier's job as drawing instructor at Miss Sanford's private school; later she also accepted a few private pupils. She learned the techniques of lithography and did several plates of fossils for a geological survey report compiled by the eminent paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. She also took lessons in china painting, and her first portraits, which she painted on china plaques by a solar print process, were immensely popular, although she privately despised them. She worked in crayon too, and took orders for children's portraits. Her first real master was the painter William Sartain (son of the etcher John Sartain), who came to Philadelphia from New York to give criticisms twice a month to a small class organized in the studio of a friend of Miss Beaux's. During her two years under Sartain she worked for the first time from a living model. Miss Beaux then established a studio of her own at 1334 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. There, in 1883, using her sister and nephew (Mrs. Henry S. Drinker and Henry S. Drinker, Jr.) as her subjects, she painted "Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance." The first full-length portrait she had undertaken, it was exhibited in 1885 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where it won the Mary Smith Prize for "the best painting by a resident woman artist." At the close of the show a friend took the canvas to

Paris, where it was accepted for the spring Salon. Early in 1888 Cecilia Beaux herself went to Paris, where she studied at the academy of Rodolphe Julian. That summer, which she spent in Concarneau, an artists' colony in Brittany, she also profited from the criticism of Charles Lazar. Although she was enthusiastic about contemporary French painters like Monet, she had "no desire to follow" them and devoted much of her time to study of the old masters in the Louvre. In November of 1888 she spent six weeks in Italy and the south of France, and after a second winter at the Académie Julian she visited an American friend, the wife of George Darwin, in Cambridge, England, where she painted several portraits before returning to the United States. Working in her Philadelphia studio during the next few years, she firmly established her reputation as a portrait artist. She won the Mary Smith Prize again in 1891 and 1892, was elected a member of the Society of American Artists in 1893 and an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1894 (she became a full member in 1903), and in 1895 was appointed the first woman instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Six of the portraits painted during this period—"Rev. Matthew B. Grier" ( 1 8 9 1 - 9 2 ) , "Ernesta Drinker, with Nurse" (1894), "A Lady from Connecticut" (Mrs. J. H. Richards, 1895), "Sita and Sarita" ( 1 8 9 3 - 9 4 ) , "Cynthia Sherwood" (1892), and "The Dreamer" (Caroline Kilby Smith, 1894)—were exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1896 and brought Miss Beaux international acclaim. On the strength of this showing, she was elected an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, an honor seldom accorded a woman; "Sita and Sarita" was purchased by the Luxembourg Museum in Paris. In 1900 she moved her studio to Washington Square in New York City, thereafter dividing her time between New York and her summer home, Green Alley, on Eastern Point in Gloucester, Mass. In New York she continued a friendship with the Richard Watson Gilders, with whom she once spent a winter; her painting of the Gilders' two daughters, "The Dancing Lesson," is one of her betterknown works. Noted especially for her paintings of women and children, she did a large number of mother-and-child portraits; her more important commissions included Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt (EDITH CAROW ROOSEVELT) with her daughter Ethel, painted in the White House in 1901; Mrs. Albert Beveridge, wife of the Senator from Indiana; and Mrs. Andrew Carnegie (LOUISE WHITFIELD CARNE-

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GIE). A 1914 painting of her niece Ernesta Drinker, for many years one of her chief models, was bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1915. In 1919, as one of eight American artists commissioned by the National Art Committee to record Allied leaders in World War I, she painted portraits of the British admiral Lord Beatty, the French premier Georges Clemenceau, and Cardinal Mercier of Belgium. During a transatlantic crossing in 1924 Miss Beaux fractured her hip, an accident which left her unable to walk without the aid of a crutch, and though she continued to paintmost notably, in 1925, her fourth self-portrait, requested by the Italian government for the gallery of the Uffizi at Florence—it was difficult for her, and she devoted much of her time to her autobiography, Background with Figures, published in 1930. In 1935 the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which in 1926 had awarded her its gold medal and in 1933 elected her to membership, honored her with a retrospective exhibition. She received honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (1908) and from Yale (1912). She was twice named one of America's twelve greatest living women, in 1923 by a committee of the League of Women Voters and in 1931 by Good Housekeeping magazine. Of medium height, with light brown hair, strong features, and gray eyes, Miss Beaux scorned the eccentricity of manner and dress adopted by many artists; she led a secluded life, perhaps best exemplified by her summer home, Green Alley, which was carefully hidden from public view, although her friends and neighbors were welcome and frequent guests. She died there of a coronary thrombosis at the age of eighty-seven. Her ashes were buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala-Cynwyd, Pa. Cecilia Beaux's paintings lie within the academic tradition. She was a master of technique and her brushwork is skillful, even "slick"; her work often appears effortless, despite her admission of repainting "hundreds of times." Her portraits were often compared with those of her contemporary John Singer Sargent, although one observer found her subjects more "homey," less cosmopolitan. While never considered Sargent's equal, she was recognized as one of America's most distinguished painters. The critic Royal Cortissoz summed up her accomplishment in 1935: "We have had no portrait painter freer than Miss Beaux from the pressure of formula. Her approach to a sitter is direct, animated, mindful of the principles of design but at the same time scornful of convention. . . . I hesitate to call her an impres-

sionist, because the word has such fixed associations, yet I know no other which so exactly defines her swift vitalized mode of capturing the fleeting aspect of a figure. . . . [The] fusion of spontaneity with an ordered purpose may be designated as the final expression of Miss Beaux's quality as a painter." [The principal sources are Miss Beaux's autobiography, Background with Figures, and The Paintings and Drawings of Cecilia Beaux (Pa. Acad, of the Fine Arts, 1 9 5 5 ) , a descriptive list with an introduction by her nephew Henry S. Drinker; also included is Royal Cortissoz's estimate of 1935. See also, for biographical and personal material: Thornton Oakley's brief appreciation, Cecilia Beaux ( 1 9 4 3 ) ; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., X L , 507; interviews in American Mag., Oct. 1923, and Woman Citizen, Feb. 7, 1925; description by one of Miss Beaux's sitters, MARY ADELAIDE NUTTING, in Ethel Johns and Blanche Pfefferkorn, The Johns Hopkins Hospital School of Nursing ( 1 9 5 4 ) , pp. 1 5 6 - 6 2 ; N.Y. Times, Nov. 14, 17, 1935, Sept. 18, 19, 1942. For critical comment see: Homer SaintGaudens in the Critic, July 1905; Mentor, Oct. 1924, pp. 3 3 - 3 4 ; Carlyle Burrows in Internat. Studio, Oct. 1926; Homer Saint-Gaudens, The Am. Artist and His Times ( 1 9 4 1 ) . Other information from Mr. and Mrs. Henry S. Drinker, Merion, Pa.; death record from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics. A biographical outline by Gabor Szent-Ivany, Carnegie Library School, Pittsburgh, was helpful.] DOROTHY

CRAFLY

BEECHER, Catharine Esther (Sept. 6, 1800May 12, 1878), author and educator, was born in East Hampton, Long Island, the eldest of four daughters and of the eight surviving children of Lyman and Roxana (Foote) Beecher. Her father was a Presbyterian minister who became famous during Catharine's girlhood for his defense of evangelical faith, his revivals, and his work for temperance and other moral reform movements. In 1810 the Beechers moved to Litchfield, Conn., then something of a cultural and educational center. The family worshiped the unselfish goodness of Roxana Beecher, but Catharine was closer to her zestful and demanding father. Delicate in health and of a difficult temper, she relied upon his indulgent tenderness. The bond between them was deep and lasting. "I can not hear him," she wrote as an adult, "without its making my face burn and my heart beat" (Harveson, p. 39). As the oldest child, Catharine assumed many responsibilities and became accustomed to dominance. When her mother died, the sixteen-year-old Catharine felt she had to take her place in the lives of the younger children. When her father married the elegant Harriet Porter in 1817, it was Catharine who penned the children's dutiful letter of welcome. Three

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more sons and one daughter were born of this second marriage. The large household, with its aunts and cousins, boarders and servants, with its talk of the Christian Observer, of Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Sir Walter Scott, was the center of her life. Though she briefly attended Miss SARAH PIERCE'S school in Litchfield, she always regarded her home training in housekeeping, cooking, sewing, and morality as her true education; indeed, her idyllic memory of the small-town New England household underlay her vigorous campaigns for the revision of female education. In 1821, now a schoolteacher in New London. Conn., Miss Beecher attracted the attention of a diffident but brilliant young mathematics professor from Yale, Alexander Metcalf Fisher. Lyman Beecher, evidently unperturbed that Fisher lacked the personal knowledge of grace which evangelical faith held crucial for salvation, prodded Catharine to accept his proposal. They became engaged in 1822, but Fisher died at sea four months later. Seeing in the death a divine judgment upon her idolatrous love, Catharine Beecher renounced worldly things. "I feel it is better I should go mourning all my days, than to live as I have done all my past life." She alternately lacerated herself and accused her father's God for damning men condemned by His own decree. Though she eventually joined Boston's new evangelical Hanover Street Church, to which her father was called in 1826, she did not accept Calvinism, and in a long series of essays and books, including Letters on the Difficulties of Religion (1836) and Common Sense Applied to Religion (1857), she maintained with increasing force that men were not naturally depraved and that they could, through education, be made perfect. Toward the end of her life she explicitly rejected the "soulwithering" doctrines of Presbyterianism and joined the Episcopal Church. To Lyman Beecher, Fisher's death revealed that God had elected Catharine for a vocation beyond the ordinary lot of women, and dutifully she gathered her energies for benevolent service. Settling in Hartford, where their brother Edward was master of a grammar school, Catharine and her sister Mary in 1823 opened a girls' school. Four years later it was incorporated as the Hartford Female Seminary. Her father was encouraging but exigent. "I should be ashamed to have you open, and keep only a commonplace, middling sort of school," he wrote (ibid., p. 34). Catharine shared these high aspirations, and her unremitting search for "a more enlarged and comprehensive boundary of exertion" fired her with such fierce

energy that other people often found her oppressive. (At sixty she wrote that every minute of her adult life had been devoted to her fellow men.) Highly critical of the typical female seminary of the day, with its numerous courses poorly taught, its rote learning, and its neglect of physical exercise, Miss Beecher instituted calisthenics and correlated courses that stressed general principles. In "Female Education," an article published in the American Journal of Education (April and May 1827), and Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education, a fund-raising pamphlet of 1829, she proposed that schools for women be endowed, that teachers be assigned limited fields, and that girls be trained in the arts of teaching and domestic science. Her strenuous dedication exacted a toll, and in 1828 she experienced an intolerable restlessness and such mental confusion as seemed "like approaching insanity." Resigning her position in 1831, she accompanied her father the following year to Cincinnati, where he assumed the presidency of the Lane Theological Seminary and she opened a new school, the Western Female Institute. Though still far from well, suffering in 1835 a serious nervous collapse, she carried on with her accustomed energy, not only looking to the interests of her school but also publishing several elementary textbooks, collaborating with the Rev. William H. McGuffey on his Eclectic Fourth Reader (1837), and joining actively in the Cincinnati temperance movement. She was cool to the rising abolitionist tide, contending in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females (1837)—addressed to ANGELINA GRIMKÉ—that any activity which "throws woman into the attitude of a combatant, either for herself or others," lay outside "her appropriate sphere." From her vantage point in the West, Catharine Beecher became convinced that the major challenge facing the nation was the large number of children who were growing up beyond the reach of schools. The collapse of her Western Female Institute in 1837, for lack of support, both deepened her awareness of the problem and freed her to do something about it. Throughout the 1840's she traveled incessantly, seeking through lectures, articles, books, and a personal canvassing of her friends to persuade the public of the urgent need for sending teachers to the West and for establishing normal schools in the newly settled regions. In The Duty of American Women to Their Country (1845) she argued that by neglecting its two million unschooled children, America was courting bloodshed and anarchy. Her pleas

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fell on responsive ears. In February 1846 the ladies of Boston's Mount Vernon Church formed a society for "sending pious female teachers to the west," and in April 1847 William Slade, formerly governor of Vermont, impressed by Miss Beecher's appeal, founded in Cleveland the Board of National Popular Education, with himself as general agent and Miss Beecher in charge of selection, training, and placement. Ultimately, over 500 New England schoolteachers were sent west by these two groups. Miss Beecher and Slade soon began to clash over policy, however. He was concerned primarily with recruiting teachers in the East, while she was increasingly interested in establishing endowed nondenominational female colleges in the West where local girls could be trained both as teachers and as homemakers. By 1848 the two had parted company, and in 1852 Miss Beecher organized the American Woman's Educational Association to accomplish her program. Through her efforts schools were begun in Milwaukee, Wis., Dubuque, Iowa, and Quincy, 111. Only one, however, the Milwaukee Normal Institute (later Milwaukee-Downer College), long survived. Catharine Beecher lived by her pen, supporting her various causes in part through royalties, and she was probably more influential as a writer than through the schools she founded. A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) and its sequel, The Domestic Receipt Book (1846), didactic, homiletic, and emphatic, went through many editions. One of the most popular revisions of the Treatise, published in 1869 as The American Woman's Home, was prepared in collaboration with her sister HARRIET B E E C H E R STOWE. In these books the curious or baffled housewife found practical instructions on cooking, family health, infant care, and children's education, as well as general observations on proper home management. The ideal set forth is that of a thrifty household, with wife, daughters, and servants working together and family comfort never sacrificed to "elegance or fashion." No Beecher, however, could rest content merely as a purveyor of household hints. Though Catharine Beecher had rejected her father's theology, she, no less than her seven brothers who became ministers, inherited his apocalyptic ardor. In numerous magazine articles and in such books as The Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children: The Causes and the Remedy (1846) she assumed the role of teacher and minister to her sex. All her writings on women—as, indeed, all her educational reforms—sprang from an indignant sense of the disparity between woman's true

role and her actual condition as exploited factory worker, worn and incompetent housewife, or corseted and indolent creature of wealth. Inadequate air and exercise, "murderous fashions," and irrelevant studies, she believed, had so ruined women's health that most of them dreaded and some sinfully avoided maternity. Such children as were born often suffered severe mental and physical damage as a result of their mothers' ignorance of proper hygiene and child-rearing principles. Her crusade was founded upon the belief that these evils were remediable. She demanded a change in the "caste" system which left women untrained for, and ashamed to perform, their proper work. In all her writings, she sought to replace the travesties of womanhood—whether the "nervous, sickly, and miserable" housewife or the "fainting, weeping, vapid, pretty plaything"—with an energetic and benevolent figure who would joyfully accept as a sacred vocation the opportunity to implant "durable and holy impressions" upon the "immortal minds" placed in her care. Miss Beecher portrayed women as the saviors of society, like Christ in that their power sprang from humility and sacrifice. But, though she pressed the sacrificial role upon her feminine readers, she also—with more strategy than consistencytempted them with power, envisioning "a 'Pink and White Tyranny' more stringent than any earthly thralldom." She had little sympathy with the feminism of the later nineteenth century which resulted in agitation for the vote and in the establishment of colleges like Smith and Vassar, for both seemed to her a repudiation of woman's peculiar domestic obligation. On the suffrage question she and her sister Harriet thus sided against their brother Henry Ward and their half sister ISABELLA B E E C H E R HOOKER.

Catharine Beecher was plain of appearance, with heavy features, dark hair worn in lank ringlets, and a sallow complexion. All her life she suffered recurrent nervous collapses and attacks of sciatica which frequently forced her, though never for long, to lay aside her varied pursuits. She sought relief in at least thirteen different health establishments of varying persuasions, but, as she dryly noted, "Owing chieflv to my own knowledge and caution, I was not injured . . . by any" (ibid., p. 214). In 1866 she taught briefly in Dio Lewis' gymnastic school for girls in Lexington, Mass., and in 1870—71 she returned for a few months as principal of the Hartford Female Seminary. In 1877, after two years of residence with her brother Edward in Brooklyn, N.Y., she went to live with her half brother Thomas in Elmira,

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Bellanca N.Y., where she took the water cure and lectured to the girls at Elmira College. She died of "apoplexy" in Elmira in 1878, at seventyseven years of age, and was buried there in Woodlawn Cemetery. [Miss Beecher's Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions ( 1874 ) is of biographical value. Her woman suffrage views are expressed in The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Woman ( 1851 ) and Woman Suffrage and Woman's Profession ( 1871). The most extensive collection of her letters is in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College. The basic secondary source is Mae E. Harveson, Catharine Esther Beecher, Pioneer Educator (1932), which includes a full bibliography. See also Lyman Beecher Stowe, Saints, Sinners, and Beechers (1934); Margaret Farrand Thorp, Female Persuasion (1949); Harriet Beecher Stowe's sketch of her sister in Our Famous Women (1883); and Lyman Beecher, Autobiog., Correspondence, be. (2 vols., 1864-65).] BARBARA M .

CROSS

B E L L A N C A , Dorothy Jacobs (Aug. 10, 1 8 9 4 Aug. 16, 1 9 4 6 ) , trade union organizer, was born in Zemel, Latvia, the fourth and youngest daughter of Harry Jacobs, a Jewish tailor, and Bernice Edith (Levinson) Jacobs. The family emigrated to the United States in 1900 and settled in Baltimore, Md., where Mrs. Jacobs died a few years later. Dorothy attended the Baltimore public schools until she was thirteen, when she began work as a hand buttonhole-sewer in a men's overcoat factory. For four weeks she worked a ten-hour day without pay while she learned the business, afterward making about three dollars a week. The experience left her with misshapen index fingers and a lifelong commitment to organized labor. Even as a young girl she protested working conditions in the Baltimore clothing shops and factories, but her employers thought she was too young to be taken seriously: "They'd reprimand me, tell me to stop such talk, and give me my job back." By 1908 or 1909, however, she had joined others, many of them East and South European girls also in their early teens, to form Local 170 of the United Garment Workers of America, a national union organized on traditional craft lines and dominated by native-born conservative trade unionists. By 1914, barely out of her teens, she headed Local 170, into which she and the other hand buttonhole-sewers (largely immigrant girls and women) had by hard work organized nearly 65 per cent of the predominantly male machine buttonhole-sewers. Her early trade union career coincided with the struggle within the U.G.W.A. between its native-born leaders and radical immigrant crit-

ics committed to industrial unionism. When the U.G.W.A. split in 1914, Dorothy Jacobs led Local 170 into the newly formed Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and was one of the local's two delegates to the first convention. She also served as delegate to the A.C.W.A.'s Baltimore Joint Board and became its secretary in 1915, founded its Educational Department, frequently negotiated contracts, and made the organization of immigrant women her special task. She was active nationally as well, aiding the new union during the important 1915 Chicago strike and the 1917 Philadelphia and New York City organizing campaigns. Her abilities did not go unnoticed. Not quite twenty-two, she won election to the A.C.W.A.'s general executive board in 1916, and she was appointed the first full-time A.C.W.A. woman organizer in 1917. Reelected to the board in 1918, she resigned at the time of her marriage. In August 1918 she became the wife of August Bellanca, a fellow A.C.W.A. organizer and a leader in Italo-American reform and radical circles, who had come to the United States from his native Sicily in 1902 at the age of seventeen. The Bellancas had no children. Except for an extended European trip in 1 9 2 2 23 when August Bellanca was too ill to work, they devoted most of their married years to the A.C.W.A., making their home in New York City. The condition and role of women workers in the men's clothing industry especially concerned Mrs. Bellanca. Supported by her husband, she vigorously combated the widespread distrust of women as trade unionists then reflected by the A.C.W.A. leadership. At the 1914 convention her local had introduced the first resolution dealing with the organization of women workers, and at the second A.C.W.A. convention she had made "an eloquent appeal" for a women's department. In 1918 August Bellanca's New York City local supported the effort and urged the appointment of women organizers. Six years later the Amalgamated finally set up a special Women's Bureau, and Dorothy Bellanca headed it, but it caused much dispute within the union and lasted only until 1926. Mrs. Bellanca's work as an organizer contributed much to the growth of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers during the 1920's and early '30's, a period when most unions were weakened by internal and external difficulties. She spread the union's power to new areas and strengthened it where it had made earlier gains. Typical was her participation in an especially bitter and difficult dispute in Roches-

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ter, N.Y., in 1933, as described by Charles W. Erwin, the editor of the A.C.W.A.'s Advance: "Dorothy is loved by the strikers, admired by the neighbors around the factory, and feared by the police. . . . Every day on the picket line, watching Dorothy, every day in the hall listening to her talk to strikers, has taught me why frail Joan of Arc was able to turn a defeated army into a victorious one." In 1920 she and her husband served on the Out-ofTown Organizing Committee, a special A.C.W.A. effort directed at "runaway shops" that had been moved from New York City to upstate New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut towns to escape unionization and to find lower labor costs. During the protracted 1920-21 New York City lockout, she organized strike relief, set up special arrangements for emergency relief, and traveled to collect additional funds (including a special assessment voted by Baltimore union members for a "New Babies' Milk Fund" that she later administered). With the onset of the great depression came a new and intensive period. In 1930 the Bellancas helped consolidate the still young Philadelphia organization. Two years later Mrs. Bellanca's efforts made possible a general strike among Baltimore clothing workers to regain earlier depression losses, and her committee of twenty women strikers persuaded the Baltimore mayor to establish a special inquiry, headed by the economist Jacob Hollander, to investigate working conditions in Baltimore clothing shops and factories. Her major work, however, was among the still nonunion cottongarment workers. From 1932 to 1934 she was a key organizer in the successful A.C.W.A. campaign among the shirt workers in upstate New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Mostly women and girls, these workers earned substandard wages and depressed the entire industry. Skillful organizing and dramatic exposure brought decisive results. In Allentown, Pa., for example, she set up a picket line of young strikers—ranging in age from thirteen to eighteen—led by herself and Cornelia (Bryce) Pinchot, the wife of Pennsylvania's governor. By 1934 nearly 30,000 shirt workers belonged to the A.C.W.A., and Mrs. Bellanca next helped to build strong local unions among them. She also played a significant role in difficult strikes and lockouts in Cleveland, Rochester, and lesser centers of clothing manufacture. In the late 1930's she participated in the organization of new A.C.W.A. industrial branches among neckwear workers, journeymen tailors, laundry workers, and cleaners and dyers. She was again a member of the general

executive board from 1934 until her death and its only woman vice-president. In addition to her work for the A.C.W.A., Mrs. Bellanca was an active member of the Consumers' League of New York, the Women's Trade Union League, and the CIO Textile Workers' Organizing Committee (1937-38). During the depression Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York (a close friend of the Bellancas since early A.C.W.A. days) appointed her to his Committee on Unemployment. In 1938 Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins named her to an advisory committee on maternal and child welfare; that same year she participated in a White House conference on national health and the next year in a similar conference on children in a democracy. In 1939 and 1941 she attended International Labor Organization regional conferences as labor adviser. More formal work resulted from appointment to two industry committees established under the federal Wages and Hours Act—as adviser to the Department of Labor on standards for the employment of women in defense industry, and as a member of the women's policy committee of the War Manpower Commission during World War II. New York governors Herbert Lehman and Thomas E. Dewey both asked her to work with state agencies concerned with discrimination in employment, and Mayor La Guardia appointed her to a city committee designed to promote understanding among New York's ethnic groups. Mrs. Bellanca also took part in New York city and state labor and reform politics, supporting the fusion movement in 1933 that helped to elect La Guardia mayor and becoming a founder of the American Labor party in 1936. Two years later, although she lived in Manhattan, she was the Congressional candidate from New York's 8th District on both the American Labor and Republican tickets. In a heavily Democratic Brooklyn district she failed to win election, but gained 118,000 votes. In 1940 and 1944 she was elected state vicechairman of the American Labor party. In 1946—six days after her fifty-second birthday —she died in New York's Memorial Hospital of multiple myeloma. Her husband survived her. One of the few immigrant women to rise to prominence in the American trade union movement, Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca was, in the judgment of the Nation, "without doubt" that movement's "ablest woman organizer." Amalgamated Clothing Workers' leaders Jacob Potofsky and Hyman Blumberg credited her with a major role in building their organization. As Mrs. Elinore M. Herrick, secretary of the Consumers' League of New York and regional di-

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Belmont rector of the National Labor Relations Board, described her: "Her slender figure and gentle face, dominated by beautiful eyes and a mobile, sensitive mouth, embodied a spirit full of human compassion, but a fire of righteous wrath when the abuses of mankind came to her knowledge." Others stressed her "vibrant and magnetic speaking voice." Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at a 1944 Chicago A.C.W.A. luncheon in Dorothy Bellanca's honor. In 1945 she was one of thirty women honored for outstanding services to New York City by the Women's City Club. Among her other interests, she had been a member of the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children. After her death the Amalgamated Clothing Workers endowed two beds in the children's ward of the Memorial Hospital in her name; and in 1951 funds contributed by union members paid for the Dorothy J. Bellanca Auditorium in the Boys' Republic at Santa Marinella, a village for homeless boys near Rome, Italy.

nessee legislator, Congressman, and militia general, and a niece of Gov. Joseph Desha of Kentucky. Despite this lineage the Smiths, so local legend has it, were never accepted by "old Mobile" society. Alva was educated in private schools in France, where the family had moved after the Civil War. Early in the 1870's she came with her mother and two sisters to New York City, part of a general influx of outsiders during the postwar period that in the eyes of the old families of New York resembled an invading horde. Of these newcomers Mrs. May King Van Rensselaer later wrote: "They were outside the pale, but that did not worry them. They aimed for social distinction not by assault upon the established caste, but by counter-attraction. They appreciated the value of publicity and employed it" ( T h e Social Ladder, 1924, pp. 5 6 - 5 7 ) . One of the counterattractions on which Alva Smith relied in her conquest of New York society was the marriage of one of her sisters to a wealthy Cuban, Fernando Yznaga, brother of Alva's close friend Consuelo Yznaga, who had in turn married the Duke of Manchester. On Apr. 20, 1875, Alva herself became the wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt, grandson of "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, the founder of the family fortune. The wedding was the great social event of the season, but the Vanderbilts were not yet accepted as equals by Mrs. William Astor (see CAROLINE W E B S T E R SCHERMERHORN ASTOR), who still presided over the inner circle of New York society. Accordingly, Alva Vanderbilt embarked on a new series of dazzling social ventures. She hired the architect Richard Morris Hunt to build a threemillion-dollar château at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street (completed in 1881), a two-million-dollar "cottage," Marble House, at Newport ( 1 8 9 2 ) , and, somewhat later, Beacon Towers at Sands Point, Long Island. The Fifth Avenue mansion became in March 1883 the scene of her celebrated costume ball, the most extravagant entertainment yet witnessed in New York. Mrs. Astor herself, so that her daughter might not remain uninvited, at last paid her rival a formal call. Mrs. Vanderbilt's triumph was complete.

[Useful general biographical information is found in obituaries of Dorothy J. Bellanca in the Ν.Ύ. Herald Tribune and N.Y. Times, Aug. 17, 1946. Other biographical data is in the Advance, Sept. 1, 15, 1946; "In Memoriam: Dorothy J. Bellanca," Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Gen. Executive Board, Report, 1948, pp. xx-xxii; Nation, Aug. 31, 1946; New Leader, Sept, 21, 1946; Elinore M. Herrick, "Dorothy Bellanca: Champion of Democracy," Woman's Press, Dec. 1946. On her husband, see Am. Labor Who's Who, 1925. Full details of her work in the A.C.W.A. are found in the published Troc, of its biennial conventions; for speeches by her see 1918, pp. 26566; 1930, pp. 287-89; 1934, pp. 257-59, 274; 1936, pp. 212-14, 321-22, 398-99; 1938, pp. 36869; 1940, pp. 457-58, 476-78; 1944, pp. 109-11; 1946, pp. 183-84. Much additional information is found in Advance, the A.C.W.A. newspaper; typical speeches appear in the issues of July 6, 1917, Jan. 28, Feb. 18, 1921, and June 19, 1925. The A.C.W.A. Research Dept. has records of many other aspects of her career: manuscript letters, typescripts of speeches, press releases concerning her work, and a collection of unpublished interviews with union associates that tell much of her career and personality. Matthew Josephson, Sidney Hillman ( 1952 ), includes only scattered references to Dorothy Bellanca but is rich in information about her particular world and times.] HERBERT G. GUTMAN

B E L M O N T , Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt (Jan. 17, 1853-Jan. 26, 1933), socialite and suffragist, was born in Mobile, Ala., the third of five children of Murray Forbes Smith and his wife Phoebe Ann Desha. Her father was a commission merchant of Virginian birth; her mother was a daughter of Robert Desha, Ten-

Her divorce in March 1895 no doubt heightened the impression that the sober, civic-spirited burghers of an earlier day had been displaced by an aristocracy impatient of traditional restraints. Granted to Mrs. Vanderbilt on grounds of adultery, it came shortly after a cruise to Calcutta on the Vanderbilt yacht. In the settlement she received an income of $100,000 a year, Marble House, and sole custody of her three children: Consuelo (born 1877),

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William Kissam II (1878), and Harold Stirling (1884). On Jan. 11, 1896, Alva Vanderbilt was married to Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, who had accompanied the Vanderbilts on many cruises, including the excursion to India. Belmont, five years her junior and son of the wealthy banker August Belmont, had himself recently been divorced from Sarah Whitney. As both partners were divorced, an Episcopal wedding was impossible and they were married at a civil ceremony performed by Mayor William L. Strong of New York. Meanwhile, in August 1895, Mrs. Vanderbilt had introduced her daughter Consuelo to society and arranged her marriage, on Nov. 6, 1895, to the Duke of Marlborough. Three decades later, at annulment proceedings before a Roman Catholic ecclesiastical court in 1926, Consuelo testified that her mother had torn her from Winthrop Rutherfurd, to whom she was secretly engaged, and forced her to marry the Duke, saying "that I had no right to choose a husband." Mrs. Vanderbilt (lending her assistance to the annulment) did not deny the charge. "I have always had absolute power over my daughter . . . ," she said. "I, therefore, did not beg, but ordered her to marry the Duke" (New York Times, Nov. 25, 1926). After the death of her husband in 1908, Mrs. Belmont, influenced by ANNA HOWARD SHAW, emerged rather unexpectedly as a militant feminist and devoted the rest of her life and a good part of her fortune to the cause. She wrote numerous suffrage articles and opened the doors of Marble House to feminist groups. In 1909 she rented an entire floor of a Fifth Avenue office building as headquarters for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, as well as for the Political Equality League, a New York suffrage organization of which she was founder and president, and for a national press bureau whose activities she completely financed. Not surprisingly, this sudden entry into the suffrage movement, reminiscent of her earlier social conquests, aroused some resentment among older workers, who were also at times embarrassed by her flamboyant and highly individualistic techniques. In 1914 she brought Christabel Pankhurst, the English militant suffragist, to the United States and organized her lecture tour. Two years later she collaborated with Elsa Maxwell on a suffrage operetta which netted $8,000 for the cause. She naturally gravitated to the Congressional Union, a group founded in 1913 by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns to work militantly for a federal suffrage amendment, serving on its executive board and, after 1917, on that of its successor, the National Woman's Party. In a

somewhat contradictory move, in 1913 she secretly contributed $10,000 to the Southern Woman Suffrage Conference, which was opposed to action on the federal level. Of this she wrote: "I plead guilty to so strong a desire for the political emancipation of women that I am not at all particular as to how it shall be granted. . . . As a southerner I thoroughly understand the problems which create this attitude and if that method proves effective I shall gratefully accept the results" (History of Woman Suffrage, V, 672 ). Other reform causes won her support as well: she endorsed the Women's Trade Union League during the garment workers' strikes of 1909 and 1916, and in 1912 she contributed $2,000 to keep Max Eastman's socialist magazine, the Masses, from bankruptcy. The reasons for this abrupt transition from high society to militant reform were doubtless varied and complex. Mrs. Belmont herself attributed the change to the influence of her travels, which made her see that "the wife of the multimillionaire and the peasant woman of Italy . . . have . . . a common ground" (flearst's Magazine, April 1913, p. 1171). It is likely that the criticism she received because of her divorce also helped convince her that the relations between the sexes needed to be put on a new footing. ( "I was one of the first women in America to dare to get a divorce from an influential man," she once wrote, with mingled bitterness and pride. " . . . I had dared to criticize openly an influential man's behavior.") In any case, she was convinced that the time had come "to take this world muddle that men have created and . . . turn it into an ordered, peaceful, happy abiding place for humanity" (Ladies' Home Journal, September 1922, p. 7). In 1921 she was elected president of the National Woman's Party, having contributed $146,000 for the purchase of a historic mansion near the Capitol as its headquarters, and in 1926 she represented that organization at the convention of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Paris. As late as 1930 she joined other suffrage leaders in urging the removal of legal disabilities against women at the Hague Conference on the Codification of International Law. In her later years Mrs. Belmont lived chiefly in France, where she maintained a villa on the Riviera, redesigned by herself, a fifteenth-century castle at Augerville-la-Rivière, which she extensively restored, and a house in Paris. She died in the French capital shortly after her eightieth birthday of bronchial and heart complications growing out of a paralytic stroke some months before. After services at St.

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Thomas's Episcopal Church, New York City, she was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, New York. [Wayne Andrews, The Vanderbilt Legend ( 1941 ) ; Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, The Glitter and the Gold ( 1 9 5 2 ) ; Edwin P. Hoyt, The Vanderbilts and Their Fortunes ( 1 9 2 6 ) ; Dixon Wecter, The Saga of Am. Society ( 1937 ) ; Ida H. Harper, Hist, of Woman Suffrage, vols. V and VI ( 1 9 2 2 ) ; Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of the Woman's Party (1921); Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (1959); William Garrett, Reminiscences of Public Men in Ala. ( 1 8 7 2 ) . For frequent newspaper references see N.Y. Times Index. Mrs. Belmont's extensive feminist writings, in addition to those cited, include articles in the North Am. Rev., Nov. 1909; Independent, Mar. 31, 1910; Harper's Bazar, Mar. 1910; Forum, Mar. 1910; World Today, Oct. 1911; Good Housekeeping, Nov. 1913 (foreword to Christabel Pankhurst, "Story of the Women's W a r " ) ; and Collier's, Dec. 23, 1922. See also obituaries in Equal Rights, Feb. 4 and 18, 1933, and N.Y. Times, Jan. 26, 27, 1933. Mrs. Belmont's birth date is confirmed by the baptismal records of Christ Episcopal Church, Mobile, Ala. Information on her family background from Tenn. State Library and Archives, Nashville, and Ala. Dept. of Archives and Hist., Montgomery.] CHRISTOPHER

BENEDICT, Crystal Eastman. See Crystal.

LASCH

EASTMAN,

BENEDICT, Ruth Fulton (June 5, 1887-Sept. 17, 1948), anthropologist, was born in New York City, the first child of Frederick Samuel Fulton, surgeon and cancer researcher, and Bertrice Joanna (Shattuck) Fulton, a graduate of Vassar. When Ruth was twenty-one months old and her sister Margery three months, their father died of an ill-defined fever at the age of thirty-two. Mrs. Fulton and her children then returned to the home town of both parentsNorwich, in the Chenango Valley of central New York—where they lived at the farm of Ruth's maternal grandparents. Her muchloved grandfather was a Baptist deacon. Beginning in 1894, her mother, with both daughters in tow, taught school successively in Norwich, St. Joseph, Mo., and Owatonna, Minn. Summer vacations were spent back on the farm. In 1899 Mrs. Fulton took a more secure job at a lower salary on the staff of the Buffalo Public Library. On $60 a month she maintained a family of four—one of her unmarried sisters kept house. Each year in rotation one member of the household was allowed a new coat; for Ruth, $1.50 for a new hat was "momentous" and unique. She always professed, however, to have been unconscious of their poverty and oblivious to clothes.

The two scars that childhood inflicted upon her were lifelong hardness of hearing, produced by an attack of measles, and an ineffaceable trauma induced by her father's death and her mother's hysterical "cult of grief." Mrs. Fulton became to Ruth an object of fear and disgust, her father a symbol of calm and repose, and both together an incitement to alienation from life and to a yearning after death. As early as she could remember, Ruth was aware of passing back and forth between two "worlds"—"the world of my father, which was the world of death," and beautiful, and "the world of confusion and explosive weeping" which she repudiated in her mother. The former became her world too, a world in which she could not imagine meeting anybody that she actually knew and into which she could not take her sister, but only an imaginary playmate from over a hill that she hadn't seen the other side of. (The playmate died the day she did see it.) To this world belonged Christ, whose portrait she had once confused with her father's, and, in due time, the figures of William 1 Blake and Michelangelo's titans on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So she grew up as the only living person in her world, with no one who "really mattered" to her in the other. She was terrified of physical embraces and certain that nothing she cared about could survive communication to other people. The physical accompaniments of this divided life were uncontrollable tantrums eventually displaced into severe fits of depression, which lasted till she was about thirty-five, plus violent vomiting every six weeks till she began to menstruate at the same intervals. Yet for all her problems, she often found herself good company and experienced great happiness as a child shelling peas on the porch and looking out across the valley and, as she grew older, in cultivating her power to put things down in words. Ruth was a bright student who won scholarships to St. Margaret's, an Episcopal preparatory school in Buffalo, and to Vassar, where she made Phi Beta Kappa and received her A.B. in 1909. The two authors read in college who made an enduring impression upon her were Nietzsche and Walter Pater—the latter because of his emphasis on the necessity of burning with a "hard gem-like flame" and on tending one's own flame at the expense of everything else. She spoke of this message as a profound liberation from her religious upbringing, "which tried so hard to make me a moral being." After graduation and a trip to Europe with classmates, she lived with her mother in Buffalo and worked, in defiance of Pater, for the Charity Organization Society. From 1911

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Benedict to 1914 she taught in girls' schools in California. She did not enjoy the work and recoiled from the prospect of becoming an old maid like her fellow teachers—she could never forget the one who cried out on seeing some lighted bungalows at night, "There are so many homes! There ought to be enough to go around." Partly in response to this terror of shriveling up, Ruth Fulton after some vacillation was married on June 18, 1914, to Stanley Rossiter Benedict, a young biochemist who eventually became a professor in the Cornell Medical School. For a while she thought she had found the secret of "zest for life" in the knowledge that a woman's great "power" was to love. But as time passed and the hoped-for child never came, she began to feel idle and lonely around the house, and her old sense of the meaninglessness of life, particularly for women, the lack of coherence and overall pattern in daily existence, came flooding back. She hoped to gain insight into her predicament, as well as a means of keeping herself busy, by writing a book on New Women of Three Centuries—Mary Wollstonecraft, MARGARET F U L L E R , and Olive Schreiner—but only the first portrait seems ever to have been sketched in. At Christmas 1916 she and Benedict had a great confrontation over what was to become of her. She insisted that she must pay her way in a job of her own. He replied that no job would hold her, that nothing ever had, neither social work nor teaching, and that children wouldn't either. After this, they continued to live together but grew increasingly apart. After another unsatisfying bout of charitable work in 1917 and many vain resolves to finish off the new women, Ruth Benedict to fill her days enrolled in 1919 in the New School for Social Research. There, under the aegis of ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS and Alexander Goldenweiser, she discovered anthropology. These two passed her on to the great Franz Boas at Columbia, where she received her doctorate in anthropology in 1923 after three semesters of work. Her first publications, beginning in 1922, reflect Boas' long absorption in the minute study of the diffusion of culture traits from one people to another. In this context, the early Ruth Benedict emphasized the variety of disparate cultural elements from far-flung sources —the variously assembled atoms of culture— that could be found in juxtaposition within the life of a given tribe. She made her first field trip in 1922 to the Serrano Indians (Shoshoneans of southern California), collected folklore among the Pueblo Indians of Zuñi and Cochiti

in the summers of 1924 and 1925, and observed their entirely different neighbors the Pima in the summer of 1926. In the summer of 1931 she directed the training of student anthropologists among the Mescalero Apache and in the summer of 1939 among the Blackfoot of Montana. Her collection, Tales of the Cochiti Indians, appeared in 1931, followed by two volumes of Zuñi Mythology in 1935. According to the highest Boasian standards, her continuous periods in the field were much too short. In addition, she was forced to rely entirely upon English-speaking informants and interpreters; with her deafness, she would have been hard put to leam a primitive language by ear. Ruth Benedict's academic career appeared to be stuck on dead center for many years, in part because Boas never had enough money to go around and because he thought that a married woman could get along on lower pay. In the academic year 1922-23 she served as his assistant in a course at Bamard and helped fire Margaret Mead, then a Bamard undergraduate, with the determination to become an anthropologist. From 1923 to 1931 Ruth Benedict was a lecturer in anthropology at Columbia, always an annual appointment, although she had sufficient professional standing to be appointed in 1925 editor of the Journal of American Folklore. Despite her modest official status at Columbia, she became indispensable to Boas by mediating between him and his graduate students, doling out on his instructions the tiny stipends, commonly a few hundred dollars, then available for research in anthropology. Through her years of apprenticeship, Ruth Benedict remained a deeply divided personality, writing technically accomplished verse "to say ouch" when life stepped on her toes (and sometimes getting it published under the name "Anne Singleton"), brooding over the hurts that she and Stanley inflicted on each other, and frequently rehearsing the advantages of death over life—but not through suicide, which would make death "cheap." Only at the end of the 1920's and the beginning of the '30's did she finally win through to a measure of serenity. She and Stanley, who had been meeting only on weekends from the mid-'20's on, separated completely in 1930 (though neither remarried, and he left her his entire estate when he died in 1936). Franz Boas recognized that she was now on her own and got her appointed assistant professor at Columbia in 1931; the terrible fits of depression died away; and the need for "Anne Singleton" diminished and finally disappeared.

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Above all, she now contrived to externalize and channel into anthropology the desperate issues of her own life. She had been appalled by the scrappiness and incoherence of daily living: she now began to evolve a concept of "patterns of culture" which postulated that many cultures were continually imposing greater harmony upon the most diverse components of existence and making life a more and more fully integrated work of folk art into which everything fitted smoothly in a way that reinforced the whole. She had been estranged from what she took to be the inevitable nature of life: she now asked herself if she might have been more at home in another time and culture, say in ancient Egypt. It seemed to her that many cultures could be defined in terms of a single dominant type of personality which they fostered in every conceivable way. Thus the Pueblo Indians had an "Apollonian" style of life, in Nietzsche's terminology, which imposed sobriety, decorum, and unfailing selfpossession upon even the most savage rites borrowed from other peoples; whereas the Plains Indians, often enacting the identical ceremonies, were "Dionysian," committed to the pursuit in their highest moments of intoxication, frenzy, and self-annihilation. Margaret Mead, who helped Ruth Benedict explore the implications of the new theory in 1927-28, thought that such a clear-cut delineation of monolithic cultural "personalities" would only have been possible to a scholar who had never lived amidst the booming confusion of an actual tribal situation and who had necessarily relied upon impressions that were filtered through the consciousness of native informants and other anthropologists. Ruth Benedict had turned her deafness and incapacity for rigorous field work to unexpected advantage. A necessary corollary of her theory was that every culture utilizes only one segment of the great arc of human potentialities available to it, that each culture gives people of a certain temperament the sense of belonging in their native milieu while leaving others in the position of outcasts, but that lord of creation and outcast would reverse their roles in another culture which fixed upon a different arc. Homosexuals, cataleptics, paranoids, and schizophrenics, for all their "unavailability" in European societies, were socially utilized in many cultures and sometimes placed at the acme of human esteem. Ruth Benedict warned that the most highly valued person in Western culture, the unbridled acquisitive man, might be merely another pathological type whose unbalance was masked by social approval and social outlets. The book in which these insights were em-

bodied, Patterns of Culture (1934), was still the best-known introduction to anthropology a quarter of a century after its publication. Part of the liberation conferred upon Ruth Benedict by Walter Pater had been that she need not concern herself with good works or cultivate a social conscience. When, upon the rise of Hitler to power, her idol Boas sprang to arms to combat racism, her first reaction was scornful: "He has given up science for good works. Such a waste!" However, she soon came around to his view that anthropologists had a mission to propagate sound views on race and hence an urgent role to play in contemporary society. The first product of this new awareness was her book Race: Science and Politics (1940), the most durable work of its kind but overshadowed for a time by a pamphlet written by herself and a younger anthropologist, Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (1943). When the Morale Division of the United States Army proposed to distribute the latter, Southem Congressmen created an uproar, but this only backfired and led to the eventual distribution of some 750,000 copies by private organizations. As a final indication of her irrevocable involvement in the common life, Ruth Benedict went to Washington to work in the Office of War Information from 1943 to 1945, in the field of overseas intelligence and foreign morale. Here she worked successively on Rumania, Thailand, and Japan and participated in a fundamental new departure in anthropology: the analysis of complex modern societies from a distance, through interviews with native informants living abroad and a close study of the national literature. On her departure from government service, Ruth Benedict took a leave of absence from Columbia to write the book in which all the dissonant notes of her life chimed together at last, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture ( 1946). In one sense, it was what the subtitle indicated, a further testing of her hypothesis in Patterns of Culture. It was also a moving work of art in which Ruth Benedict far transcended any eloquence that "Anne Singleton" had ever attained: a vivid portrayal of the structure of obligations to emperor, family, and self which bound the Japanese fast. The practical lesson of the book was that Japan could only be reintegrated into a peaceful world community by building upon favorable elements already present in her own culture rather than by trying to assimilate European values wholesale. In the wake of the powerful impression made by this book, Columbia University re-

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B E N N E T T , Alice (Jan. 31, 1 8 5 1 - M a y 31, 1925), physician and hospital superintendent, christened Mary Alice, was born in W r e n t h a m , Mass., the second daughter and youngest of six children of Isaac Francis Bennett, a blacksmith, and Lydia ( H a y d e n ) Bennett. H e r father was a native of W r e n t h a m , her mother of Cumberland, R.I. Alice was educated at Day's Academy in W r e n t h a m and for four years, beginning w h e n she was seventeen, t a u g h t in local district schools. In 1872 she entered the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, from which she received the M.D. degree four years later. Following her graduation, she worked in a dispensary in the slums of Philadelphia for seven months. In October 1876 she was appointed demonstrator of anatomy in the Woman's Medical College and for the next four years devoted herself to teaching and studying while maintaining a private practice. H e r continued study of anatomy led to a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1880—its first to a woman—with a dissertation on the anatomy of the forelimb of the marmoset.

ceived in 1947 a large grant from t h e Office of Naval Research to establish under R u t h Benedict's direction a program of "Research in Contemporary Cultures." A decade before, a few h u n d r e d dollars h a d not seemed contemptible in the eyes of an anthropologist; now there were hundreds of thousands of dollars in the offing. A d e c a d e before, Ruth Benedict h a d been carefully passed over as F r a n z Boas' successor; now she was presiding, though still an associate professor, over the most ambitious program of anthropological research the United States had yet seen. As if to signalize the decisive turn in her fortunes, she served as president of the American Anthropological Association in 1 9 4 7 - 4 8 ( a n d seized the opportunity to admonish her colleagues on the anthropological wisdom to b e found in great humanists like S a n t a y a n a ) . In 1948 Columbia finally capitulated and m a d e her a full professor. T h e tide of recognition caught her just in time. T h a t fall she died in N e w York City of a coronary thrombosis at sixty-one; after funeral services at the Columbia chapel, she was cremated. She h a d been a pretty child who grew into a striking woman, with strong eyebrows and a generous mouth, her hair already gray in her thirties. For some time before the end her friends had thought that she looked like death, with the flesh d r a w n taut upon her bones; b u t she h a d always thought that death was beautiful. In the last six years of her life, after Boas died in 1942, she was undoubtedly the leading American anthropologist: the first American w o m a n to become the preeminent leader of a learned profession. [Ruth Benedict's publications not cited above include: "The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America," Am. Anthropological Assoc., Memoirs, no. 29 (1923), pp. 5-97; "Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest," 23rd Internat. Cong, of Americanists, Sept. 1928, Proc., pp. 572-81; "Anthropology and the Abnormal," Jour, of General Psychology, Jan. 1934; "Primitive Freedom," Atlantic Monthly, June 1942; "Recognition of Cultural Diversities in the Postwar World," Am. Academy of Political and Social Science, Annals, July 1943; "Anthropology and the Humanities," Am. Anthropologist, Oct.-Dec. 1948 (presidential address); "Child Rearing in Certain European Countries," Am. Jour, of Orthopsychiatry, Apr. 1949. For a full bibliography of her publications see Am. Anthropologist, JulySept. 1949, which also includes an obituary article by Margaret Mead. Ruth Benedict's papers are in the Vassar College Library. These and published writings were drawn upon by Margaret Mead in compiling An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (1959), the leading primary source for Ruth Benedict's biography.] DONALD

FLEMING

In July 1880, through t h e efforts of Dr. Hiram Corson of Montgomery County, a staunch friend of women in medicine, Dr. Bennett was appointed superintendent of the women's section of the newly opened State Hospital for the Insane in Norristown, Pa. She was reportedly the first woman to hold such a position. She early undertook to abolish mechanical restraint —straitjackets, chains, and cells—in the treatment of the patients. Such measures, she contended, were ineffective: the patient's energy, checked in one direction, would readily find another outlet, with the "added impetus of resentment and desire for revenge." Restraint of this sort was also, she felt, incompatible with "moral treatment," which d e p e n d e d upon a "bond of respect between patient and attendant" (Medico-Legal Journal, I, 1884, pp. 287— 8 8 ) . Dr. Bennett's philosophy of nonrestraint and her introduction of occupational t h e r a p y handicrafts, music, and painting—in the care of the insane were imitated by other hospitals and won her widespread professional recognition. She resigned from the staff of t h e Norristown hospital in 1896, probably for reasons of health. After the turn of the century Dr. Bennett turned to other fields of medicine. She returned to W r e n t h a m , Mass., and apparently maintained a private practice there. In 1910 she began working in Dr. e m i l y b l a c k w e l l ' s New York Infirmary for W o m e n and Children, where she gave her services gratuitously for the remaining fifteen years of her life. T h e r e

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she served as head of the outpatient department of obstetrics, officiating at 2,000 births in the East Side district. Dr. Bennett wrote a number of medical papers, chiefly on the nature and characteristics of mental illness and its treatment. She was an active member of many medical associations, among them the American Medical Association, the Pennsylvania State Medical Society, the Philadelphia Neurological Society, the Philadelphia Medical Jurisprudence Society, and the Montgomery County Medical Society. In 1890, after ten years of membership, the last group elected her to its presidency, the first woman so honored. Dr. Bennett never married. A Unitarian, she was one of the original incorporators of the Spring Garden Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. She died in 1925 of angina pectoris at the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and was buried in her native Wrentham. [Frances E . Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) ; letter by Dr. Hiram Corson in Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, III ( 1 8 8 6 ) , 4 7 2 - 7 4 ; editorial in N.Y. Tribune, June 13, 1880; Alumnae Assoc. of Woman's Medical College of Pa., Transactions, 1925, p. 16, 1927, pp. 2 0 - 2 2 ; James King Hall, ed., One Hundred Years of Am. Psychiatry ( 1 9 4 4 ) ; death notice in Medical Woman's Jour., July 1925, p. 205, and obituary in N.Y. Times, June 1, 1925. Besides her annual reports, included in the Official Report of the Trustees and Officers of the State Hospital for the Insane . . . Norristown, Pa., 1 8 8 1 - 9 6 , Dr. Bennett's publications include: "Mechanical Restraint in the Treatment of the Insane," Medico-Legal Jour., I ( 1 8 8 4 ) , 2 8 5 - 9 6 , and "Relation of Heart Disease to Insanity," Medical Soc. of Pa., Transactions, 1884, pp. 1 0 3 - 2 1 . Information about Isaac Francis Bennett (sometimes listed as Francis I. Bennett) from Town Clerk, Wrentham, Mass.; see also, on his children, Vital Records of Wrentham, Mass., to the Year 1850, vols. I and II ( 1 9 1 0 ) . A biographical report by Mrs. Kathryn H. Speert, Columbia Univ. School of Library Service, was helpful.] STANLEY I.

KUTLER

B E N N E T T , Belle Harris (Dec. 3, 1852-July 20, 1 9 2 2 ) , Southern Methodist lay leader, was born at Whitehall, near Richmond, Ky., the younger daughter among eight children of Samuel and Elizabeth (Chenault) Bennett. Her father, a successful planter, was descended from "Honest John Bennett," a tailor, farmer, and Methodist preacher, who had come about 1790 from Maryland to Madison County, Ky., where he married Isabel Harris, from Virginia. Belle's great-grandfather on her mother's side, William Chenault, of French Hugue-

not descent, had moved to Kentucky from Virginia in 1786. "Homelands," the Bennett plantation, where Belle (christened Isabel) grew up, was a center of Methodist piety and gracious living. At eleven, after attending the local country grammar school, she entered Dr. Robert Breck's private school in Richmond, going on afterward to Nazareth School, near Bardstown, Ky., and then completing her schooling in College Hill, Ohio. She was an omnivorous reader, especially of history. Until she was twenty-three Belle Bennett followed a life largely devoted to social diversion; she had frequent suitors, but none who won her heart. In that year, influenced by a visiting Presbyterian evangelist, she joined the local Methodist church her family had long attended; soon afterward, with her sister, Sue, ten years her elder, she began a Sunday school for poor children of the county. A second revival in 1884 brought her a sense of "baptism of the Spirit." Attendance at a Methodist missionary meeting in 1887 impressed her with the inadequate preparation received by young women going to foreign fields. Pondering this need, she learned of the training school established in the Northern Methodist denomination by Mrs. L U C Y RIDER M E Y E R and wrote for information. In 1888, after returning from a summer assembly at Chautauqua, N.Y., she felt so positively a call to establish a missionary training school for women that she answered audibly, "Yes, Lord, I will do it." The next year she attended the meeting of the Southern Methodist Woman's Board of Foreign Missions, at the urging of a Kentucky member, and, overcoming initial timidity, presented her plea for a training school. She was at once appointed an agent of the board to collect funds for the purpose. Though taken aback by this sudden and unusual responsibility, she soon began to travel through the South, speaking in churches and camp meetings, her dignity, deep conviction, keen sense of humor, and effective use of anecdote drawing a warm response. Before the year was out Dr. Nathan Scarritt of Kansas City, Mo., had offered land and $25,000 for a building, provided the church raised an equal amount. Though some opposition developed to locating the school "so far west" and to the broadening of its scope to include the training of home as well as foreign missionaries (as Miss Bennett and Dr. Scarritt wished), this was overcome, and on Sept. 11, 1892, the Scarritt Bible and Training School was dedicated. Refusing the principalship herself, Miss Bennett helped secure a Kentucky educator, Miss Maria Layng Gibson, for the post. In 1895 Miss Bennett and Mrs. W. D.

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Wightman, vice-president of the Woman's Board of Foreign Missions, completed their successful drive for funds. Much of Belle Bennett's later work centered on home missions, in which field she helped lead her denomination into new paths. After the death, in 1892, of her sister, Sue Bennett, Belle was chosen to take her place on the central committee of the Woman's Parsonage and Home Mission Society (after 1898 the Woman's Home Mission Society). Her first work was to carry forward her sister's plan to bring education to the mountain district of southeastern Kentucky. The result was the Sue Bennett Memorial School, opened in London, Laurel County, in 1897; Belle Bennett carried the burden of its financing until 1901, often making up the deficits herself. Her major concern, however, was with the social needs of the cities. As president (1896) of the Home Mission Society and, after 1898, of its new governing body, the Woman's Board of Home Missions, Miss Bennett worked closely with Tochie Williams (Mrs. Robert W.) MacDonell, general secretary of the board from 1900, and Miss Mary Helm, editor of its organ, Our Homes. Studying problems of labor and immigration and the work of other religious and welfare organizations, they passed the information along, through leaflets, speakers, and study groups, to the women of their church in an effort to stir their sense of social justice. Miss Bennett gained further ideas when, with Miss Helm, she visited the great missions of London in 1901. In place of the denomination's few existing city missions, she and Mrs. MacDonell urged the establishment of church settlement houses with a broad social program; the first was founded in Nashville in 1901. Finding, however, that some Southern Methodists viewed the settlement movement as too secular, Miss Bennett suggested (1906) substituting the name "Wesley Community House"; eventually more than forty of these, including "Bethlehem Houses" for Negroes, were established. Other church members were undertaking cooperative homes for young working women, work with the foreign-bom in New Orleans and Galveston, with Cubans in Florida, with migrant workers in Texas, and with Orientals in California. To provide the trained women necessary for these various undertakings Miss Bennett persuaded the General Conference of 1902 to authorize the enrollment of deaconesses, under the direction of the Woman's Board. Despite initial resistance within the church to work among Negroes, she also persuaded her society to establish (1901) an industrial department for girls at the de-

nomination's Paine Institute for Negroes in Augusta, Ga. She took repeated occasion to preach against race prejudice, and after World War I assisted Dr. W. W. Alexander in enlisting Southern women in the work of the Council on Interracial Cooperation. Her personal activities reflected her social concerns. In Richmond, Ky., where she now lived, she conducted a weekly Bible study class for Negro church leaders (1900-04) and organized a Colored Chautauqua. She was an early member of the National Child Labor Committee and, from youth, a supporter of woman suffrage, having been won over by her neighbor L A U R A C L A Y , whose sister Sarah had married one of her brothers. When in 1910 the Southern Methodist women's home and foreign mission boards were united as the Woman's Missionary Council, under a largely male Board of Missions, Miss Bennett was the obvious choice for the council presidency; she held that office until her death, making the best of the loss of autonomy which the women's work had suffered. Her new duties drew her once more into foreign mission concerns. She spurred the raising of funds and led in the establishment of new mission fields, in the Belgian Congo and Japan, and of a women's college (later named for her) in Rio de Janeiro. She early became a representative of her church in interdenominational missionary conferences, and on field visits to South America and the Far East became impressed with the need for denominational cooperation. One of her last goals was the Woman's Christian Medical College, established in Shanghai under joint auspices, where the Belle H. Bennett Clinical Building was named for her in 1925. In 1906, when the Southern Methodist General Conference first broached the plan for reorganizing the women's boards, Miss Bennett and others launched a drive for full "lay rights" for women, who at that time had no voice in church councils. Her long campaign was eventually victorious with the vote of the General Conference in 1918 and ratification by twothirds of the Annual Conferences in 1919. The Kentucky Annual Conference then elected Belle Bennett as its first woman delegate to the General Conference of 1922. Illness, however, prevented her from attending, and she died of cancer that July in Richmond, Ky. She was buried in the family plot in the Richmond cemetery. In 1924 the training school she had founded was renamed Scarritt College for Christian Workers and moved to Nashville, Tenn., where a central group of buildings constitutes the Belle H. Bennett Memorial.

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Bennett [Mrs. R. W. MacDonell, Belle Harris Bennett, Her Life Work ( 1928), is the fullest account. See also: Sara Estelle Haskin, Women and Missions in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South ( 1920 ) ; Mary N. Dunn, Women and Home Missions (1936); memorial articles in Missionary Voice, Oct. 1922; Christian Advocate (Nashville, Tenn.), July 28, 1922; N.Y. Times, July 21, 1922. Death record from Ky. Bureau of Vital Statistics.] DOUGLAS H.

CHANDLER

B E N N E T T , Mary Katharine Jones (Nov. 28, 1864-Apr. 11, 1950)', churchwoman, leader in home mission and interdenominational work, was born in Englewood, N.J., the younger of two daughters of Henry Jones, a builder in comfortable circumstances, and Winifred (Davies) Jones. Both her parents were natives of North Wales. After attending the Dwight School in Englewood and the Bordentown (N.J.) Academy, Katharine, as she was known, entered Elmira College in 1881. A brilliant student, she compiled a near-perfect academic record. Graduating with the A.B. degree in 1885, she taught in both public and private schools in Englewood for several years. Religious and social work proved more appealing, however, and in 1894 she became national secretary of young people's work for the Woman's Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A. (the Northern branch ). She also served during this period on the governing board of the College Settlements Association, formed in 1890 by alumnae of several Eastern women's colleges to promote the settlement house movement. Her marriage, on July 20, 1898, only briefly interrupted her career. Her husband, Fred Smith Bennett, a resident of Englewood and a prosperous New York manufacturer and merchant, warmly supported her social and religious work, and since they had no children, domestic responsibilities were light. Though Mrs. Bennett had resigned her position with the Woman's Board of Home Missions at the time of her marriage, she was soon afterward elected a member of that board. An able public speaker, cooperative team worker, and efficient presiding officer, she became president of the Woman's Board in 1909 and served with distinction until 1923, when it merged with the Presbyterian Board of National Missions, of which she was vice-president until 1941. She also served her denomination as a corresponding member of the General Council ( 1 9 2 4 3 2 ) . As a woman of means, she was able to travel widely in the interests of home missions both in this country and abroad. She also wrote scores of articles and pamphlets on the sub-

ject, notably Home Missions and the Social Question ( 1 9 1 4 ) . Greatly interested also in the Protestant ecumenical movement, Mrs. Bennett represented her church at the founding of the interdenominational Council of Women for Home Missions, formed in 1908 to coordinate the efforts of the various women's groups in this field, and was its second president from 1916 to 1924. She was the first president of the interchurch Board for Christian Work in Santo Domingo ( 1 9 2 0 - 3 6 ) . She served on several committees of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, including the famous Commission on the Steel Strike of 1919, whose 1920 report contributed to the elimination of the twelve-hour day and to other reforms in the steel industry. She represented her communion at the worldwide Life and Work Conference at Oxford, England, in 1937. She was still active in interdenominational work at the age of seventy-six, devoting her particular attention to work with migrants and American Indians, when in 1940 the Council of Women for Home Missions merged with the Home Missions Council. Barely over five feet tall, dark-haired and brown-eyed, Mrs. Bennett was an energetic woman who found time for many local activities as well. She was the first president of the Englewood Civic Federation ( 1 9 0 1 - 1 1 ) ; president of the Woman's Club ( 1 9 0 2 - 0 6 ) ; a founder of the Englewood Forum in 1916; and, during the First World War, chairman of the local Woman's Council for National Defense. She loved to entertain and is remembered as a gracious hostess. Relaxation from her many duties was provided by reading and motoring. Though not a feminist in the usual sense, she worked toward the equal recognition of the sexes, especially in church affairs, and as an officer of the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War she cooperated with women of such national stature as C A R R I E CHAPMAN

C A T T AND J A N E

ADDAMS.

A widow in her final years, Katharine Bennett died at Englewood Hospital in 1950, at eighty-five, from a fractured hip and hypertensive cardiovascular disease. She was buried in the Jones family plot at Brookside Cemetery in her native city. She had been one of the leading churchwomen of her day. [Archival material at Board of Nat. Missions, United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., N.Y. City; obituaries in N.Y. Times, Apr. 12, 1950, and Englewood Press-Jour., Apr. 13, 1950; Durward Howes, ed., Am. Women, 1935-36; Who Was Who in America, vol. Ill (I960).]

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HANDY

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Berkeley

B E R K E L E Y , Lady Frances (1634-posf 1 6 9 5 ) , wife of three colonial governors and the central figure of the "Green Spring faction" in Virginia politics, was baptized May 27, 1634, at Hollingbourne Church, Kent, England. The youngest of the five children of Thomas and Katherine (St. Leger) Culpeper, she had important family connections in Virginia affairs at court and in the colony. Her father was one of the original patentees of the Northern Neck; her brother Alexander, of Leed's Castle, Kent, was surveyor general of Virginia, 1 6 7 1 - 9 4 ; her cousins included William Byrd, Nathaniel Bacon the Rebel, and Thomas, Lord Culpeper, who in 1680 became governor of Virginia. With her parents she came to Virginia about 1650. In 1652 she was married to Samuel Stephens of Bolthorpe, Warwickshire, who became governor of the Albemarle settlements in North Carolina and owner of Roanoke Island in October 1667. Governor Stephens died in December 1669, and about six months later his widow was married to Sir William Berkeley, the popular and powerful governor of Virginia. As mistress of Green Spring, Sir William's plantation near Jamestown, she shared with him the reputation for gracious hospitality which he had already established by opening his home to royalist émigrés during the English Civil War. Among her house guests was young Nathaniel Bacon, who as protégé of the Berkeleys quickly acquired good lands up the James River and a seat on the Council. Throughout the confusion and amidst the shifting loyalties created by Bacon's Rebellion (1676) and its aftermath, Lady Berkeley took her stand directly beside her husband and consistently used her influence in Virginia and in England to frustrate the plans of Bacon and his followers and, afterward, of the royal commissioners who were sent to Virginia to investigate Berkeley's conduct during and after the uprising. When Bacon first defied the governor, she openly expressed distrust of her kinsman's intentions and ability, charging him with falsehood and deep-dyed ingratitude. After Bacon's Indian war became rebellion, Berkeley sent his wife to court as his agent. She remained in England from the summer of 1676 until February 1677, when she returned to Virginia with Herbert Jeffreys (one of the three royal commissioners) and the thousand Redcoats who were to restore order. Bacon had died four months earlier, the rebellion had collapsed, and Berkeley's followers were busily confiscating rebel property and reclaiming their own losses while the governor quarreled with the two commissioners who had arrived in the colony ahead of Jeffreys. In May Sir William

finally obeyed the King's order to return to England; he died there in the home of his brother, Lord John, before the date of his scheduled audience with Charles II. While Lord John and Alexander Culpeper halfheartedly presented Sir William's defense in England, Lady Berkeley vigorously defended his reputation and interests in Virginia and organized an effective opposition to the party of Herbert Jeffreys, who as lieutenant governor had succeeded her husband as the colony's executive. In private meetings at her home, this "Green Spring faction," headed by Philip and Thomas Ludwell, Edward Hill, Robert Beverley, and Thomas Ballard, planned their political strategy and then carried their program through the assembly by representing themselves as spokesmen for local interests. They took the position that Jeffreys was only a deputy, first of Berkeley and then of his designated successor, Thomas, Lord Culpeper; by constant reference to Lady Berkeley's influence at court, they kept the faction in power. Since Berkeley's death his widow had been struggling with financial problems growing out of Bacon's raids, which had left her destitute of crops, livestock, and furniture, and with buildings and fences badly damaged if not destroyed. Because she believed Green Spring to be "the finest seat in America & the only tollerable place for a Governour," she planned for a time to rent the plantation to the colony and to live in England on the income, though she abandoned the latter idea after her third marriage. When the new royal governor, Lord Culpeper, arrived in 1680, she had just married Philip Ludwell. Except for short periods when Green Spring was rented to Culpeper and to a later governor, Francis Howard, Lord Effingham, the Ludwells lived there—even while Ludwell was governor of North Carolina ( 1 6 8 9 - 9 3 ) and of both Carolinas ( 1 6 9 3 - 9 4 ) . Thus her home remained a center of political activity. Gubernatorial complaints against the "Green Spring faction" disappeared after the arrival of Culpeper, who was conciliatory in politics because his real interest was in developing the Northern Neck. Governor Effingham, who took office in 1684, found all Virginia a faction against him and denounced Ludwell and Beverley as leaders of the popular party and official agents of the burgesses. "Lady Frances" (a style she continued to use) spent the winter of 1684 in England at Leed's Castle and in later years sometimes accompanied her husband on official visits at court. She was living at Green Spring in 1695, the date of her last extant letter, and she died there, leaving no descendants. Her grave at

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Jamestown may still be identified, though the inscription is only partly legible. Opponents called her arrogant, grasping, and devious, but friends trusted her and respected her judgment. Her letters, written with force and polish, reveal strength of character and proud integrity, personal warmth and tact, intense loyalty and affectionate regard for kinsmen and friends. [Fairfax Harrison, "Proprietors of the Northern Neck," Va. Mag. of Hist, and Biog., Oct. 1925, supplies genealogical data. A dozen of Lady Berkeley's letters have been found in three English manuscript collections: Coventry Papers, vols. 77 and 78, at Longleat, Wiltshire; Cunliffe-Lister Muniments, Bundle 69, at Bradford, Yorkshire; Filmer MSS., Kent Archives, Maidstone. Contemporary comments in the correspondence of kinsmen and associates appear in the same volumes of the Coventry Papers and in the Public Record Office, C.O. 1 / 3 4 - 4 8 , C.O. 5/1371. A portrait, privately owned, is reproduced in Alexander W. Weddell, ed., A Memorial Volume of Va. Hist. Portraiture, 1585-1830 ( 1 9 3 0 ) , preceding p. 91; another, erroneously identified as Lucy Higginson, is described by E. K. Meade in Clarke County Hist. Soc., Proc., Ill ( 1 9 4 3 ) , 32-39. A sketch and plat of Green Spring, 1683, is in the William Salt Library, Stafford, England.] JANE D. CARSON

BERNARDINA, Mother. See Teresa.

MATHEWS,

Ann

BERRY, Harriet Morehead (July 22, 1877Mar. 24, 1940), civic worker and public official, "mother of good roads in North Carolina," was born in Hillsborough, N.C. The daughter of John Berry, a physician, and Mary (Strayhom) Berry, and the granddaughter of Capt. John Berry, she was descended from the earliest settlers of her native Orange County. In 1883 her parents moved out of town to Sunnyside, the ancestral Berry plantation. Harriet studied under her mother's supervision until she was twelve and then for the next four years attended the Nash-Kollock School, traveling the two miles to Hillsborough over clay roads. In 1893 she enrolled at the State Normal and Industrial College (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro), where she graduated with a brilliant record four years later. For a few years after graduation she taught school. In 1900 she took a business course at the State Normal School; she later (1905) did graduate work in English and Spanish at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1901 Miss Berry joined the staff of the North Carolina State Geological and Economic

Survey. Although her early employment was as a stenographer and statistician, she was in 1904 appointed secretary of the survey. Part of her work was the preparation of numerous exhibits for the State Fair and for expositions throughout the United States. During World War I, while acting as director of the survey, she was consulted by President Wilson on the use of North Carolina minerals in the war effort. Her interest in the movement for good roads began during her years at the Geological and Economic Survey, when she was associated with Joseph Hyde Pratt, state geologist. In the vanguard of those who recognized the need for a state highway system, she emerged as the dominant force in the North Carolina Good Roads Association, organized in 1902; for fifteen years she was its secretary. Miss Berry possessed tact and judgment; she knew North Carolina thoroughly; and she was well and favorably known to thousands of people all over the state. She wrote and distributed bulletins, addressed meetings, and corresponded with leaders of public opinion. In 1920 she secured the adoption of a plank in the state Democratic platform calling for a state-constructed and state-maintained system of highways. The next year she helped write the successful bill which authorized a bond issue of $50,000,000 and provided for a statewide system of roads. The Raleigh News and Observer (Jan. 13, 1921), echoing a common estimate, gave Miss Berry credit for "one of the most stupendous pieces of legislation in the history of the state. . . . It was her bill in the beginning, and it was her indefatigable work that held the General Assembly in line until it had voted." Though her fight was successful, Miss Berry lost her post with the State Geological and Economic Survey in 1921 through a change of administration. In 1922 she was on the staff of the Greensboro Daily News, which the next year suggested her as a candidate for governor on a platform calling for the state government to assume complete operation of the public schools. From 1922 to 1924 she attempted to organize a North Carolina Chamber of Commerce with purposes almost identical with those of the later State Department of Conservation and Development. A loyal and enthusiastic Democrat, Miss Berry was a delegate-atlarge to the party's national convention in 1924. For many years she was a representative of Orange County on the Democratic state executive committee. Always interested in farmers and their problems, she returned to public service in 1925, this time in the State Department of Agriculture. At first she served

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Berry as editor of Market News, but her major work was in organizing credit unions throughout the state. From 1927 until her retirement in 1937 she was also superintendent and organizer of savings and loan associations. Harriet Berry was of medium height, slender, almost frail in appearance. She had a quiet, strong voice, an awareness of feminine dignity, and great self-confidence, and her large, always alert, hazel eyes radiated selflessness and sincerity. During her career she served as secretary of many organizations and agencies, among them the state Drainage Association, the Fisheries Association, the Southern Appalachian Good Roads Association, the American Association of State Highway Officials, and the Legislative Council of Women. During World War I she was chairman of the Liberty Bond and Thrift Stamp drive, and was a member of the committee on women in industry in North Carolina under the Council of National Defense. She supported woman suffrage for many years, for several years as chairman of the Chapel Hill Equal Suffrage League and at one time as vice-president of the state Equal Suffrage League. In religion she was an Episcopalian. She died at Chapel· Hill, N.C., in 1940 of heart trouble and complications and was buried in the local cemetery. [Hugh T. Lefler and Paul W. Wager, eds., Orange County, 1752-1952 ( 1 9 5 3 ) , p. 323; Harriet M. Berry, ed., The Development of a State Policy in Road Building in N.C. ( 1 9 2 1 ) ; Raleigh News and Observer, Jan. 13, 1921, Mar. 25, 1940; Greensboro Daily News, Aug. 9, 1923, June 2, 1926, Mar. 25, 1940; Raleigh Times, June 21, 1926; Charlotte Observer, July 4, 1937; "Roads to Fulfillment, Being a Story of the State Highway System," by Harriet M. Berry (typescript copy, n.d.); papers of Berry family in possession of Mrs. Margaret Berry Street, Huntersville, N.C.] HUGH T .

LEFLER

BERRY, Martha McChesney (Oct. 7, 1866Feb. 27, 1942), Southern educator, was born at Oak Hill, a cotton plantation near Rome, Ga., the second of five daughters and of the six children of Capt. Thomas Berry and Frances (Rhea) Berry. Her father, who had emigrated from Rockbridge County, Va., was a merchant and, after the Civil War, a planter; wiped out by the war, he had started his personal reconstruction with a loan from prewar business friends in Philadelphia. His wife, a strong-willed, managerial woman, came from a large plantation near Gadsden, Ala. From the time Martha could remember, the family was affluent. Tutored at home along with her sisters, except for a few months at the Edge-

worth Finishing School in Baltimore, she enjoyed the comparatively free life of a country girl. When she was in her early twenties her father, to whom she was always close, died leaving her a substantial estate. She was early interested in the mountain people whom she encountered on visits to the family hunting lodge on Mount Berry in the Blue Ridge range, a few miles north of Rome. Her career as an educator began one Sunday in the late 1890's when she offered to tell Bible stories to three mountain children who came upon her while she was reading in a small log-cabin retreat her father had built for her. The following Sunday the three returned with new recruits, and in a few weeks she found herself running a Sunday school for all ages. Struck by the almost total lack of educational opportunity for these people, Martha Berry determined to use her inheritance to set up a boarding school for mountain boys. Against the vigorous opposition of her family and friends, and despite the loss of a fiancé who did not share her enthusiasm, in 1902 she opened the Boys' Industrial School (later the Mount Berry School for Boys) in a log cabin furnished with dry goods boxes and odd pieces from her mother's attic. The undertaking flourished, and the Martha Berry School for Girls was added in 1909. Primarily enrolling young people of high school age, the schools stressed agricultural, vocational, and domestic skills, though a college preparatory course was later added. Since none of the pupils had much cash, Miss Berry worked out a system by which tuition could be paid in manual labor. This remained for many years the basis of the Berry schools. While the wide variety of work done by the students partly supported the schools, Martha Berry also justified it as an important part of the educational process. The schools maintained a religious atmosphere but were completely nondenominational, so much so that few students ever knew that Miss Berry herself was a devout Episcopalian. Despite various crises, including fire and flood, the Berry schools grew rapidly and began to attract national attention. Miss Berry, a builder at heart, was never satisfied with stabilizing enrollment, but continued to add buildings and students, confident that the money to support them would somehow be found. A handsome woman, small, pretty, and darkhaired in her younger days, with lively eyes and "flying feet," she early began to tap Northem philanthropy. She developed great skill in dramatizing her achievements; the careful preparations for visiting philanthropists would have done justice to a great showman. The

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success of her efforts is attested by the contrast between the simple frame structures built by the students in the early years and the magnificent Gothic-style buildings contributed in the 1920s by Henry Ford, whose total benefactions reached nearly four million dollars. In 1926 Berry College was established, and later a model practice school was added. The Berry Schools, managed by a self-perpetuating board of trustees, survived their founder; by 1960 their graduates numbered 16,000, and the physical plant comprised some 100 buildings scattered over thousands of acres. Martha Berry drove herself and her staff unmercifully and held the students to high levels of performance and behavior. The schools were run on strict, authoritarian lines, a reflection partly of the wishes of the mountain parents and partly of Miss Berry's own personality. A New Republic reporter, sent in 1934 to investigate rumors of a strike by Berry students, concluded that they were troubled less by cuts in their wages than by the need for a richer social life and less discipline and above all by the need to be treated as something other than objects of charity. It is perhaps significant that in her entry in Who's Who in America Miss Berry listed herself, not as an educator, but as a "philanthropist." In spite of her immense drive, Martha Berry was so obviously dedicated and so skillful in her approach to people that she created hundreds of devoted admirers—even among those aware of her technique of cajoling them—and not a few devoted slaves. Perhaps this was because, for all her entrepreneurial zeal, her vision was a noble one. In a poor and unschooled mountain boy she saw the potential sturdy, trained, versatile man. One of her favorite stories was of the World War I officer who wrote that there were only seven men in his platoon who could do anything, and all of them came from Berry School. She also had a vision of each Berry graduate returning to the mountains and uplifting, by example, a whole community. Like Tuskegee, which it resembled in philosophy, Berry provided an opportunity for thousands of young people to attain what Miss Berry liked to call "light and learning."

in 1939. The state of Georgia made her the first woman member of its university regents and its planning board. Miss Berry died of cancer in Atlanta at the age of seventy-five and was buried on the grounds of the Berry Schools. [There is no critical biography. Hamett Kane and Inez Henry, Miss Berry's secretary, collaborated on Miracle in the Mountains ( 1 9 5 6 ) , undocumented but based on firsthand research; the authors admire Miss Berry but do not conceal her drive for power or her methods of charming money out of wealthy pockets. Tracy Byers, The Sunday Lady of Possum Trot ( 1 9 3 2 ) , by a faculty member, is highly laudatory. Articles have appeared in numerous periodicals, beginning with Miss Berry's "A School in the Woods" in Outlook, Aug. 6, 1904; see, e.g., Good Housekeeping, Oct. 1921; American Mag., Apr. 1923; Pictorial Ree., Jan. 1929; and especially Hamilton Basso, "About the Berry Schools, An Open Letter to Miss Martha Berry," New Republic, Apr. 4, 1934. There is an extensive obituary in the N.Y. Times, Feb. 27, 1942. See also Allan Nevins and Frank E. Hill, Ford: Expansion apd Challenge, 1915-1933 ( 1 9 5 7 ) , pp. 4 9 7 98, 506; Harvey Roberts, "The Berry Schools of Georgia," Ga. Rev., Summer 1955.] ANNE FIHOH SCOTT

Her admirers ranged from Theodore Roosevelt ("This is the real thing"), William Gibbs McAdoo ("I would rather have built the Berry School than the Hudson tunnel"), and the Georgia legislators who designated her a "distinguished citizen" in 1924, to the Good Housekeeping readers who chose her one of America's twelve outstanding living American women in 1931 and the Southern farmers who voted her the "noted Southern woman of the year"

BETHUNE, Joanna Graham (Feb. 1, 1770July 28, 1860), charitable worker and leader in the "infant school" and Sunday school movements, was born at Fort Niagara, Canada, where her father, John Graham, a Scotsman, was surgeon to a British army regiment. Her mother, with whom she worked closely during her early career, was I S A B E L L A M A R S H A L L GBAHAM. Joanna, the second daughter and third of five children, grew up in Scotland, to which the family returned after her father's death in 1773. She was educated at her mother's school for small children in Paisley and at a school for young ladies which Mrs. Graham opened in Edinburgh in 1779. In 1783 Joanna joined the household of her mother's friend Lady Glenorchy, a noted Scottish evangelical reformer, who sent her for two years to a French school in Rotterdam where she prepared herself to teach. In 1789 the family moved to New York City; Joanna then taught in the highly successful school that Mrs. Graham established there. Given a careful religious upbringing by her mother, she became a member of the Cedar Street Presbyterian Church and privately vowed that she "would never connect myself in marriage with one who was not a decided Christian." After a long struggle against the temptation to a gay social life, and a serious

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Bethune attack of "nervous fever" from which she did not fully recover for many years, she was married in July 1795 to Divie Bethune, a Scottishborn friend of her mother's, a well-to-do merchant, and a member of the Cedar Street Church. Six children were born to them, of whom three lived to maturity: Jessie, who married Robert McCartee, pastor of the Irish Presbyterian Church in New York (their son Divie Bethune McCartee became a medical missionary to China); Isabella Graham, who became the wife of George Duffield, long a Presbyterian minister in Detroit; and George Washington Bethune, who had a distinguished pastorate in the Dutch Reformed Church. Divie Bethune's prosperous business enabled him to provide for his wife's mother; Mrs. Graham spent most of her latter years in their home, and the three worked together to establish many philanthropic and religious societies in New York City. It was on Mrs. Bethune's suggestion that Mrs. Graham founded in 1797 the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, of which the mother became "First Directress" or president and the daughter "Third Directress." Distressed that the society could not care for the children of widows who died, Mrs. Bethune, after reading a life of August Hermann Francke, founder of the Orphan House at Halle, Germany, took the lead in organizing, in 1806, the Orphan Asylum Society in the City of New York. She herself took the post of treasurer, securing her mother's associate Mrs. Sarah Ogden Hoffman, a woman of judgment, experience, and "commanding social position," as first directress (president) and ELIZABETH SCHUYLER H A M I L TON, widow of Alexander Hamilton, as second directress. The Orphan Asylum Society was incorporated in 1807, and was given an annual state appropriation beginning in 1811. Pledging her husband's credit for thousands of dollars, Mrs. Bethune helped the society build a house—one of the earliest orphan asylums in the United States—which through the years sheltered hundreds of children who would otherwise have been dependent on the local almshouse. She taught in the asylum's Lancasterian school until funds were available for a regular teacher and, after her mother's death in 1814, prepared Mrs. Graham's writings to be sold for the benefit of the society. Mrs. Bethune served on the Orphan Asylum Society's board for fifty years, becoming second directress (under Mrs. Hamilton) in 1821 and finally first directress (1849-56). Mrs. Bethune also took the lead in organizing, in 1814, the Society for the Promotion of Industry among the Poor, which, during the hard times following the War of 1812, set

up a House of Industry that provided work for some 500 indigent women. As early as 1801 the Bethunes had observed the Sunday school movement in Scotland while traveling for Mrs. Bethune's health, and about 1803 they apparently began, with Mrs. Graham, several Sunday schools in New York to teach reading, writing, and religion to poor adults and children. Mrs. Bethune's main effort in this cause, however, dates from 1816, the immediate impulse coming from the work of Robert Raikes in England. In that year she organized in New York the Female Union Society for the Promotion of Sabbath-Schools, an interdenominational group which brought some 8,000 children of the city into its classes. The society was eventually merged with the American Sunday-School Union (founded in 1824). For her leadership, Mrs. Bethune has been called »» "the mother of Sabbath-schools in Amerîca. On her deathbed Isabella Graham, discouraged by the little that could be done in reforming the old, had urged her daughter to devote herself to the young. After Bethune's death on Sept. 18, 1824, which left her, at fifty-four, his sole heir and manager of his business, Mrs. Bethune accordingly gave much of her time to the education and conversion of children. Having sent abroad for books explaining the theories of the Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and describing the Pestalozzian "infant schools" established in England by Samuel Wilderspin for young children of poor parents, Joanna Bethune founded an Infant School Society in New York on May 23, 1827, with the help of the New York Lancasterian educator John Griscom. About two months later she opened a free infant school; soon the society had at least nine such schools in New York, all of which she superintended and one of which (in New York's notorious Five Points district) she taught herself. These schools, which continued for over a decade, and her books on infant school instruction became widely known in religious circles, inspiring similar enterprises as far afield as Ohio (see BETSEY MIX COWLES) and Chicago (see ELIZA CHAPPELL

PORTER).

For much of her later life, beginning in 1839, Mrs. Bethune taught a Sunday school class in her home, meanwhile continuing to be active in the affairs of the Orphan Asylum. She died in New York City at the age of ninety. She was one of the first American women to devote herself to organized charity. [The principal source is George W. Bethune, Memoirs of Mrs. Joanna Bethune (1863), with an

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Bethune

appendix containing extracts from her writings. There is also material in The Power of Faith: Exemplified in the Life and Writings of the Late Mrs. Isabella Graham, of N.-Y. ( 1 8 1 6 ) ; Joanna Bethune, ed., The Unpublished Letters and Correspondence of Mrs. Isabella Graham, from the Year 1767 to 1814 ( 1 8 3 8 ) ; Mrs. Jonathan Odell et al., Origin and Hist, of the Orphan Asylum Soc. in the City of N.Y., 1806-1896 (1896), a compilation of the society's annual reports; Edwin W. Rice, The Sunday-School Movement, 17801917, and the Am. Sunday-School Union, 18171917 ( 1 9 1 7 ) , pp. 53, 5 5 - 5 9 ; and David M. Schneider, The Ilist. of Public Welfare in N.Y. State, 1609-1866 ( 1 9 3 8 ) , pp. 187-90. Some family data is to be found in the accounts of George Washington Bethune, George Duffield ( 1 7 9 4 1868), and Divie Bethune McCartee in the Diet. Am. Biog.] MARY

S.

BENSON

BETHUNE, Louise Blanchard (July 21, 1856Dec. 18, 1913), first professional American woman architect, was born in Waterloo, N.Y. Christened Jennie Louise, she was the only daughter of Dalson Wallace Blanchard and Emma Melona (Williams) Blanchard. Her father, principal of the Waterloo Union School and a mathematics instructor known for his "mental agility and accuracy," was of Huguenot descent; her mother's family had come to Massachusetts from Wales before the Revolution. Since her only brother died at an early age, Louise Blanchard grew up as an only child. Educated at home and in Buffalo High School, she showed even in girlhood, it is said, "great aptitude in planning houses and various other structures." Two years of teaching, travel, and study followed her graduation in 1874, during which she prepared for the recently opened architectural course at Cornell University. But a more traditional entrée to the profession came her way and, at twenty, she accepted a position as draftsman with the Buffalo architect Richard A. Waite, spending part of the time also with another architect, F. W. Caulkins. Her apprenticeship was productive. She read widely in Waite's architectural library and mastered the techniques of drafting and architectural design. In Waite's office, too, she met her future husband, a Canadian who had worked as draftsman with Gordon Lloyd of Detroit. In October 1881, with Robert Armour Bethune (1855-1915), Louise Blanchard opened an architectural office in Buffalo, and on Dec. 10 the partners were married, their firm becoming R. A. and L. Bethune. The province of the Bethunes was wide. They undertook designs for a variety of local buildings, from an Episcopal chapel in the

suburb of Kensington to a brick factory at Black Rock, from a grandstand and fence for the Buffalo baseball club to a veterinary stable, from a storage building to a bank, designing much of the time in the prevailing Romanesque Revival style. Although Mrs. Bethune regarded domestic architecture as "the most pottering and worst-paid work an architect ever does," her firm designed residences, apartment houses, and flats. Plans and specifications were also provided for the stores that were rising in Buffalo; a building for the merchant M. J. Byrne, a block of stores for Michael Newell, the Iroquois Door Company's plant, the Denton, Cottier & Daniels music store. If Mrs. Bethune specialized at all, it was in school buildings, of which she planned some eighteen in western New York state, the firm's most ambitious undertaking being the Lockport High School (cornerstone laid July 10, 1890). Other buildings credited to the Bethunes are the old Seventy-fourth Regiment Armory and the East Buffalo Live Stock Exchange. In 1898 they were invited to plan the 225-room Hotel Lafayette in Buffalo, which was completed in 1904 in "French Renaissance" style. A professional architect in every sense of the word, Mrs. Bethune had a thorough practical knowledge of all the details of building. Joining the Western Association of Architects in 1885, she helped organize the next year the Buffalo Society of Architects. On Apr. 4, 1888, she was elected to the American Institute of Architects—its first woman member—and the following year, when all members of the Western Association of Architects were automatically made Fellows, she became the first woman Fellow. She worked for an architects' licensing law and advocated "equal pay for equal service," which she held essential to "woman's complete emancipation." Strongly opposed to architectural competitions, she refused in 1891 to submit a design for the proposed Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition, a competition that was won by another architectural pioneer, Sophia G. Hayden (c. 1868-1953), first woman graduate of the regular architectural course at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mrs. Bethune went into semiretirement in 1890 when a third partner, William L. Fuchs, entered the firm (which now became Bethune, Bethune and Fuchs). A short, stout woman, she devoted her later years to genealogical pursuits, joining for a time the Daughters of the American Revolution. Her one child, Dr. Charles William Bethune, was born in 1883. An Episcopalian, Louise Bethune died in Buf-

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falo of "kidney trouble" and was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery. By her career she had proved that the "practical questions of actual construction," the "brick-and-mortar-rubberboot-and-ladder-climbing period of investigative education," as she once put it (Inland Architect and News Record, March 1891, p. 21), were not beyond a woman's ken, and that a woman could practice architecture with success. [Sources for Mrs. Bethune's career are scanty and scattered. Her business and personal papers have not been preserved. The author is indebted to Mr. George E. Pettengill, Librarian, Am. Inst, of Architects, for information. Among the more important sources are: Architectural Era, Aug. 1888, p. 149; Nov. 1888, p. 214; Aug. 1889, p. 179; Dec. 1889, pp. xiv and 268; Feb. 1890, p. 47; Mar. 1890, p. 64; June 1890, p. 138; Louise Bethune, "Women and Architecture," Inland Architect and News Record, Mar. 1891; Buffalo Courier, Dec. 19, 1913; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XII, 8 - 9 ; Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1 9 4 2 ) ; Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) . Other information was supplied by the Buffalo and Erie County Pub. Lib., and by the Nat. Soc. of the D.A.R. For a fuller account, see the author's We the Women ( 1963).] MADELEINE

B.

STERN

BEVIER, Isabel (Nov. 14, 1860-Mar. 17, 1942), pioneer home economics educator, was born on a farm near Plymouth in north central Ohio, the youngest of four sons and five daughters of Caleb and Cornelia (Brinkerhoff) Bevier. Both her paternal French Huguenot and maternal Dutch ancestors had settled in New York in the seventeenth century; her father was a native of Owasco, N.Y. After completing two years of high school in Plymouth, Isabel went on to the Wooster (Ohio) Preparatory School; meanwhile she had taught country school for three summers before reaching eighteen. She graduated, Ph.B., from the University (later College) of Wooster in 1885, doing her best work in languages, after which she was a principal and then a teacher, primarily of languages, in Ohio high schools. She received a master's degree in Latin and German from Wooster in 1888, the year in which the drowning of her fiancé changed the course of her life. To be near friends, she accepted a professorship of natural sciences at Pennsylvania College for Women in Pittsburgh, preparing for the vacancy by studying chemistry at Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland during the summer. The following summer a teacher there convinced her that the future for women in chemistry lay in work with food. At his rec-

ommendation she continued her education, during summers, at Harvard and at Wesleyan University, where she worked with Wilbur O. Atwater, a pioneer in agricultural chemistry and calorimetry. Under Atwater's direction, she conducted nutrition studies in Pittsburgh and among Negroes near Hampton, Va. The results, along with the results of similar research projects undertaken later at Lake Erie College, were published in Bulletins Nos. 52 (1898), 71 (1899), and 91 (1900) of the Office of Experiment Stations, United States Department of Agriculture. Dissatisfied with life in a women's college, Miss Bevier resigned her Pittsburgh post in 1897 for a year of study at Western Reserve University and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she specialized in the chemistry of food and in sanitary chemistry with E L L E N H . RICHABDS. In 1898 she became professor of chemistry at Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio. She still longed, however, for a coeducational setting in which to work out her ideas for the liberal education of women. The University of Illinois, eager to do something for its women students, called her to its faculty in 1900. The time was critical in the development of home economics as a discipline: social and economic changes were altering the role of the home, and home economics was almost entirely new as a university subject. Although other land-grant institutions with courses in the field had organized them on a cooking-school basis, Professor Bevier's insistence on providing scientific rather than merely utilitarian work was reflected in the name given her new department—Household Science. She sought to present home economics both as part of a liberal education and as professional education. The department thus was open to students in other colleges of the university besides the College of Agriculture, of which it was a part. The early curriculum was built around the study of food, shelter, and clothing, with institutional management added later. Miss Bevier's relations with the Illinois State Farmers' Institute caused her some initial difficulty. She irritated that body by refusing the request of its household science department that she offer sewing and dressmaking courses and accept an advisory committee of their number. The College of Agriculture had long relied on the Farmers' Institute to promote the legislative bills for its appropriation, and Dean Eugene Davenport recommended that the university ask for her resignation. Miss Bevier stood her ground and won the support of President Edmund J. James, who sympathized

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Bevier with her views while regarding her as deficient in tact. Apart from this crisis, which lasted from 1907 to 1910, she enjoyed the backing of administrative superiors. She alienated some colleagues by demanding rigorous admissions and academic standards. Gradually, however, she won respect within the university for her department, which graduated 630 students and gave instruction to about 5,000 during her tenure as its head. In addition to her department's excellent reputation, Miss Bevier's writings, speeches, and professional activities carried her fame throughout the state and nation. Her major publications were The Home Economics Movement (with Susannah Usher, 1906), which she greatly enlarged under the title Home Economics in Education (1924); and The House: Its Plan, Decoration and Care (1907). She co-authored three shorter works dealing with food, wrote several bulletins, circulars, and articles on home economics subjects, and served for three years on the editorial board of the Journal of Home Economics. Miss Bevier frequently addressed meetings of the Farmers' Institute and the State Federation of Women's Clubs. She originated the idea of using the thermometer for meat cookery in 1907, and the following year established a house on the campus as a laboratory for study, the first of its kind in the country. Beginning in 1900 she participated in the annual Lake Placid Conferences on Home Economics, the forerunner of the American Home Economics Association, whose second president she became in 1910. In 1915, after the Smith-Lever Act provided federal support for the activity, she became vice-director of home economics extension work in the University of Illinois. During the First World War she was chairman of the conservation department in the Illinois Council of National Defense, and she served briefly in Washington as acting chairman of the home economics committee of Herbert Hoover's Food Administration. Miss Bevier resigned from the University of Illinois in September 1921 to become chairman of the department of home economics at the University of California at Los Angeles, where she remained for two years; in 1925 she lectured for a semester at the University of Arizona. She returned to Illinois as professor of home economics in 1928, became acting vice-director of home economics extension in 1929-30, and retired in September 1930. The following year she made her fourth and final trip to Europe. She died at the age of eightyone of arteriosclerotic heart disease at her home in Urbana, 111., and was buried in the

family plot at Greenlawn Cemetery in Plymouth, Ohio. Tall and strong, with blue eyes and delicate skin that long retained a pink flush, Isabel Bevier had vitality and infectious good humor. She was a devoted Presbyterian. She enjoyed travel, good talk, and people, though some found her brusque in speech and resented the dominant role she played in conversation. Her lifework, taken up as a result of circumstances and at the initiative of others, paralleled the first years of the organized home economics movement. By translating the results of scientific research into the language of the home she helped lay the foundations of modern homemaking. Both the College of Wooster and Iowa State College conferred honorary doctorates of science upon her. At the University of Illinois, where she left funds to endow lectures on the philosophy of her subject, the home economics building bears her name. [Much of Isabel Bevier's officiai and personal correspondence, along with diaries, pictures, and a bibliography of her writings, is located in the Dept. of Home Economics in Bevier Hall at the Univ. of 111.; more of her official correspondence may be found in the papers of Presidents Andrew S. Draper and Edmund J. James in the Univ. Archives. The best autobiographical accounts are "How I Came to Take up Home Economics Work," Home Economist and Am. Food Jour., May 1928; and "The Hist, of the Dept. of Home Economics at Univ. of 111., 1900-1921" (1935), a 50-page MS. in the Home Economics Library in Bevier Hall, Univ. of 111., published in part in the Jour, of Home Economics, May 1940, pp. 291-97. The best biographical accounts are Eugene Davenport, "Home Economics at 111.," ibid., Aug. 1921; and Lita Bane and Anna R. Van Meter, "Isabel Bevier: Pioneer Home Economist," ibid., June 1942. Lita Bane, The Story of Isabel Bevier (1955), the only published biography, is adulatory and uncritical and consists largely of quotations from Miss Bevier's writings, but offers the insights of a former student and colleague. On her family background, see Katherine Bevier, The Bevier Family (1916), pp. 219-20.] W I N T O N U.

SOLBERG

BIANCO, Margery Williams (July 22, 1881Sept. 4, 1944), author of children's books, was born in London, England, the third daughter and youngest of four children of Robert and Florence (Harper) Williams. Her father, a barrister, was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford; her mother, the daughter of an Oxford librarian, shared her husband's love for books and scholarship. Williams believed that children should be taught to read early and that they needed no further training until the age of ten; Margery, separated by six years from

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Bianco her next oldest sister, spent most of her childhood reading and playing alone. Her favorite books were Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales and the three volumes of John George Wood's Illustrated Natural History. To satisfy her love for animals, she traced Wood's illustrations to make a paper zoo, until she acquired the first of her lifelong sequence of real pets, which in an appropriate zoological variety included white mice and snakes as well as dogs and cats. Later she was an avid reader of St. Nicholas magazine. Margery was six when her father and twelve-year-old sister died, a tragedy presently followed by the family's conversion from the Church of England to Catholicism. Three years later Mrs. Williams took her children for a prolonged visit to the United States, where they lived first in New York City, later on a farm in Quakertown, Pa., and finally in Philadelphia. Margery attended day school in Philadelphia and later, beginning when she was fifteen, boarded for two years at the Convent of the Holy Child in Sharon, Pa., but even this schooling was interrupted by visits to England. After her brother Owen ran away from home to live in Chicago and her sister Cecil was married to an American artist, Edward Boulton, Margery and her mother returned to London to live. There she began to write. She published her first novel in 1902, The Late Returning, about a revolution in South America. Two other novels followed, both set in southern New Jersey. At a writers' club she met Francesco Bianco, a native of Turin, Italy, who was working at Zaehnsdorf's, the famous binders and book dealers in London. They were married in 1904, and had two children: Francesco Marco (1905) and Pamela (1906). In 1907 they moved to Paris, where Bianco was in charge of the rare book department at Brentano's. They returned four years later to London, where he opened a bookshop, then moved in 1914 to Turin. There he headed a film company and served in the Italian army during World War I. After two more years in London, they settled in 1921 in the United States, making their home in New York City, where Bianco again dealt in rare books. Summers were spent in Maine, Woodstock, N.Y., Point Pleasant, N.J., and later at their own cottage in New Preston, Conn. Since her last novel Mrs. Bianco had written only a short travel book about Paris; now eager to try something different, she wrote her first children's story, The Velveteen Rabbit. Her memories of her own childhood playthings were vivid; her daughter later wrote,

"My mother always treated our toys as though they were just as real to her as they were to us" (Moore and Miller, p. 26). Published in 1922 with illustrations by William Nicholson, the English painter and engraver, the book was a kind of modern fairy tale for the children of the post-World War I generation and their parents and immediately established Mrs. Bianco as one of the foremost writers in her field. Poor Cecco, a story about her son's wooden dog, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, followed three years later. Mrs. Bianco's daughter, Pamela, whose drawings had won acclaim when she was only twelve, illustrated The Little Wooden Doll (1925) and The Skin Horse (1927). Of Margery Bianco's books of this period Louise Seaman has written: "They have an instinct for what is distinguished. They are rich in the memory of old world places, and the knowledge of classics in more than one language. They have the spirit of play, the sentiment that treasures nonsensical possessions, the humor that keeps alive a family vernacular" (Horn Book, March 1926). Mrs. Bianco's early love for real animals found expression in All about Pets (1929) and More about Animals (1934). In the 1930s, with Winterbound (1936) and Other People's Houses (1939), she was one of the first writers to attempt the psychological novel for older children. Her last book, the wartime Forward, Commandos! (1944), was for boys, written with "crisp dialogue and real understanding of boy nature" (Moore and Miller, p. 17). Margery Bianco also translated several stories from the French. In all, she was the author of some twenty children's books, as well as a frequent contributor to the Horn Book Magazine and a sensitive critic whose informal advice was valued by editors, librarians, and other writers. Little and spare, with dark blue eyes, Mrs. Bianco never lost her English accent, and continued to serve tea in an era overflowing with cocktails. "Her respect for children and their opinions was one of her strongest characteristics," wrote Anne Carroll Moore. "She agreed with Kenneth Grahame that children have just as much sense as we have; it is only experience they lack." She died suddenly in New York of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of sixty-three. Her husband survived her by two years. [Anne Carroll Moore and Bertha Mahony Miller, eds., Writing and Criticism: A Book for Margery Bianco ( 1951 ) ; Cornelia Meigs et al., A Critical Hist, of Children's Literature ( 1 9 5 3 ) ; Helen J. Ferris, ed., Writing Books for Boys and Girls (1952); Louise Seaman, "About the Biancos,"

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Horn Book Mag., 1926; Charles Norman, "To the Memory of Francesco Bianco," Literary Rev. (Teaneck, N.J.), Autumn 1957; Agnes Boulton (O'Neill), Part of a Long Story (1958), pp. 13940, 293-96.] CHARLES NORMAN

BICKERDYKE, Mary Ann Ball (July 19, 1817-Nov. 8, 1901), Civil War hospital worker, known as "Mother" Bickerdyke, was bom on a farm in Knox County, Ohio, the daughter of Hiram and Annie (Rodgers) Ball. Her paternal grandfather, David Ball, had come to Ohio from New Jersey in 1803. When Mary was seventeen months old her mother died, and until her father's remarriage several years later she was cared for by her maternal grandparents in Richland County, Ohio. At the age of twelve she went again to live with Richland County relatives, first with her grandparents and then, after their death, with a maternal uncle. In 1833 she settled in Oberlin, Ohio, where she may have taken domestic work, and a few years later moved to Hamilton County, near Cincinnati, where her uncle had settled with his family. Throughout this peripatetic childhood she received only the most rudimentary education. On Apr. 27, 1847, in Cincinnati, Mary Ann Ball was married to the forty-one-year-old Robert Bickerdyke, a widower with at least three children. A native of Yorkshire, England, Bickerdyke was by trade a sign and house painter and by avocation a bass violist. Their affairs in Cincinnati languished, and in 1856, leaving Bickerdyke's offspring with relatives in Kentucky, they moved with their two sons, James and Hiram, aged eight and six, to Galesburg, 111. Here, in March 1859, "Professor" Bickerdyke, as he was now called in recognition of his musical gifts, suddenly died. A widow with three children—a daughter, Martha, born in 1858, died at the age of t w o Mrs. Bickerdyke now supported herself by practicing "botanic" medicine, an art she may have studied in Cincinnati in the years before her marriage. The Civil War unexpectedly offered Mary Ann Bickerdyke a larger field of service. One Sunday in the spring of 1861 she and other members of the Galesburg Congregational Church were deeply stirred when their pastor, the Rev. Edward Beecher, described the appalling neglect of young Illinois volunteers suffering from typhoid and dysentery at their camp in Cairo, III. A relief fund was raised, and Mrs. Bickerdyke, now a vigorous fortythree years old, volunteered to oversee its distribution. Reaching Cairo on June 9, 1861,

she found conditions worse than reported. The filthy regimental "hospital" tents were overcrowded, sanitary arrangements primitive, and the food inadequate. Without asking anyone's leave, Mrs. Bickerdyke went to work cleaning, nursing, and feeding the sick men. Thus began four years of unceasing labor for the ailing and wounded, both in general hospitals behind the lines and at the front. She remained in Cairo for about nine months, in November 1861 becoming matron of the general hospital established after the battle of Belmont. In February 1862 she and MARY JANE SAFFORD, a young Cairo volunteer whom she had introduced to the rigors of hospital service, made five trips to the battlefield at Fort Donelson on the Sanitary Commission's hospital ship City of Memphis, helping evacuate the wounded to hospitals in Cairo and other cities. Convinced by this experience that the most pressing needs were at the front, Mrs. Bickerdyke joined forces with Grant's army as it moved up the Tennessee toward the Confederate stronghold at Corinth, Miss. For seven months after the bloody battle of Shiloh (Apr. 6 - 7 , 1862), she labored at Union field hospitals—most often simply tents scattered in the woods—in Savannah, Tenn., Farmington and Iuka, Miss., and finally in Corinth itself. Under the most adverse circumstances and with rudimentary equipment, she performed monumental feats of laundering, prepared quantities of food, distributed tons of supplies, and personally ministered to the wounded, among whom she quickly became famous as "Mother" Bickerdyke. In April 1862 she was appointed "agent in the field" by the Northwestern Sanitary Commission in Chicago, whose food and medical supplies she had been informally distributing since the early days in Cairo. One Sanitary Commission representative who visited her at Savannah, Tenn., Mrs. ELIZA C H A P P E L L PORTER, was so impressed that she became Mrs. Bickerdyke's co-worker through much of the rest of the war, her cultivation and quiet efficiency providing an effective counter to Mrs. Bickerdyke's brusque and turbulent energy. "Mother" Bickerdyke's fame on the home front dated from the battle of Fort Donelson, when a dramatic account of her midnight visit to the battlefield, looking for wounded men among the dead, was widely circulated in the Northern press. From then on, newspaper correspondents kept on her trail. Colorful and unpredictable, she was the most publicized of the woman "reliefers." The Sanitary Commission recognized the value of such a spokesman, and late in 1862, under the guidance of MARY

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Bickerdyke Mrs. Bickerdyke made the first of several Midwestern speaking tours on behalf of the commission. (She also utilized this Northern visit to place her sons, hitherto cared for by Galesburg neighbors, with a minister's family in Chicago.) The principal effect of her growing celebrity was to make her more impatient than ever with military red tape. When a surgeon asked her on whose authority she acted, she is said to have retorted: "On the authority of Lord God Almighty; have you anything that outranks that?" Lazy or corrupt medical officers and attendants infuriated her, and her efforts—often successful—to secure their dismissal generated understandable ill will. Her audacity succeeded in large part because of the firm friendships she maintained with all the principal Western commanders, including Grant, William T. Sherman, John A. Logan, and Stephen A. Hurlbut, who viewed her efforts with attitudes ranging from amused tolerance to genuine respect. Returning early in 1863 from her Northern tour, Mrs. Bickerdyke became matron of the Gayoso military hospital in Memphis, Tenn. Her principal duties involved management of the laundry, but indignation over the meager hospital diet led her to Illinois again in April 1863 on a whirlwind tour to solicit from farmers contributions of cows and chickens as a source of fresh milk and eggs for the Memphis hospitals. The Northwestern Sanitary Commission was overwhelmed by the sudden influx of farm animals, but the imperturbable Mrs. Bickerdyke successfully managed to transport the livestock to Memphis. Soon after her return from Chicago "Mother" Bickerdyke once again joined Grant's army, now besieging Vicksburg. She entered Vicksburg after its surrender on July 4, 1863, and after two months set out with Sherman's army for Chattanooga. The only woman on the scene at the battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge (Nov. 24-25), she worked in mud and freezing rain to care for the 1,700 Union wounded in the field hospital of the XVth Army Corps, foraging for food, preparing warm drinks, and trying to make the sufferers comfortable. She was joined on Jan. 1, 1864, by Eliza Porter. For the next nine months the two women worked in field hospitals near Chattanooga and at nearby Huntsville, Ala.; they then accompanied Sherman's force on its march through hostile territory toward Atlanta, their task complicated by the fact that Sanitary Commission supplies often lagged far behind. During the battle at Resaca, Ga., in May, the two women worked almost incessantly for five days, doing everything A. LIVERMORE,

from assisting at amputations to brewing barrel after barrel of coffee. From June to September Mrs. Bickerdyke worked in a tent hospital in Marietta, Ga., within sight of Atlanta, which fell on Sept. 1. She spent the following two months accompanying hospital trains north and in November again set out on a speaking tour for the Sanitary Commission. Learning in Philadelphia that Sherman's army had reached Savannah, Ga., and was preparing to march northward, she set out for Savannah by coastal steamer with a load of supplies. She disembarked at Wilmington, N.C., however, to assist a group of emaciated Union soldiers being transported north after their release from the notorious Andersonville prison, and then joined the main body of the army at Beaufort, N.C. She was there in April 1865 when the war ended. Proceeding to Washington with Sherman's triumphant forces, she was given an honored place in the great victory parade of May 24, 1865. The following March, having assisted in the demobilization of Illinois soldiers, she resigned her Sanitary Commission position. The more prosaic peacetime years offered no opportunities worthy of "Mother" Bickerdyke. In 1867, after a year as assistant superintendent of Chicago's Home for the Friendless, a charity for indigent women and children, she became involved in an ill-conceived project for settling unemployed veterans—often with no farm experience—in Kansas. Railroad interests provided free transportation for the new settlers and also helped Mrs. Bickerdyke make the down payment on a Salina boardinghouse which served both as a hotel for train passengers and as a social center for the homesteading veterans. Her venture was not a financial success, however, and after two years the railroad foreclosed her mortgage. In 1870, through her wartime co-worker Mary Safford, she secured a position as a missionary for the Protestant Board of City Missions of New York City. She moved in 1874 to the vicinity of Great Bend, Kans., where her farmer sons were living, and promptly helped relieve a locust plague by returning to Illinois to solicit foodstuffs and other contributions. Failing health sent her in 1876 to San Francisco. Here she resided for eleven years, working for the Salvation Army and other benevolent organizations and supported by a clerkship at the San Francisco mint secured for her by John A. Logan, now a Senator from Illinois. She never ceased trying to serve "her boys," the veterans; she made periodic trips to Washington to press the pension claims of men she had known at the front, and frequently visited

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in Soldiers' Homes. She helped organize the California branch of the Woman's Relief Corps, an auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic, and was often invited to reunions of the G.A.R. and the Army of the Tennessee. In 1886 Congress gave her a pension of $25 a month. Returning to Kansas in 1887, Mary Ann Bickerdyke spent her final years with her son James in Salina and Bunker Hill. She died in the latter city in 1901 at the age of eightyfour. A statue of her stands in Galesburg, 111., where she is buried in Linwood Cemetery. [The temptation to sentimentalize Mrs. Bickerdyke has been productive of much bad writing. Even the standard biography, Nina Brown Baker, Cyclone in Calico ( 1 9 5 2 ) , contains fictionalized conversation and embroidered detail, and repeats many stories first published in Mary A. Livermore's anecdotal and popularized My Story of the War ( 1 8 8 7 ) . The most valuable contemporary accounts are Sarah E. Henshaw, Our Branch and Its Tributaries ( 1 8 6 8 ) , a history of the Northwestern Sanitary Commission, and Mary H. Porter, Eliza Chappell Porter ( 1 8 9 2 ) , especially the letters reprinted on pp. 187-209. See also L. P. Brockett and Mary C. Vaughan, Woman's Work in the Civil War ( 1 8 6 7 ) , pp. 1 7 2 - 8 6 ; Mrs. A. H. [Jane C.] Höge, The Boys in Blue ( 1 8 6 7 ) ; E. V. Erlandson, "The Story of Mother Bickerdyke," Am. Jour, of Nursing, May 1920; and George W. Adams, Doctors in Blue ( 1 9 5 2 ) . ] GEORGE W . ADAMS

BINGHAM, Anne Willing (Aug, 1, 1764-May 11, 1801), Federalist society leader, was bom in Philadelphia, the eldest of thirteen children of Thomas and Anne (McCall) Willing. Both parents came of wealthy families prominent in Philadelphia society. The Willings, of English descent, had settled in America in 1728 and gone on to found one of the largest colonial mercantile houses. Although nominally Episcopalian, they were not particularly devout. Anne Willing, acclaimed as one of America's great beauties, attracted many eligible suitors, most notably William Bingham, one of the country's wealthiest men, to whom she was married when she was sixteen and he twentyeight (Oct. 26, 1780). Although one observer found him ruthless and "unsupportably disagreeable" (Journal and Correspondence of Miss Adams, I, 50), the marriage was apparently successful. A Philadelphian active in shipping, banking, landholding, and politics, Bingham served in the Continental Congress and in the United States Senate (1795-1801). The couple had three children: Ann Louisa (1782), Maria Matilda (1783), and William (1800). From May 1783 to March 1786 the Bing-

hams traveled in England and Europe, where William attracted some attention by his published letter on British commercial policy toward the United States. But it was Anne Bingham who captivated the courts of George III and Louis XVI, as well as many traveling Americans of distinction. The European trip had an important influence on Mrs. Bingham, barely into her twenties. "Vastly superior in manners and understanding to her husband" (in the judgment of ABIGAIL A D A M S ) , she was particularly impressed by the great French salons where talented women moved on terms of easy intimacy with the great of the realm. In a revealing letter to Thomas Jefferson she expressed open admiration for the "young and handsome" Marquise de Coigny, who "takes a lead in all the fashionable Dissipations of life, and at more serious moments collects at her House an assembly of the Literati, whom she charms with her knowledge and her bel Esprit. The women of France interfere in the politics of the Country, and often give a decided Turn to the Fate of Empires" (Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, XI, 1955, p. 393 ). Returning to Philadelphia, now the capital city of the new nation, Anne Willing Bingham set out to play the same role. Journals and letters of the day describe her as witty, elegantly dressed, and not averse to the use of cosmetics. She was also noted as a brilliant and sensitive, if sometimes risqué, conversationalist. The Binghams entertained lavishly at their Spruce Street mansion, an enlarged copy of the London town house of the Duke of Manchester, and impressionable Senators and Congressmen in their letters spread their hostess' fame throughout the nation. In addition to the Philadelphia mansion, the Binghams owned two country estates, Landsdowne on the Schuylkill (formerly in the hands of the Penns) and Bellevue on the Atlantic coast of New Jersey, near the mouth of the Shrewsbury River, where they initiated what became a fashionable summer resort. To these houses came the leaders of Philadelphia society, writers of travel books, and émigré Frenchmen—Talleyrand, the Duke of Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and the Duke of Orléans, who later became Louis Philippe. Personal problems at times threatened Anne Bingham's reign over Philadelphia society. Her elder daughter made a good marriage to Alexander Baring (who later, as Lord Ashburton, negotiated with Daniel Webster the treaty which settled the long-disputed northern boundary of Maine), but the younger daughter, Maria, shocked the capital by eloping at fifteen with the Comte de Tilly, forty, of bad

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Bingham character, and poor. The marriage was annulled by the legislature after the count was bribed to testify against himself. (Maria later married her brother-in-law Henry Baring and, after a divorce, a second French nobleman.) More serious were the effects of shifting political tides. In Philadelphia in the 1790's the reins of government were held by a selfconscious oligarchy of Federalist leaders, of which the Bingham household was in many ways a symbol. William Bingham was an adviser to Alexander Hamilton, and Federalist leaders, from Washington down, were frequent guests; consultations on matters of state and political intrigue intermingled with polite conversation. But the rise of Jeffersonian Republicanism brought increasing public hostility. The manager of a "democratic" theatre ostentatiously refused Anne Bingham's request for a private box, and in 1795 a mob attacked the Bingham mansion in an outburst of resentment against the Jay Treaty. Mrs. Bingham's social standing was still at its height, however, when, in the winter of 1800, she contracted "lung fever" after a sleighing party. In the hope that a change of climate might arrest her rapid decline, she sailed with her husband for Madeira, but died en route in St. George's, Bermuda, at the age of thirty-seven. She was buried there in St. Peter's Churchyard. Her husband survived her by less than three years. The Bingham children all settled in England, so that the family left no American descendants. Anne Bingham is best remembered in the diaries of diplomats and Federalist leaders, the leading figure of a fleeting but brilliant aristocracy. [Thomas Willing Balch, ed., Willing Letters and Papers ( 1 9 2 2 ) , and Rufus W. Griswold, The Republican Court ( 1 8 6 7 ) , supply the basic materials for Anne Bingham's life; see also Burton A. Konkle, Thomas Willing and. the First Am. Financial System ( 1 9 3 7 ) . The most thorough modern treatments are Margaret L. Brown, "Mr. and Mrs. William Bingham of Phila.," Pa. Mag. of Hist, and Biog., July 1937, and "Anne Willing Bingham," Bermuda Hist. Quart., July-Sept. 1949. Contemporary commentaries on Mrs. Bingham may be found in: Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., The Life and Letters of Harrison Gray Otis, vol. I (1913); Charles Francis Adams, Letters of Mrs. Adams, Wife of John Adams ( 1848); and Caroline A. DeWindt, ed., Jour, and Correspondence of Miss [Abigail] Adams, vol. I ( 1841 ). Descriptions of late eighteenth-century Phila. and the Bingham household are in Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the U.S. of America ( 1 7 9 2 ) ; and François Alexandre Frédéric de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels through the U.S. of North America, vol. II ( 1 7 9 9 ) . Herman L. Collins and Wilfred Jordan, Phila., a Story of Progress

(1941), discusses the resentment the Bingham social activities generated. Dixon Wecter, The Saga of Am. Society ( 1 9 3 7 ) , places Mrs. Bingham's social role in historical perspective.] EARL E.

LEWIS

BIRNEY, Alice Josephine McLellan (Oct. 19, 1858-Dec. 20, 1907), child welfare worker, founder and first president of the National Congress of Mothers, later the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, was born in Marietta, Ga., near Atlanta. She was the oldest of three daughters of Leander C. and Harriet (Tatem) McLellan. Her father, a small cotton planter and native of North Carolina, was of Scotch Presbyterian origin; her mother was the daughter of an English family that had emigrated to St. Croix in the West Indies. Growing up in the South amid the social and economic upheavals of the Reconstruction period, Alice enjoyed a close-knit and secure home life. To this she attributed her subsequent interest in the well-being of children, particularly acknowledging the encouragement of her mother, who after Leander McLellan's death in 1883 joined in many of her daughter's endeavors. Widely read as a girl, Alice attended a private school in Atlanta, to which her family had moved, and high school in Marietta. She was active in the Church of Our Father (Unitarian) in Atlanta and also taught school briefly. Going north for further education in 1875, she attended Mount Holyoke Seminary in Massachusetts for one year. On Feb. 26, 1879, she was married to Alonzo J. White, Jr., of Charleston, S.C., a young lawyer who was city sheriff. He died, however, of pleuropneumonia on Nov. 8, 1880, shortly before the birth of their daughter Alonsita. Alice White had had hopes for a medical career, but she now returned to Georgia to live with her mother, save for a brief period in the late 1880's spent in New York City, where she sought to support herself by selling advertising. On Dec. 6, 1892, she was married to Theodore Weld Birney, a lawyer of Washington, D.C. Birney, who had gone south for his health, was a grandson of James G. Birney, abolitionist and Liberty party presidential candidate. The couple settled in Chevy Chase, Md., a Washington suburb, where two daughters, Catherine and Lillian, were born, in 1894 and 1895. As she sought guidance in rearing her family, Mrs. Birney was appalled by the dearth of good literature on the subject and by the way the lives of many children were permanently warped through parental ignorance. She studied the works of the psychologist G. Stanley

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Hall, the kindergarten innovator Friedrich Froebel, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, and others, and in 1895, pondering how mothers could be educated and "the nation made to recognize the supreme importance of the child," she conceived the idea of a great gathering of mothers in the national capital. Encouraged by her husband, she overcame a natural timidity and successfully presented her idea in August 1895 to a group of mothers at the Chautauqua, N.Y., summer school. Her ardent publicizing of the proposal won the support of educational and civic leaders, notably the wealthy Mrs. P H O E B E A P F E R S O N H E A R S T , then living in Washington, and on Feb. 17, 1897, over 2,000 women gathered at that city for a "mothers' congress." The meeting was extensively reported by the newspapers and culminated in a White House reception for the leaders. From this gathering emerged a permanent organization, the National Congress of Mothers (after 1924 the National Congress of Parents and Teachers), with Mrs. Bimey as president. Following her husband's illness and death, in July 1897, she devoted herself to the Congress, traveling widely to encourage the formation of local mothers' clubs. A variety of causes and views had been urged at the 1897 gathering, but Mrs. Birney led the organization along the lines she believed most worthwhile: the organization of mothers into groups to engage in child study, to support local child welfare bodies, and to work for greater parent-teacher cooperation. She was convinced that to be effective the Mothers' Congress must be open to all regardless of race, religion, or social standing. She also hoped the movement would spread abroad and become a force for peace. This program was formally promulgated in a "Declaration of Principles" in April 1897 and elaborated by Mrs. Birney in an article in the Mothers Magazine in March 1898. From the first, she encouraged the establishment of state congresses to strengthen ties between parents and teachers at the local level and to promote the other goals of the Congress. In the fall of 1897 she was present in Albany when the New York Assembly of Mothers was organized (with Gov. Theodore Roosevelt's enthusiastic support) as the first state branch, to be followed by seven others during her administration. By 1899, membership had risen to 50,000. In 1902 Alice McLellan Birney resigned as president of the Mothers' Congress because of poor health and was succeeded by H A N N A H K E N T S C H O F F . She continued active, however, writing a series of articles on child rearing for

the Delineator magazine; these were later gathered together in a short book, Childhood (1905), for which G. Stanley Hall wrote an introduction. Two years later she died of cancer at Chevy Chase, Md., at the age of fortynine. After Episcopal services, she was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington. [In addition to Mrs. Birney's writings mentioned above, see "The Twentieth Century Girl: What We Expect of Her," Harper's Bazar, May 26, 1900, and, for excerpts from her 1897 address, Child Welfare, Feb. 1931. The best sketch of her life is in the Nat. Cong, of Parents and Teachers' Golden Jubilee Hist., 1897-1947 ( 1 9 4 7 ) , pp. 1 5 49. See also Helen C. Bennett and Alice D. Miller, "Making the Most of Motherhood," Good Housekeeping, Nov. 1913; Nat. Cong, of Parents and Teachers, Through the Years: From the Scrapbook of Mrs. Mears ( 1 9 3 2 ) ; Hannah K. Schoff, "Memories of Mrs. Theodore W. Birney," Child Welfare, Feb. 1930; Alonsita Walker, "My Mother," National Parent-Teacher, Feb. 1943; "The Work of the Mothers' Congress and Clubs," Coming Age, Sept. 1899, pp. 247-53. A number of articles about Mrs. Birney have appeared in the National ParentTeacher, e.g., Jan. 1935, Feb. 1942, Feb. 1960. For obituary notices see N.Y. Times and Washington Post, Dec. 21, 1907, and the Atlanta Constitution and Atlanta Jour., Dec. 22, 1907. Other information from Mrs. Birney's daughter Lillian Birney (Mrs. E. B.) Finkenstaedt, Washington, D.C.; from the registrar of Mount Holyoke College; and from Md. and Charleston, S.C., death records. The Atlanta Public Library has a large file of newspaper clippings about Mrs. Birney.] ELVENA B .

TILLMAN

BISHOP, Anna Riviere (Jan. 9, 1810-Mar. 18, 1884), singer, was born in London, England, the eldest daughter of Daniel Valentine Rivière and Henrietta (Thunder) Rivière. Her father, who came of a French family which had emigrated from Bordeaux to London at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, was a drawing master, successful enough to support and educate five sons and six daughters. Of Anna's brothers, an older one, William, and a younger, Henry, achieved some prominence as painters, as did her sister Fanny, wife of Charles E. Smith; another older brother, Robert, became a well-known bookbinder. Anna Rivière's musical talents were evident from an early age, and her mother was able to give her preliminary training. On June 12, 1824, she was elected a foundation student at the Royal Academy of Music. She studied piano under Ignaz Moscheles, who had taught Mendelssohn, and voice under the most popular English musician of the day, Henry Rowley Bishop. She continued as a student until 1831. On Apr. 20 of that year she

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Bishop made her debut as a singer at a concert of "ancient music" at the New Rooms, Hanover Square. Shortly thereafter, on July 9, she was married to Bishop, her senior by twenty-three years, less than a month after the death of his first wife. Their children were Rose, born Feb. 4, 1833, and twins, Augustus Henry and Johanna Louise, born Nov. 9, 1837. Many professional engagements followed Anna Bishop's marriage, especially at music festivals in the provincial cities. Some may have been prompted by the curiosity of audiences to see and hear the bride of the popular London composer, but her qualities as a singer must account for her part in the semichorus chosen to sing at the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838. In 1839 she went on tour with Robert Bochsa, a well-known French harpist and composer. Turning now from her earlier classical repertoire (Handel, Mozart, and Beethoven) to the Italian school, she appeared at the Queen's Theatre, Dublin, and the Adelphi Theatre, Edinburgh, in "dramatic concerts," operatic selections sung in costume and acted in character. The last of these was produced with great success at Her Majesty's Theatre in London on July 5. Early in August she left her husband and eloped with Bochsa. For seven years Anna Bishop and Bochsa remained on the Continent, avoiding only France, where Bochsa was wanted for forgery. Their appearances included Hamburg and Copenhagen in 1839, Stockholm, Uppsala, and St. Petersburg in 1840. In Moscow in 1841 Anna sang in Russian the part of Alice in Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable and went on to Nizhni Novgorod and Kazan. After further tours of Germany and Austria, she journeyed to Italy in the summer of 1843. There she was engaged for twenty-seven months at the San Carlo Opera in Naples; with Bochsa conducting, she made 327 appearances in a repertoire of twenty-four operas. A return to England in 1846 was not successful, although her appearance at Drury Lane in Michael William Balfe's Maid of Artois was well received. In mid-1847, after six months in Dublin, she sailed for America. She was first heard in New York on July 12, 1847, at a private reception held in her honor, and later in concerts with Bochsa and in a season of opera at the Park Theatre, where she was an immediate success. After a tour to Havana, Mexico, and California, she appeared again in New York, with ever-increasing popularity. At Niblo's Garden, on Nov. 1, 1852, with Bochsa conducting, she sang in the first American production of Friedrich von Flotow's Martha. The years 1854—58 took her to

San Francisco, Australia (where Bochsa died in January 1856), Chile, the Argentine, and Brazil. On her return, Sir Henry Bishop having died in 1855, she was married to Martin Schultz, a New York diamond merchant. There followed a year in England, which included an appearance in the Crystal Palace in 1858, a return to New York, and, during the next five years, many American concert engagements, though by this time the advent of other great sopranos had somewhat dimmed her luster. Seemingly indefatigable, Anna Bishop resumed her world travels in 1865, first with a return to Mexico and California. On a voyage from Honolulu to Hong Kong in 1866 she was shipwrecked on Wake Island. The survivors were able to salvage from the wreck a cask of water and a little food, and with a ship's officer as navigator they set out in two open boats, rigged with sails, for the Ladrone Islands, 1,400 miles distant. One boat was lost, but the other, carrying Mme. Bishop and Schultz, reached the island of Guam after thirteen days. Lacking music and a wardrobe, Anna Bishop nevertheless gave concerts in Manila, and, somehow reequipped, proceeded to Hong Kong, Singapore, Calcutta, and a tour of India and Ceylon (1867). She returned to New York via Australia and England. Although now past her prime, she was still in demand and undertook one more tour. On July 14, 1873, she gave the first concert at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, by invitation of the Mormon leader Brigham Young. She then went on to California and to Australia, and in September 1875 arrived in Cape Town, South Africa. To sing at Kimberley she had to travel some 500 miles by coach and cape-cart over makeshift roads and unbridged rivers. She sang a series of concerts at Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and others in Madeira en route to England. In 1880 she came back to her New York City residence and there spent her remaining years, still appearing occasionally, the last time on Apr. 20, 1883, at a Gilmore Band concert. She died the following year in New York City of apoplexy and was buried beside her son, Augustus Bishop, in St. Paul's Lutheran Cemetery, Red Hook, Dutchess County, N.Y., the birthplace of her second husband. The most traveled vocalist of her time, Anna Bishop was known chiefly for her high and brilliant voice, enormous facility, and wide-ranging repertoire. [Oscar Thompson, ed., Internat. Cyc. of Music and Musicians (5th ed., 1952); Diet. Nat. Biog., V, 89-90, and XLVIII, 334-35; George C. D. Odell, Annals of the N.Y. Stage, vols. V - X I I (1931^10);

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Travels of Anna Bishop in Mexico, 1849 ( 1852 ) ; Richard Northcott, The Life of Sir Henry R. Bishop (1920); clippings in Harvard Theatre Collection; obituaries in the Times (London), Mar. 24, 1884, and N.Y. Times, Mar. 20, 1884; death record from N.Y. City Dept. of Health; information from Mrs. Warren W. Rockefeller, Red Hook, N.Y. Anna Bishop's year of birth is apparently confirmed by a baptismal record; see Eric Blom, ed.,· Grove's Diet, of Music and Musicians (5th ed., 1954). This source and the Diet. Nat. Biog. list her as "Ann" rather than "Anna."] NATALIE STARR

PUTMAN

BISHOP, Bernice Pauahi (Dec. 19, 1831-Oct. 16, 1884), Hawaiian high chiefess and philanthropist, was born in Honolulu, the only child of Abner Paki, a royal councilor, and his wife, Konia. Both parents were of distinguished lineage and chiefly rank, the mother being a granddaughter of Kamehameha I, founder of the Hawaiian kingdom. According to a common Hawaiian custom, Bemice Pauahi was adopted at birth by another high chiefess, Kinau, a daughter of Kamehameha I and at that time kuhina nui (premier) of the kingdom. After spending her early childhood with her foster mother, Bemice was returned late in 1838 to her parents, who had meanwhile adopted another daughter, the later Queen LiLiuoKALANi. In 1839 Bernice entered the Royal School, a boarding establishment for Hawaiian children of noble family directed by an American missionary couple, Amos Starr Cooke and Juliette (Montague) Cooke; Mrs. Cooke formed a warm motherly bond with the girl. An apt pupil, Bernice learned Western ways and developed a fondness for literature and music. Mrs. Cooke described her in a letter of 1847 as "a most lovely girl—lovely in feature, form, and disposition." She remained at the Royal School until her marriage on June 4, 1850, to Charles Reed Bishop ( 1 8 2 2 - 1 9 1 5 ) . Her parents had sought to have her marry Prince Lot (later Kamehameha V ) , but she chose the young American. A native of Glens Falls, N.Y., who had come to Hawaii in 1846, Bishop was at the time of his marriage collector of customs of the port of Honolulu. He resigned this post in 1853 to enter business and in 1858 established, with a partner, Hawaii's first bank, a highly successful enterprise that brought him substantial wealth. He also served the Hawaiian government as financial adviser, privy councilor, and member of the House of Nobles. Though childless, his marriage proved unusually happy. Both husband and wife were of a serious turn of mind and spent much time in self-improvement; both had a high sense of

civic responsibility. Mrs. Bishop was a member of Kawaiahao Church (Congregational) in Honolulu, where she taught Sunday school, and vice-president of the Stranger's Friend Society, a prominent charitable organization. She also exercised a maternal supervision over a large number of her countrymen. Her high rank, poise, and conversational skill made her a social leader in the Honolulu of her day, a frequent hostess to visiting naval officers and diplomats, and a link between the native Hawaiian and American communities. On his deathbed, in December 1872, King Kamehameha V wished to name her, a Kamehameha, as his successor, but despite his urging Mrs. Bishop declined. She and her husband had visited the United States in 1866 and 1871, and in 1875 they embarked on a tour of the United States and Europe that lasted a year and a half. Mrs. Bishop succumbed to cancer in Honolulu in 1884 in her fifty-third year. Her death was followed by a day of public mourning, and she was buried in the Royal Mausoleum at Honolulu. In her memory her husband founded the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, devoted to Hawaiian and Polynesian ethnology. The year before her death Mrs. Bishop, who had previously inherited the properties of her parents, received the great landed estates of the Kamehameha family upon the death of her cousin, Princess Ruth Keelikolani. Her will left nearly all her property in trust to establish two schools stressing the practical arts, one for boys and one for girls, to be called the Kamehameha Schools. The first opened in 1887, a preparatory branch began classes the next year, and the school for girls commenced in 1894; following a policy established by the first board of trustees, which included Charles Bishop, enrollment has been limited to children of Hawaiian or part-Hawaiian aboriginal ancestry. As the principal beneficiaries of her estate, the schools have continued to grow and today rank as one of the state's leading educational institutions. [Mary H. Krout, The Memoirs of Hon. Bernice Pauahi Bishop (1908); Harold W. Kent, Charles Reed Bishop (1965); W. G. Smith, "The Banker and the Princess," San Francisco Chronicle, July 18, 1910; Wills and Deeds of Trust, Bernice P. Bishop Estate, Bernice P. Bishop Museum, Charles R. Bishop Trust (1927); Daily Pacific Commercial Advertiser (Honolulu), Oct. 17 and 28, Nov. 3, 1884; Hawaiian Gazette, Oct. 22, Nov. 5 and 12, 1884; The Friend (Hawaii), Dec. 1928 (entire issue). Mrs. Bishop's collected correspondence was lost in the San Francisco fire of 1906.]

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Bishop B I S H O P , Harriet E . (Jan. 1, 1 8 1 7 - A u g . 8, 1 8 8 3 ) , pioneer Minnesota teacher and missionary, was born in Panton, Addison County, Vt., the third of five children of Putnam and Miranda ( W r i g h t ) Bishop. Her one brother, Jesse P. Bishop, rose from the family's humble circumstances to gain distinction as a lawyer and judge in Cleveland, Ohio. Harriet early became a Baptist and determined to become a missionary. She also aspired to teach. Educated in the schools of Vergennes, Vt., and at the Fort Edward ( N . Y . ) Institute, she began her teaching career in the common schools of Essex County, N.Y. T h e Northeast, however, then had a surplus of trained and pious teachers while in the W e s t they were in short supply. Seeking wider opportunity, Harriet Bishop went to Albany in 1847 to enroll in a course, sponsored by the recently organized Board of National Popular Education, preparing teachers for service in the West. That June a letter came from the upper Mississippi requesting a female to aid the cause of religion and learning at St. Paul. Her classmates refused, but Harriet Bishop chose the hazardous Minnesota mission because she felt most needed on this fringe of civilization. She arrived in mid-July at St. Paul, then a primitive trading post among the Sioux Indians consisting of a few log structures and containing at most twenty families, of which three were American. Previously the area had supported only short-lived boarding and mission schools. In the week of July 18 Miss Bishop opened the first permanent citizen day school. Initially, only a handful out of thirty-six potential pupils came to the crude hut, where ablutions necessarily took precedence over instruction. But her school flourished, improved its location, and became a pattern for others. T h e third annual report ( 1 8 5 0 ) of the Board of National Popular Education commended her (p. 3 1 ) as a "woman of excellent mind and heart" who had "deservedly acquired great influence in the Territory." She also planted the seeds of religion. Believing herself the only Christian inhabitant, she introduced Sunday schools into Minnesota after her first week of teaching by inviting her day-school pupils to Sabbath religious instruction. From this nucleus grew the first Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches in St. Paul. A missionary she requested from the Baptist Home Mission Board came to nurture the Baptist church, and she remained an active supporter of that denomination's endeavor. Always she struggled with self-denying devotion to raise the moral tone of this isolated

frontier community, whose future, along with that of the Christian republic, she deemed to be woman's special responsibility. Active as early as 1 8 6 9 on behalf of woman suffrage, she was that year chosen a vice-president of the American Equal Rights Association. Quick in speech and resolute in action, she attacked issues on their merits alone, thereby frequently alienating the timid. She was particularly zealous in her struggle to advance the temperance movement. Miss Bishop also took up the pen, in literary efforts which reveal some ambition and a modest talent. Articles sent to Eastern newspapers sought to entice settlers by praising the attractions of Minnesota, and she published three books (one in verse) stressing the history and prospects of her adopted state. In these early years on the frontier, often illness alone imposed rest. Her likeness shows a well-formed woman with attractive features and a wistful expression framed by long brown curls. Her planned marriage to a St. Paul lawyer (probably in 1 8 5 0 ) was blocked when his sister objected that he was some years his fiancee's junior. A contemporary noted that this seemed to destroy her fine mental balance and wreck her life ( R e b e c c a Cathcart, p. 5 3 1 ) . Weariness with the struggle to improve the frontier may have impelled her to seek peace in wedlock eight years later. On Sept. 12, 1858, she was married to John McConkey, a hamessmaker and widower with four children. T h e marriage was legally dissolved on Mar 13, 1867, on grounds that her husband was a habitual drunkard who treated her inhumanly, and she legally resumed her maiden name, thereafter prefacing it with " M r s . " Her earlier prestige now diminished, Harriet Bishop gradually constricted the circle of her activities and moved briefly to California. She died in 1883 in St. Paul of "general asthenia" (weakness), and was buried there in Oakland Cemetery. Although relatively unknown at the time of her death, she had fulfilled her mission to carry nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism and culture to the Midwestern frontier. Harriet Island in the Mississippi River at St. Paul perpetuates her name and the lasting impression she made on Minnesota. [Mrs. Bishop's MS. "Hist, of the First Baptist Church of St. Paul and Societies" ( 1 8 8 0 ) is in the Minn. Hist. Soc., which also has other miscellaneous materials, including relevant information in transcripts from the N.Y. Evangelist. Under various names she published the following works, all of which contain autobiographical material: Harriet E. Bishop, Floral Home; or, First Years of Minn. ( 1 8 5 7 ) ; Harriet E. Bishop M'Conkey,

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Bisseil

Dakota War Whoop; or, Indian Massacres and War in Minn. (1863; rev. ed., 1864); Mrs. Harriet E. Bishop, Minn., Then and Now (1869). Important references to her are found in the following: Mrs. W. J. (Harriet N. K.) Arnold, ed., The Poets and Poetry of Minn. (1864); Christopher C. Andrews, ed., Hist, of St. Paul, Minn. (1890); William Cathcart, ed., The Baptist Encyc. (1881); Compendium of Hist, and Biog. of Northern Minn. (1902), on J. A. McConkey; Thomas M. Newson, Pen Pictures of St. Paul, Minn., and Biog. Sketches of Old Settlers (1886); Warren Upham and Mrs. Rose Barteau Dunlap, comps., Minn. Biogs., 1655-1912 (Minn. Hist. Soc., Collections, vol. XIV, 1912); John Fletcher Williams, A Hist, of the City of Saint Paul, and of the County of Ramsey, Minn. (1876); Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, II (1881), 381n. The most valuable articles are: Zylpha S. Morton in Minn. Hist., June 1947; James A. Briggs in Mag. of Western Hist., Jan. and Oct. 1888; Mrs. Rebecca Marshall Cathcart, "A Sheaf of Remembrances," Minn. Hist. Soc., Collections, XV (1915), 515-52; D. A. J. Baker, "Early Schools of Minn.," ibid., vol. I ( 1902 ed. ) ; Henry L. Moss, "Biog. Notes of Old Settlers," ibid., IX ( 1901 ), 143-62; Gen. Agent of the Board of Nat. Popular Education, Annual Report, 184850, 1853, 1854. An obituary from an unnamed newspaper is in the Minn. Hist. Soc. scrapbook, "Biography," I, 1866-88; another is in the Daily Minn. Tribune (Minneapolis), Aug. 9, 1883. No official record of her birth (which some references give as Jan. 1, 1818) is traceable in Vermont town, county, or state records. Her marriage and divorce are both recorded in the Ramsey County Clerk of Courts office; the special law changing her name is in Gen. Laws of the State of Minn. (1867).] WINTON U. SOLBERC

B I S S E L L , Emily Perkins (May 31, 1861-Mar. 8, 1948), social welfare worker, antisuffragist, and initiator of the antituberculosis Christmas seal in America, lived for most of her life in her birthplace of Wilmington, Del. The first daughter and second of four children of Champion Aristarcus Bissell, a banker and real estate investor, and Josephine (Wales) Bissell, she came on both sides of Connecticut ancestry. Her maternal grandfather, John Wales, had moved to Delaware, where he became a prominent lawyer, banking and insurance executive, railroad promoter, and United States Senator ( 1 8 4 9 - 5 1 ) . Emily Bissell was educated in the Wilmington schools and at a Miss Charlier's private school in New York City, where she spent part of her childhood. Her interest in social welfare work began after her return to Wilmington when a Sunday school teacher took her on visits to the homes of needy families. In 1889 she founded the West End Reading Room, which not only

sponsored the city's first free kindergarten, but also Boys' Brigades (a forerunner of the Boy Scouts), Better Babies demonstrations, a boys' gymnasium, and the first public playground m Delaware. Beginning in 1894, Emily Bissell also followed a literary bent, contributing articles, short stories, and poems, under the pen name "Priscilla Leonard," to such national journals as the Outlook and Harper's Bazar. Despite her reform interests, her writings reflected to some degree the conservatism for which her native state was already known. It should be realized, she wrote on one occasion, "that the dregs are at the bottom because they are the dregs"; and she defended the state's use of the whipping post. She was an active opponent of woman suffrage, testifying before Congressional committees and speaking in various states, often in association with Mrs. JOSEPHINE MARSHALL DODGE. In Miss Bissell's view, the ballot would add to women's burdens, lead to family discord, and double the Negro and immigrant vote; women could make their influence felt far more readily through economic pressure, church activity, and moral suasion. An exponent of temperance, she favored the policies of the Anti-Saloon League over those of the officially suffragist Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Miss Bissell's charitable work entered its most creative phase in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1904 she played an important part in organizing the Delaware chapter of the American Red Cross and became its first secretary, a post which she held for many years. This connection proved important in 1907 when her cousin Dr. Joseph P. Wales solicited her aid in an effort to maintain a small "tuberculosis shack" which he and other local physicians had built for the treatment of consumptives. Miss Bissell had read of the Danish government's practice of issuing "Christmas stamps" each year to aid in fighting tuberculosis, as described in an article by Jacob Riis in the Outlook for July 6, 1907. She obtained permission from the national Red Cross to use its symbol, and with the cooperation of a local printer, the advertising division of the Du Pont Company, and various volunteer workers, she sold the first American Christmas seals in the lobby of the Wilmington post office on Dec. 7. When it became evident that local sales of the stamps, at one cent each, could not bring in a sufficient return to save the tuberculosis shack, she promptly traveled to Philadelphia, secured the backing of an influential newspaper, the North American, and of the Pennsylvania Red Cross, and had the stamps placed on sale there, altogether

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Bisseil netting about $3,000. T h e following year, with the help of M A B E L T . BOABDMAN of the American Red Cross, Miss Bissell developed a broad national campaign which ultimately raised about $ 1 3 5 , 0 0 0 . Thereafter the issuing of Christmas seals became an annual institution, managed jointly by the Red Cross and the National Tuberculosis Association from 1910 to 1919 and afterward by the latter organization alone. Throughout the remainder of her life Miss Bissell became increasingly involved in the fight against tuberculosis. As president of the Delaware Anti-Tuberculosis Society, a position she held from 1 9 0 8 until her death, she was especially concerned with the development of Hope Farm, a home for consumptives built near Marshallton, Del., on land purchased with part of the proceeds from the 1907 Christmas stamp drive. Supported at first by both public appropriations and private donations, this institution was taken over by the state in 1925; in 1 9 5 3 it was given the name of the Emily P. Bissell Sanitorium. F o r her work against tuberculosis Miss Bissell was also awarded the Trudeau Medal of the National Tuberculosis Association in 1942, the first person outside the medical profession to receive this honor. Miss Bissell found time to take part in a variety of other causes and organizations on the local level. She was the first president ( 1 9 0 6 ) of the Consumers' League of Delaware. In 1914 she was instrumental in securing the passage of Delaware's first child labor law and of the state's first maximum-hour law for women in industry. During the period following World W a r I she was a member of the board of managers of the Service Citizens of Delaware, a group which promoted the building of new school facilities, sponsored teachers' institutes, carried on educational work among immigrants, and attempted to improve public health practices. She also served for eight years as chairman of social service for the Delaware State Federation of Women's Clubs. During the summers she vacationed at Paris Hill, Maine; here and at her home in Wilmington she collected Staffordshire and lusterware, antique furniture, clocks, and Persian cats. Once described by a newspaper reporter as "gentle . . . soft-voiced . . . and almost Victorian in her femininity," she was nevertheless "addicted to the goriest of murder mysteries." At the age of seventy-six she suffered a mild stroke which considerably restricted her activities; a second stroke ten years later resulted in her death at Delaware Hospital in Wilmington. She was buried in that city from West-

minster Presbyterian Church, of which she was a charter member. [There are collections of newspaper clippings, MSS., and other materials pertaining to the life of Emily Perkins Bissell in the Hist. Soc. of Del. and in the offices of the brokerage firm of Laird, Bissell, and Meeds, both in Wilmington. For her numerous writings, usually under her pen name, see the Outlook and Harper's Bazar, 1894-1913, especially: Outlook, Aug. 24, 1895, Jan. 11, Apr. 11, Aug. 15, 1896, and Mar. 20, 1897; Harpers Bazar, Nov. 1909 and Apr. 1910. A generous sampling of her poetry, selected largely from Outlook, is provided in Happiness and Other Verses (1928). For her antisuffrage activity, see her A Talk to Women on the Suffrage Question (N.Y. State Assoc. Opposed to Woman Suffrage, 1909), and various references in Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, vols. IV-VI ( 1 9 0 2 - 2 2 ) - s e e index. On the origins of the Christmas seal, see "Priscilla Leonard," "The Christmas Stamp in America," Outlook, Oct. 3, 1908, and Miss Bissell's "The Story of the Christmas Seal," in Birthday of the Fortieth Christmas Seal (1946); and Richard H. Shryock, Nat. Tuberculosis Assoc., 1904-1954 (1957), pp. 127-32. See also Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXXVIII, 313-14; and obituary in N.Y. Times, Mar. 9, 1948.] W. DAVID LEWIS

B I T T E N B E N D E R , Ada Matilda Cole (Aug. 3, 1 8 4 8 - D e c . 15, 1 9 2 5 ) , lawyer, suffragist, and temperance leader, was born in Macedonia, Bradford County, Pa., the daughter of Daniel and Emily A. (Madison) Cole. Both parents were Pennsylvania-bom; while her father was partly of German stock, they were mainly descended from English settlers of New England. Daniel Cole, an inventor, served as a Union soldier during the Civil W a r and died soon afterward. Following early schooling near home, Ada attended Lowell's Commercial College in Binghamton, N.Y., and graduated in 1869. She was later ( 1 8 7 4 - 7 5 ) a student at the Pennsylvania State Normal School at Bloomsburg, taught there for a year, and in 1 8 7 6 - 7 7 attended the Froebel Normal Institute in Washington, D.C. She then became principal of the model school of her alma mater at Bloomsburg, but having impaired her health through overwork, she soon resigned and returned to her mother's home. On Aug. 9, 1878, at Rome, Pa., she was married to Henry Clay Bittenbender, a young Bloomsburg lawyer and graduate of Princeton, and that November moved with him to Osceola, Nebr. Mrs. Bittenbender, who had no children, taught school for a year and then became editor of the Osceola Record, a Republican newspaper in which her husband owned an interest. She continued in that post

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Bittenbender until 1881, when she briefly edited a local journal of the Fanners' Alliance. She held several offices in the Polk County Agricultural Association and in 1881 was the first woman delegate to the State Board of Agriculture. An increasingly active feminist, she helped in the same year to organize the Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association. As its president for the year 1882, she delivered many speeches in favor of a suffrage amendment to the state constitution which was on the ballot that November. The male voters, however, rejected the proposal—partly out of fear of the prohibitionism of many Nebraska women. Mrs. Bittenbender had meanwhile been reading law under her husband's supervision. In May 1882, following an examination before a court, she became Nebraska's first woman attorney. As her husband's partner, she did not confine herself to office work but frequently made successful appearances in state and federal courts. Both Mrs. Bittenbender and her husband had early become interested in the antialcohol agitation, and after moving to the state capital, Lincoln, in December 1882, she became active in the Nebraska Woman's Christian Temperance Union, serving from 1883 to 1889 as its superintendent of temperance legislation. She drew up bills to achieve W.C.T.U. objectives, organized petition campaigns in their behalf, and lobbied successfully for compulsory temperance instruction in the schools and a ban on the sale of tobacco to children, as well as for the establishment of an institution for delinquent women, and a bill granting married women joint and equal legal guardianship over their children. She failed, however, to win either prohibition or woman suffrage in Nebraska. In 1887 Mrs. Bittenbender became superintendent of legislation and petitions for the National W.C.T.U. She now gave primary attention to federal laws and spent considerable time in Washington, D.C. In 1888 she also became attorney for the National W.C.T.U., at this time winning admission to practice before the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. Besides answering legal questions arising from the war on the liquor traffic, the handsome woman appeared repeatedly before Congressional committees to advocate bills backed by her organization. She is credited with drafting the bill, enacted in 1889, which raised the statutory age of consent for women in the District of Columbia to sixteen years. She also called, unsuccessfully, for laws prohibiting the sale of liquor in the District and in federal territories and did some of the first lobbying for nationwide constitutional

prohibition. To help achieve the latter end, she wrote The National Prohibitory Amendment Guide (1889), in which she set forth the procedure for a sweeping petition campaign. In 1890 she gave up her moderate salary as W.C.T.U. attorney to return to her home and private practice, and two years later she also relinquished her national superintendency. Back in Nebraska, Mrs. Bittenbender ran on the Prohibition party ticket for supreme court judge in 1891 and received nearly five per cent of the vote. In her later years she abandoned legal work and devoted herself to philosophical studies; in 1911 she published Tedos and Tisod: A Temperance Story, a bizarre mixture of fiction and fact in which the names of the chief characters signified "temperance daughter of saloon keeper" and "temperance son of drunkard." While she was a lifelong Presbyterian, she imparted to this book overtones of spiritualism. After seven years of widowhood, she died of pneumonia at Lincoln and was buried there at Wyuka Cemetery. [The best general sketch of Mrs. Bittenbender is in Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893). See also Ernest H. Cherrington, ed., Standard Encyc. of the Alcohol Problem, I (1925), 348-49; and B. F. Austin, ed., The Temperance Leaders of America (1896). On her suffrage activities see Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, III (1886), 687-92; IV (1902), 802, 808. For her temperance work, see her MS. "Hist, of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Nebr.," in the Nebr. Hist. Soc.; her Hist, of the Nebr. W.C.T.U. Dept. of Legislation and Petitions (1893); and her reports in the Minutes of the Nat. W.C.T.U., 1888-92. For her death and other personal data, see obituaries in Lincoln (Nebr.) Star, Dec. 15, 1925, and Lincoln State Jour., Dec. 18, 1925, and death certificate at the Nebr. Dept. of Health. Information about her husband from Princeton Univ. Archives.] FRANK L.

BYHNE

BLACK, Winifred Sweet (Oct. 14, 1863-May 25, 1936), journalist, known also as "Annie Laurie," was born in Chilton, Wis. Christened Martha Winifred, she was the fourth of five children and youngest of three daughters of Benjamin Jeffrey Sweet and Lovisa Loveland (Denslow) Sweet, both natives of upstate New York. Her father, who left his Wisconsin law practice to become a Union officer in the Civil War, achieved some celebrity when, as commander of Camp Douglas military prison in Chicago, he foiled a planned attack on the camp by Confederate agents and sympathizers. Appointed United States pension agent for Chicago in 1869, he moved with his family to

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Black a farm west of the city. He died in January 1874 in Washington, D.C., where he was serving as first deputy commissioner of internal revenue in the Grant administration, and his wife died four years later. Thereafter Winifred was brought up by her sister Ada Celeste Sweet, who from 1874 to 1885 held the federal post of pension agent in Chicago. Winifred was educated at the Sacred Heart Convent in Chicago, the Lake Forest (111.) Seminary, and Miss Burnham's Preparatory School at Northampton, Mass. A statuesque, aubum-haired beauty, Winifred Sweet first sought a stage career in New York, where through her sister's friend MABY MAPES DODGE she met a number of celebrated literary figures. Though her theatrical hopes did not materialize—in a series of road tours she never advanced beyond minor roles—a new career beckoned when the editor of the Chicago Tribune published a letter she had written to her sister describing the misadventures of an aspiring young actress, then asked for more. In 1890, having gone west to track down a younger brother who had run away from home, she secured a job as reporter on William Randolph Hearst's Son Francisco Examiner. She was married two years later (June 1892) to Orlow Black, a fellow journalist, by whom she had a son, Jeffrey; but her devotion to newspaper work continued unabated. Winifred Black entered the profession just as the sedate, impersonal style of reporting was giving way, under the impact of Joseph Pulitzer and his New York World, to a lively, hard-hitting, informal prose. Under the Examiner's managing editor, Sam S. Chamberlain, who instructed her to write for "the gripman on the cable car," she soon learned to combine simplicity and clarity with a maximum of vivid feeling. Following the custom which dictated pseudonyms for woman reporters, she chose "Annie Laurie," from her mother's favorite lullaby. In the pattern already set by Pulitzer's globe-circling "Nellie Bly" (see E L I Z A B E T H COCHBANE S E A M A N ) , "Annie Laurie" took part in a series of "stunts" and exposés, a key feature of this era of sensational journalism. On one occasion she "fainted" on a downtown street and was hauled on a horse cart to the San Francisco receiving hospital, there to be neglected and abused. Her indignant report of this experience brought hasty reforms and the purchase of a city ambulance. Her articles on "Little Jim," a crippled boy born to a prostitute in the city prison hospital, led to an Examiner campaign to provide a ward for incurables at the San Francisco Children's Hospital.

For several years she directed this and other of the newspaper's charitable projects. Brash, yet adept with people, she secured an exclusive interview with President Benjamin Harrison in Nevada in 1892, reportedly by hiding under a table aboard his campaign train. Winifred Black had the complete friendship and confidence of William Randolph Hearst; she was the one woman on his staff with access to his inner councils. She, in turn, described Hearst as "the strongest influence in my life" and "the simplest-hearted, wisest, most understanding, most forgiving, most encouraging human being it has ever been my luck to know" (Good Housekeeping, February 1936, p. 213). In 1895, when Hearst challenged Joseph Pulitzer on his own ground by purchasing the New York Journal, "Annie Laurie" was one of the Examiner stars he took east with him. She was unhappy in New York, however, and soon returned to California. Pausing in San Francisco long enough to file a divorce suit against Orlow Black (September 1897), she next secured a job with the Denver Post, a worthy rival of the Journal and the World in the field of yellow journalism. On Feb. 7, 1901, she was married to Charles Alden Bonfils, brother of Frederick G. Bonfils, co-publisher of the Post. They had two children: Eugene, who died at nine, and Winifred (later Mrs. Charles O. Barker). While maintaining her affiliation with the Post, Winifred Bonfils remained during these years a Hearst feature writer, traveling throughout America and Europe to cover political campaigns, natural disasters, sporting events (she was, it is said, the first woman to report a prize fight), and sensational trials. In 1898, when the Journal launched a crusade against Mormon polygamy, she went to Utah to interview Mormon women, filing stories published under such headlines as "Crush the Harem; Protect the Home!" Her greatest scoop came in September 1900 when—disguised as a boy to get through police linesshe became the first outside journalist, and the only woman reporter, to enter Galveston, Texas, after the storm and tidal wave that killed more than 7,000 persons. She stayed on in the city for a time, distributing relief funds collected by the Hearst papers. In 1906 she hurried to the scene of the San Francisco earthquake after receiving Hearst's one-word telegram: "Go." The following year she was one of four well-known woman reporters at the trial of Harry Thaw for the murder of Stanford White; their sentimental and extremely charitable treatment of the beautiful Evelyn Nesbit Thaw and her motives in accepting

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White's advances led a cynical male reporter to call them "the sob sisters." Mrs. Bonfils, who took great pride in her all-round professional competence, hated the nickname, but it clung to her, often in the form of the cliché that she was "the greatest sob sister of them all." Her second marriage, like her first, failed to survive her peripatetic habits. After 1909, while Charles Bonfils lived first in Kansas City as managing editor of the Kansas City Post and then in New York as a free-lance writer, the two were rarely together. They were reunited briefly in San Francisco in 1917, but "Annie Laurie" soon went off to Europe to report the war and the Versailles peace conference, and when she returned to San Francisco Bonfils had gone again to Denver; their separation thereafter was permanent. After the war Winifred Black traveled occasionally for Hearst—to Washington for the naval disarmament conference of 1921—22 and to Geneva in 1931 for an international convention on narcotics—but her later journalistic work was primarily confined to the writing of a regular column for the San Francisco Examiner. At Hearst's request she wrote a memorial biography of his mother, The Life and Personality of Phoebe Apperson Hearst (privately printed, 1928). Although nearly blind in her later years, Winifred Black remained a reporter to the end. In October 1935, at seventy-two, she took an airplane flight over Mount Shasta, an adventure she enthusiastically described in her column. Long a sufferer from diabetes and arteriosclerosis, she died the following May at her home in San Francisco's Marina district. By order of the mayor, her body lay in state in the rotunda of the city hall, and special civic exercises were conducted in her honor. After fuñera,! services in St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, she was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, Colma, Calif. While not the first woman to win success in the era of sensational journalism, she was unquestionably one of the best known and most colorful. [The numerous problems of verification which arise in tracing the career of Winifred Black are intensified, rather than resolved, by her own "Rambles through My Memories," Good Housekeeping, Jan.-May 1936. Brief biographical sketches may be found in Woman's Who's Who of America, 1 9 1 4 - 1 5 ; and Max Binheim, Women of the West (1928). On her birth date and her mother, see George M. Roberts, "The Denslow Family in America," N.Y. Genealogical and Biog. Record, July 1950; on her father, Appletons' Cyc. Am. Biog. and Bessie L. Pierce, Hist, of Chicago, II (1940), 2 8 0 - 8 1 ; on her sister Ada, Frances E.

Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) , and Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15. Useful in tracing her places of residence were Who's Who in America, 1 9 0 1 37; Denver city directories, 1 9 0 0 - 0 9 ; and San Francisco city directories, 1917 ff. On her divorce and second marriage, see San Francisco Call, Sept. 14, 1897; Denver Republican, Feb. 8, 1901; Denver Post, Aug. 25, 1955 (obituary of Charles A. Bonfils); and Gene Fowler, Timber Line: A Story of Bonfils and Tammen ( 1 9 3 3 ) . The numerous biographies of Hearst all contain relevant information and stress her close professional relations with "The Chief." Obituaries of Mrs. Black appeared on May 26, 1936, in the Denver Post, the Chronicle and Examiner in San Francisco, and the N.Y. Times. For a portrait, see Fortune, Oct. 1935, p. 135. Such general works as Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press ( 1 9 3 6 ) , and Frank L. Mott, Am. Journalism ( 1 9 4 1 ) , place her in the context of her times.] WALTON BEAN

BLACKWELL, Alice Stone (Sept. 14, 1857Mar. 15, 1950), feminist and humanitarian radical, was bom in Orange, N.J., the only child of Henry Browne Blackwell and LUCY STONE. Her father, the son of an English sugar refiner who had emigrated with his family to the United States in 1832, was a Cincinnati hardware merchant of generous reform sympathies at the time he met and married Lucy Stone, the Massachusetts-born, Oberlin-educated suffrage leader. Their celebrated partnership in the cause of woman's rights made the Stone-Blackwell home a storm center of feminine advance. Alice was enveloped in the movement from birth. Her father was a suffrage enthusiast throughout his life. His sister ELIZABETH BLACKWELL was the first woman in America to receive a medical degree. Another aunt, ANTOINETTE BROWN BLACKWELL, was the country's first ordained female minister. But it was the towering example of Lucy Stone, more than any other, which dominated her daughter's consciousness. Alice's childhood was often unsettled and lonely, owing to her father's itinerant business ventures and her mother's frequent forays for the family cause. After years of transient living in borrowed rooms and modest cottages, the Blackwells moved in 1869 from New Jersey to Boston, where Lucy Stone set to work establishing the American Woman Suffrage Association and launching her suffragist paper, the Woman's Journal. In the big family house in suburban Dorchester, Alice came of age. She was a dark-eyed, homely girl, sensitive and vulnerable, consumed by adolescent passions for schoolgirl chums and convinced—as she confided to her diary—of "total boy-ine

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Blackwell depravity." At the Newburyport, Mass., school of JANE ANDREWS, at the Harris Grammar School in Dorchester, and later at the Chauncy Hall School in Boston she excelled in imaginative composition and was an outstanding student, despite eye trouble and frequent headaches. But prizes and parental pride could not overcome her shy self-consciousness. When her mother published one of Alice's poems in the Woman's Journal in 1872, she felt only irritation, and wrote in her diary, "I do wish I could sometimes have a little fun like other girls, and live something as they do." Her private insecurity took a religious bent, and she grasped the Unitarian faith. "The God I should like to believe in," she mused, "wouldn't squash individuals for the good of the whole if it wasn't for their own good as well." An occasional flash of self-assurance revealed the woman to be. Her grammar school valedictory address was witty, unorthodox, and satisfying, and Alice told herself: "It's perhaps the first, but I don't mean it to be the last old fence I shall break through." Alice entered Boston University with the class of 1881, one of two girls among twentysix males. She carried all before her, became class president, and graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. A career was waiting. She promptly went to work in the offices of the Woman's Journal. By now her youthful resentments of the suffrage cause as a rival for her mother's attention had given way to discipleship, and "the child of the regiment," as she was called, cheerfully took her place on the line. Over the next thirty-five years, Miss Blackwell bore the main burdens of editing the country's leading woman's rights newspaper—gathering copy, reading proof, preparing book reviews, and writing long columns of crisp, hard-headed arguments for female equality. Beginning in 1887 she also edited the Woman's Column, a collection of suffrage items sent out free to newspapers around the country. Her editorial pen was spirited and sure. "When you tackle anybody, something gives way," an admirer told her, and an oldline Boston editor (no friend of woman suffrage) was once heard to remark that Alice Blackwell was the only woman in Massachusetts who could write a paragraph. Guided by her aging mother and the promptings of common sense, she meanwhile helped effect a truce in the dreary quarrel between the American Woman Suffrage Association and SUSAN B. ANTHONY'S rival National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1890 the two organizations merged, and Miss Blackwell became recording secretary of the new National

American Woman Suffrage Association, an office she held for nearly two decades. She deprecated her secretarial services to the new body and continued to shy away from platform performances. But in time she acquired a talent for lucid verbal argument, and even found debating at the State House with antisuffragists to be "rather fun." Through the long years of suffrage stalemate around the tum of the century she maintained a keen interest in the cause across the country, but her contribution was more hortatory than executive. Lucy Stone's death in 1893 emancipated her daughter from the family's prudent social conservatism, and thereafter Miss Blackwell ranged eagerly for evils to expose and underdogs to champion. She herself gave particular credit for the broadening of her interests to her friendship with the reformer ISABEL C. BARROWS ( Woman's Journal, Nov. 8, 1913, p. 357). At the Barrowses' Canadian summer camp, in 1893, she befriended a young Armenian theological student named Johannes Chatschumian. His death a few years later ended her only brush with personal romance. But his searing tales of Turkish atrocities against his people propelled her into a lifelong devotion to the cause of Armenian refugees. For years she operated an informal employment service for needy Armenians and earned the enduring gratitude of the Armenian community in America. Aroused by Czarist iniquities she joined William Dudley Foulke and George Kennan in activating the Friends of Russian Freedom and became a fast friend and supporter of Catherine Breshkovsky, the "little grandmother of the Russian Revolution." A favorite avocation of Miss Blackwell's middle years was rendering the poetry of oppressed peoples into English to widen American awareness of their aspirations. With the help of her new foreign-bom friends she translated and published the verses of Armenian, Russian, Yiddish, Hungarian, and Mexican poets, among others. Her own poetry and literary tastes remained entirely conventional. Meanwhile her affiliations steadily widened beyond the suffrage sphere to include the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Vivisection Society, the Women's Trade Union League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Peace Society. She had become an inveterate joiner of righteous causes. With the onset of World War I, her retirement from the Woman's Journal, and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, her roving spirit grew more radical. Scorning the drift of many feminists toward dutiful auxiliary ties with the two-

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party system now that the vote had been won, she urged women to remain an autonomous moral force in politics and helped start the League of Women Voters in Massachusetts. (To the sneer that woman suffrage had not brought the millennium, she later coolly replied: "There is a great deal of human nature in women.") The free-wheeling Non-Partisan League in the Midwest won her admiration, and she was crestfallen at its quick collapse. She supported La Follette for president in 1924. Meanwhile, abuses under the Espionage Act, the deportation of radicals, suppression of free speech, the rise of Mussolini, and racial discrimination at Boston University (where she sat on the board of trustees) all fired her wrath, and at least one Boston paper refused to print her militant letters because of the controversy they provoked. Postwar reaction had turned Miss Blackwell into an avowed socialist radical. "Dreamed last night I was to be hanged on a charge of 'Red' activities," ran a diary entry of April 1920. The case of Sacco and Vanzetti engrossed her from the outset. Convinced of their innocence, she avidly supported their long defense and became one of Vanzetti's most voluminous and dedicated correspondents during his years in jail. Grayhaired, fragile, and diminutive, clutching her books and brown paper lunch bag, Miss Blackwell was a familiar figure at Boston protest meetings throughout the 1920's—an indomitable relic of the New England heritage of dissent. Between sallies into Boston she bustled about the house in Dorchester or at her summer place on Martha's Vineyard, caring for her aged cousin Kitty Barry (Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell's adopted daughter) and working on her mother's biography. The publication of Lucy Stone in 1930 concluded some forty years of intermittent, reverent labor. Over the next decade she went blind, and through the dishonesty of her business agent she lost most of her invested savings. Several thousand scattered friends contributed to an annuity fund which enabled her to survive these cruel setbacks. After her cousin's death in 1936 she moved to the plain comfort of a Cambridge apartment. There, surrounded by a clutter of papers and mementos, visited by old friends and cub reporters who prized her salty observations on the passing scene, she lived into her ninety-third year. She died in Cambridge of arteriosclerotic heart disease. After cremation her ashes were placed in the Lower Columbarium at Forest Hills Cemetery, Boston. Almost six decades before, according to a cherished family legend, the dying Lucy

Stone had whispered to her, "Make the world better." She had tried. [The Alice Stone Blackwell Papers in the Library of Congress are the prime source. Other letters are in the Blackwell Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College also contains several pertinent letters. Valuable information was gleaned from Elinor Rice Hays, Morning Star: A Biog. of Lucy Stone (1961); Lois B. Merk, "Mass. and the Woman-Suffrage Movement" (microfilm, 1961, Schlesinger Library); the files of the Woman's Jour.; and a letter from Edna L. Stantial, Melrose, Mass. Biographical details appear in Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15, and N.Y. Times, Mar. 16, 1950. See also Julia Ward Howe, ed., Representative Women of New England ( 1904 ), p. 406; and Maud Wood Park in Woman Citizen, Jan. 1926. The city clerk of Cambridge, Mass., supplied a record of death. Besides her Lucy Stone, Miss Blackwell published several volumes of translated verse and edited The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution: Reminiscences and Letters of Catherine Breshkovsky (1917).] GEOFFREY

BLODGETT

B L A C K W E L L , Antoinette Louisa Brown (May 20, 1825-Nov. 5, 1 9 2 1 ) , Congregational and Unitarian minister, author and lecturer, was born in Henrietta, N.Y., the fourth daughter and seventh child of the three sons and seven daughters of Joseph and Abby (Morse) Brown. The parents were New Englanders, the mother representing the seventh generation from the Puritan Samuel Morse. Moving from his birthplace of Thompson, Conn., to the rural village of Henrietta, near Rochester, Joseph Brown farmed the land and raised his God-fearing family in an area known for its successive waves of religious enthusiasm. During Antoinette's early childhood her paternal grandmother upheld orthodox standards of piety and the Rev. Charles G. Finney's revivals inspired the conversion of Antoinette's parents and of the older children. Religiously precocious, Antoinette in 1834, at the age of nine, made a public confession of faith that persuaded the elders of the Congregational society to accept her as a church member. Her early education, although casual, showed her ability to learn and to excel. At the age of three, Nettie, as she was called, tagged along with her older brothers and sisters to the district school. Later she attended the newly established Monroe County Academy, where, with the exception of Greek, she studied the same subjects as the boys. In 1846, after she had earned money from schoolteaching in a neighboring town, father Brown indulged his bright daughter by helping her finance an education at Oberlin College. Enter-

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Blackwell ing as a member of the third-year class and graduating from the literary course (which did not award the bachelor's degree) in 1847, Antoinette then asserted her real intention: to emulate her brother Joseph and take a theological degree at Oberlin. Now at last she met with resistance from her parents and advisers. "I was reasoned with, pleaded with, and besought even with tears . . . ," she later recalled, "not to combat a beneficent order tending to promote harmony . . . in the family and in the commonwealth. . . . [M]asculine headship everywhere was held to be indispensable to morality, and grounded in the inmost fitness of things" (quoted in Hays, p. 118).

Oberlin had not formed Antoinette's aspirations but it had unintentionally strengthened them. Its principle of open admission to men and women encouraged a minority of its students to demand full equality for the women. Antoinette Brown found a particular ally in twenty-seven-year-old LUCY STONE, already an outright feminist and abolitionist. Although Lucy faltered at the idea of Antoinette's becoming a minister, they agreed that women must be permitted to take a public part in society. Failing to dissuade the determined Miss Brown from applying to the theological course, her teachers at Oberlin concluded that they could not rightfully deny her the privilege of acquiring knowledge in religious studies. The perplexed faculty showed its respect for the rebel by publishing in the Oberlin Quarterly Review her exegesis of St. Paul's admonition "Let your women keep silence in the churches," and other passages of like tenor, in which she attempted to disprove the conventional antifeminist interpretations. But, while permitting her to keep any pulpit engagements she made on her own, her ambivalent professors refused to give Antoinette a student's license to preach, and when she completed the program in 1850, she and a fellow woman student were not allowed to graduate. (In 1878 Oberlin belatedly granted her an honorary A.M. and in 1908 an honorary D.D.) During her three years of theological study Antoinette Brown had given sermons and lectures in Ohio and New York state and taught at the Rochester (Mich.) Academy; these experiences strengthened her determination, despite the contrary advice of her parents and teachers, to take a pulpit. For two years after leaving Oberlin she followed a successful career as a lecturer, speaking on woman's rights, antislavery, and temperance in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New England, and New York. (During

a temperance tour with SUSAN B. ANTHONY and she alone refused to wear the new "Bloomer" costume.) She was sometimes invited to preach in the churches of such progressive Unitarian ministers as Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Theodore Parker. To her dismay she met resistance principally from fellow clergymen, who in 1853 howled down her attempt to speak as a delegate to the World's Temperance Convention in New York. On Sept. 15, 1853, however, she was ordained as minister of the First Congregational Church in Butler and Savannah, Wayne County, N.Y., thus becoming the first ordained woman minister of a recognized denomination in the United States. Yet her pastorate did not give her the satisfaction she sought. Her views on infant damnation and other Calvinist tenets diverged radically from those of her orthodox congregants, and her long-standing bent for reading "speculative" or philosophical books now unsettled her faith. On July 20, 1854, after serving only one year, Antoinette Brown was "at her own request" dismissed from her pulpit. Consistent with her growing religious liberalism, she in time wholly severed her Congregational affiliation and became a Unitarian. She spent the year 1855 as a volunteer worker in the slums and prisons of New York City, where, working with ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS, she studied the causes of mental and social disorder among the poor (especially among women) and recorded her observations for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune in a series of articles afterward collected as Shadows of Our Social System (1856). Her life was about to enter a new stage, however. In November 1853 Samuel Charles Blackwell of Cincinnati, Ohio, whose brother Henry was soon to marry Lucy Stone, had come to South Butler for the express purpose of meeting Miss Stone's college friend. A romance followed, and on Jan. 24, 1856, at Henrietta, N.Y., Antoinette Brown and Samuel Blackwell were married, with her magistrate father officiating. The match was a happy one. Blackwell, who had encouraged his sister ELIZABETH BLACKWELL in her efforts to become a physician, similarly supported his wife's feminist principles and her other social concerns. Moreover, he, too, was becoming Unitarian in his religious outlook. A businessman, he had engaged in hardware and real estate enterprises with his brothers in Cincinnati and in other unsuccessful ventures in New York City. There, after his marriage, he became bookkeeper for Grinnell, Minturn & Company. The couple spent about a year in

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Blackwell the city before making their residence in Newark, N.J. After living for some years at various locations in and around Newark, they settled in Somerville, N.J. Antoinette Blackwell bore her husband seven children, two of whom died in infancy. The five surviving daughters were Florence, Edith, Grace, Agnes, and Ethel; among them, Edith and Ethel became doctors and Agnes an artist and teacher of art. During the first eighteen years of her marriage, while administering a busy household, Antoinette Blackwell rarely appeared on the public platform. She did, however, continue her private studies, averaging "three hours of daily habitual brain work, not including daily papers and miscellaneous light reading" (Sexes throughout Nature, p. 167). Generalizing from this experience, she insisted that for continuing personal growth women, whatever their economic circumstances, should have definite goals or interests outside their domestic responsibilities. In a paper delivered at the first congress of the Association for the Advancement of Women, in 1873, she envisaged parttime paid employment and household assistance from husbands as necessary means to this end. Her own particular intellectual interest was in the new evolutionary hypothesis and its social implications. In several books she grappled with the theories of Darwin and Spencer, seeking to square them with her own views on religion and feminism. Her first work in this philosophical vein, Studies in General Science (1869), expressed her faith in God and His goodness, finding "the highest beneficence" behind "the seeming cruelties and sufferings incident to the existing organic scheme" (p. 249). In The Sexes throughout Nature (1875), her most interesting book, she emphasized that the male perspective of Darwin and Spencer limited their analysis of "woman's place in nature" (p. 15) and argued that "the sexes in each species . . . are always true equivalents—equals but not identicals in development and in relative amounts of all normal force" (p. 11). Darwin, she concluded, had simply offered further evidence of the need for female emancipation: "Evolution has given and is still giving to woman an increasing complexity of development which cannot find a legitimate field for the exercise of all its powers within the household. There is a broader, not a higher, life outside, which she is impelled to enter . . ." (p. 135). Mrs. Blackwell returned to her earlier theme in The Physical Basis of Immortality (1876) and The Philosophy of Individuality (1893). In the latter, her most ambitious book, she

worked out a complicated cosmology reconciling mind and matter and showing "the possible emergence of the Relative from the Absolute by the intervention of Beneficent and Rational Causation" (p. iv). Her writings also include a novel, The Island Neighbors (1871), and a book of poems, Sea Drift; or Tribute to the Ocean (1902). Antoinette Blackwell reemerged briefly as a public speaker in 1878 after her husband suffered serious financial reverses. Her announcement in the Woman's Journal that she was available to take a permanent pulpit of Unitarian denomination elicited no offers, but in 1879 and 1880 she traveled throughout the country lecturing and preaching. In addition she gave support to Lucy Stone's leadership at the meetings of the American Woman Suffrage Association (founded in 1869) and contributed to the columns of the Woman's Journal, of which Henry Blackwell was editor. She also served in this period as a vice-president of JULIA WARD HOWE'S Association for the Advancement of Women, and, in one of its projects, joined MAHIA MITCHELL in encouraging and directing young women into scientific studies. Antoinette Blackwell herself had been an inspiration to many feminine aspirants for the ministry, beginning with OLYMPIA BROWN, who had heard her preach at Antioch College in the late 1850's. Mrs. Blackwell herself ordained two women ministers at Unity Church in Cleveland, Ohio: Marian Murdock in 1885 and Florence Buck in 1893. The Blackwells' circumstances improved in the 1890's, and in 1896 they returned to New York City. After Samuel Blackwell's death in October 1901, his widow lived for a time in East Orange, N.J., and then in 1905 moved again to New York City to live with two unmarried daughters, Edith and Grace. Still later she resided with her daughter Agnes (Mrs. Samuel Thomas Jones) in Elizabeth, N.J. She helped found All Souls' Unitarian Church in Elizabeth, and from 1908 until her death served as pastor emeritus; she preached her last sermon in 1915. When nearly ninety she published two condensations of her earlier philosophical works: The Making of the Universe (1914) and The Social Side of Mind and Action (1915). Her faithful attendance at suffrage meetings all over the country made her an honored figure among new generations of feminists, and in 1911 she rode in state in a Fifth Avenue suffrage parade. On Nov. 2, 1920, at the age of ninety-five, despite blindness and generally declining health, she exercised her right to vote. She died a year later at Elizabeth, N.J.; her remains were cremated.

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in Counterslip, near Bristol, England, the third daughter and third surviving child of Samuel and Hannah (Lane) Blackwell. Of the twelve Blackwell children, three died as infants; one, Anna, became a newspaper correspondent; two, Elizabeth and EMILY, pioneering woman physicians; another, Ellen, an author and artist; while two sons, Samuel and Henry, were well-known reformers whose wives were AN-

The intensity of Antoinette Brown Blackwell's religious quest and her respect for education clearly derived from her devout New England upbringing. Her natural independence and equanimity were fostered by both her secure place in a loving family and her youth in a frontier rural community. Although not an original thinker, she was unlike most of the activists of her generation in having a scholar's interest in philosophical thought and writing. Her social outlook, despite her radical steps at Oberlin and her eventual repudiation of the Congregational faith, was essentially conservative. For all her feminism, she regarded divorce as untenable. Even in her antislavery days she was never a Garrisonian abolitionist. Her perspective did not expand significantly after the Civil War, and as a result she never understood the growing problems of industrial America. For one decade of her long life, 1 8 4 6 - 5 6 , she played a dramatic role in the growing movement for woman's rights through her persistent and successful claim to a place in the ministry. What is less conspicuous but perhaps more remarkable in her story is the pattern of productive intellectual labor and social involvement she sustained as a wife, mother, and professional woman for sixty-five years after her marriage. [The Blackwell Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, contain the largest single collection of the papers of Antoinette Brown Blackwell, including family letters, correspondence from Susan B. Anthony, Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith, and Lucy Stone, journals of Samuel C. Blackwell (1835-52), memoirs of her brother the Rev. William B. Brown, and a partial typescript copy of her own memoirs, as edited by Mrs. Claude U. Gilson. The Blackwell Papers at the Library of Congress also contain valuable information. Less extensive holdings are available at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and at Syracuse Univ. For biographical information, the most useful and reliable published sources are: the sketch in Frances E. Willard and Mary A Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893); and Elinor Rice Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwells (1967). See also: Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, vols. I and II (1881); files of the Woman's Jour.; James Parton et al., Eminent Women of the Age ( 1869), pp. 389-92; and obituaries in Ν.Ύ. Times, Nov. 6, 1921, and Newark Evening News, Nov. 5, 1921. Laura Kerr, Lady in the Pulpit ( 1951 ), is a popular biography.] BARBARA M. SOLOMON

B L A C K W E L L , Elizabeth ( F e b . 3, 1821-May 31, 1 9 1 0 ) , physician, the first woman of modern times to graduate in medicine, was born

TOINETTE BROWN BLACKWELL,

first

American

woman minister, and LUCY STONE, antislavery and woman's rights leader. The elder Samuel Blackwell, a prosperous sugar refiner, was an energetic and deeply religious man. He was an active Dissenter and lay preacher in the "Independent" church, but his Puritan austerity was leavened with kindliness, humor, and tolerance. Elizabeth adored him, and he was respected even by those who held opposing views. His championship of social reform, woman's rights, temperance, and the abolition of slavery attracted other reformers among enlightened religious intellectuals, and his children were constantly exposed to their liberal and progressive ideas. The beautiful and spirited Hannah Blackwell played a strong supporting role to her husband but was also a mellowing influence. She was of a family of rich merchants, and the scale of living familiar to her had to be sternly modified upon her marriage, but music, books, and other amenities made their home bright and comfortable. Discipline was provided by Samuel's four maiden sisters who lived with them. Their home life thus nourished in the young Blackwells seeds of individuality, social consciousness, and resilience of mind and character. Because schools were poor and Dissenters' children barred from them, Samuel Blackwell engaged private tutors, who taught the girls the same subjects as the boys—a liberal departure from the custom of the day. Their education was extended by summers in the country at Olveston, nine miles from Bristol, where they developed a love for nature which to Elizabeth especially was a source of refreshment throughout life. This favorite daughter was a diminutive blonde (five feet, one inch tall), plainer than her sisters and reserved, but with resources of strength and courage which marked her as a leader even in childhood. In maturity her expressive hands and resonant voice were her most commanding features. From her early years she sought challenges which tested her powers of endurance, as if unconsciously preparing for a life of trial; as a schoolgirl she occasionally slept on the bare floor to "harden" her body.

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Social and political unrest in England and the loss of his sugar refinery by fire prompted Samuel Blackwell to move to America in 1832, when Elizabeth was eleven. A Quaker merchant helped him find a house in New York City for his family ( increased in November by the arrival of George Washington Blackwell) and quarters for a sugar refinery. Though he introduced more modern refining methods, his efforts to develop the use of beet sugar (rather than the cane variety produced by slave labor) met with scant success, and his abolitionist activities did not endear him to his business associates. The whole family took up the cause, and William Lloyd Garrison became a valued friend. After three years in New York City, the Blackwells moved across the river to Jersey City, N.J. Here they lived simply, though taking part in New York social and cultural activities, until Samuel suffered new losses in the depression of 1837. Friends encouraged him to make a fresh start in Cincinnati, where they moved in May 1838. But the hoped-for prosperity was elusive, and in August Samuel Blackwell died of a "bilious fever," leaving his close-knit family griefstricken and almost penniless. The next ten years were hard, as the older Blackwells set about earning a living and educating the younger members of the family. For four years Elizabeth maintained a private school with her mother and two elder sisters, Anna and Marian, and then went to Henderson, Ky., for a further year of teaching. But she was somewhat bored by the classroom, and the prospect of marriage, as she later admitted in her autobiography, filled her with foreboding. From girlhood she admitted she had been extremely susceptible to "the disturbing influence exercised by the other sex," but whenever she "became sufficiently intimate with any individual to be able to realise what a life association might mean," she "shrank from the prospect, disappointed or repelled." In Cincinnati, after her year in Kentucky, she was strongly drawn to a well-educated suitor, but troubled by their lack of "close and ennobling companionship." When a woman friend urged her to study medicine, the idea at first repelled her, for she "hated everything connected with the body" and from childhood had been "filled . . . with disgust" by "the physical structure of the body and its various ailments." But after "many a severe battle" she determined to seek a career in medicine and thus place a "strong barrier" between herself and matrimony. Active at this period in William Henry Channing's Unitarian society in Cincinnati, and much influenced by Swe-

denborgian and Transcendentalist thought, she did not fail to see the broader significance of her decision: "The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me" (Pioneer Work, pp. 27-29; Ross, p. 86). Teaching, for two more years (in the Carolinas, 1845-47), was now combined with intensive study of medicine, first in the library of physicianclergyman John Dickson of Asheville, N.C., and then with his brother, Samuel Dickson, a distinguished physician of Charleston, S.C. In May 1847 Elizabeth Blackwell proceeded to Philadelphia, where two liberal Quaker physicians, Joseph Warrington and William Elder, endeavored to help her realize her ambition—admission to one of the city's medical schools, considered among the nation's best. She followed her applications with personal appeals to faculty members, but although many of the physicians were impressed by her poise, attractive personality, and preparation, she was turned down by every school in Philadelphia and New York, and also by Harvard, Yale, and Bowdoin. Disheartened but still determined, she studied anatomy in the private school of Dr. Joseph M. Allen and began applying to rural medical schools. To her joy she was accepted by Geneva College in west central New York. Only later did she learn that the administration at Geneva had referred her application to the students, who had accepted it with much hilarity, supposing it a spoof perpetrated by a rival school. Miss Blackwell began her studies in November, and soon tasted the isolation and loneliness that would attend the course she had chosen. Ostracized by the townspeople as "queer" or immoral, and at first barred from classroom demonstrations, she was sustained only by the excitement of her work; but with quiet dignity and gentleness masking her iron will, she soon turned curiosity into respect. The professor of anatomy, James Webster, became a friend and defender, and the students, though occasionally rude, were in general friendly, even admiring. Unexpected admission in the summer of 1848 to the Philadelphia Hospital, part of the vast Blockley Almshouse in Philadelphia, afforded her her first practical experience with patients—and with hostile young resident physicians. An outbreak of typhus among Irish immigrant patients at Blockley provided a subject for her thesis, which in February 1849 was published in the Buffalo Medical Journal and Monthly Review. Written in a characteristically plain and forthright style unusual in an age of prolix expres-

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sensible message appealed to a number of Quaker women who attended the lectures, and through their good offices came patients and friendship with several influential QuakersStacy B. Collins, Robert Haydock, Merritt Trimble, and Samuel Willets—whose support was vital to her subsequent accomplishments. In 1853 she opened on a part-time basis a one-room dispensary in a tenement district of New York, treating two hundred poor women the first year. After several years of fund raising, she expanded this to a hospital, the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, established at 64 Bleecker Street in 1857. By this time she had two strong and capable allies in her sister Dr. Emily Blackwell, who returned from postgraduate training in Europe

sion, it emphasized the importance of sanitation and personal hygiene in combating disease, a principle which became the core of her medical philosophy. On Jan. 23, 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell received her medical degree from Geneva. Realizing that she must seek further education abroad, she went to England that April—first, however, becoming naturalized as an American citizen. In England she visited family and old friends and was cordially received in hospitals in Birmingham and London. Paris was her ultimate objective, but she was disappointed to discover that she could secure practical experience only through enrollment as a student midwife at La Maternité, a large state institution. With characteristic good humor, she made light of this frustration and found profit in the opportunities offered. Her training came to a halt, however, when she contracted purulent ophthalmia after treating a child suffering from the disease. The anguish of the following eleven months was partly physical but largely mental, for the eventual loss of sight in one eye meant abandonment of her cherished hope of becoming a surgeon. Returning to England in October 1850, she was admitted to the wards of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where her education progressed under Dr. (later Sir) James Paget and colleagues. Her pioneering spirit attracted friends in literary and scientific circles who later became loyal supporters, including the Misses Leigh Smith, Lady Noel Byron, Michael Faraday, the Herschels, and Florence Nightingale.

in

1856,

and

Dr.

MARIE

E.

ZAKRZEWSKA,

newly graduated from Western Reserve, whom Elizabeth had previously helped and encouraged. Dr. Zakrzewska became resident physician and worked with the Blackwells until she went in 1859 to Boston, where she later founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Men high in the profession—Valentine Mott, John Watson, Willard Parker, Richard S. Kissam, Isaac E. Taylor, and George P. Cammann—served as consulting physicians to the infirmary and lent it the sanction of their names. Among the trustees were Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, and Henry J. Raymond, founder of the New York Times, who gave the venture strong support in their columns.

August 1851 found her back in New York, eager to begin her medical career. For the next seven years, however, she experienced every possible discouragement. She was barred from practice in city dispensaries and hospitals, ignored by medical colleagues, and insultingly attacked in anonymous letters. Unable to find anyone who would rent decent consulting rooms to a "female physician"—a term then used by a notorious New York abortionist, Madame Restell (see ANN TROW L O H M A N ) — she was forced to buy a house (79 East 15th Street) she could ill afford. Loneliness prompted her in October 1854 to adopt Katharine Barry, a seven-year-old orphan from Randall's Island, who brightened this dark period and remained daughter, friend, housekeeper, secretary, and companion to Elizabeth Blackwell all her life. While waiting for patients she began a series of lectures outlining the principles of good hygiene, published in 1852 as The Laws of Life, with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls. Her simple and

In August 1858 Elizabeth Blackwell went to England to help advance professional opportunities for women in medicine there. She worked and lectured for a year, paying her own expenses, and in January 1859 became the first woman to have her name entered on the Medical Register of the United Kingdom. Among those inspired by her lectures was the talented Elizabeth Garrett, who became the pioneer woman physician in Britain. Dr. Blackwell returned to New York in August 1859 and was soon deep in plans for a medical college for women, a nursing school, and a chair of hygiene, the importance of which had been emphasized in her long talks with Florence Nightingale. The Civil War for a time postponed this project. Soon after the fall of Fort Sumter, Elizabeth Blackwell called a meeting of the lady managers of the infirmary to discuss the care of soldiers. There followed a large meeting at Cooper Union at which was formed the Woman's Central Association of Relief. A suggestion from this and two other groups to the Department of War in turn resulted in the

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establishment of the United States Sanitary Commission in June 1861. During the war both the Blackwell sisters were involved in the selection and training of nurses, Elizabeth as chairman of the registration committee of the W.C.A.R. The year 1868 brought the final realization of Elizabeth Blackwell's plan for a medical college and her own appointment to the first chair of hygiene. There were medical schools for women in Boston and Philadelphia, but she wanted to set higher standards than these schools could then offer, conscious that women would receive particular scrutiny from the medical profession. At the Woman's Medical College of the New York Infirmary she established entrance examinations (ten years before they were made compulsory by state law), a three-year graded course with longer terms than commonly prevailed, ample opportunity for clinical experience, and, to attest to the high caliber of the training, an examining board, independent of the faculty, appointed from among the most eminent physicians in the city. Now women could at last obtain a betterthan-average education, in an institution connected with a hospital where they could receive the necessary clinical training and experience. The school continued to function until 1899, when the Cornell University Medical School in New York opened its doors to women. Once the infirmary and college were operating successfully, Elizabeth Blackwell left them in Emily's capable hands and in 1869 returned to England, this time for the rest of her life. She soon had a large and successful practice in London, and in 1871 she and her supporters formed the National Health Society, whose hygienic goals were expressed in its motto, "Prevention is better than cure." She lent firm support to Elizabeth Garrett, who had founded a London dispensary for women, and to another young woman physician, Sophia Jex-Blake, who ultimately opened a medical school for women in Edinburgh. In 1875 Dr. Blackwell accepted the chair of gynecology in the New Hospital and London School of Medicine for Women, which had grown out of Miss Garrett's dispensary. But she suffered from "biliary colic," and after one year of lecturing, realizing that her health would not permit continued strenuous work, she reluctantly retired to a house on the sea at Hastings. Here she and Kitty Barry spent the next thirty years, enjoying trips to the Continent and visits from her family, to whom she had remained close. She made one more trip to America, in 1906, when eighty-six. From the first, Elizabeth Blackwell had

viewed her medical training as a steppingstone to work for moral reform, and she now utilized her greater leisure to speak out on the issues which concerned her. In Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of Their Children (1878), The Human Element in Sex (1884), and a number of essays, articles, and lectures, she combated the popular notion that the "double standard" of morality was rooted in physiological necessity, and urged an end to prostitution. Her temerity in presuming to write on such taboo subjects aroused shocked comment in Victorian England. Her Counsel to Parents was initially rejected by twelve publishers, and Dr. Blackwell had to have it privately printed; later, through the instrumentality of friends, it was reissued through regular publishing channels. In other writings she urged higher standards of hygiene and sanitation and criticized what she believed to be the excessive use of surgery in medical practice. Not all her views were soundly based. She was a vocal opponent of vaccination because of the death of a young patient from infection early in her professional life, and her hostility to animal experimentation made her unable to appreciate the work of Claude Bernard, Pasteur, Koch, and others. But despite these negative stands, and although she made no direct contribution to medical science, her stress on the importance of preventive medicine, sanitation, and public health, and her willingness to speak out on problems of sexual behavior were in advance of her time. That her interests were never narrowly medical is shown by her acquaintance with such varied figures as Herbert Spencer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Eliot, and George Henry Lewes. Returning in her later years to the Episcopal Church (of which she had been a member before her conversion to Unitarianism ), she was influenced by her friend Charles Kingsley to espouse Christian Socialism, an early version of the social gospel then being formulated by Kingsley and other liberal Anglicans. In her pamphlet Christian Socialism (1882) she called for the application of Christian principles to contemporary problems, and specifically for a more just distribution of income, greater governmental efficiency, workers' insurance, and the establishment of agrarian communities by Christian joint-stock companies. In 1902 she had been won by the beauty of a quiet spot in the Highlands of Scotland— Kilmun on Holy Loch in Argyllshire—and each summer thereafter she and Miss Barry returned there. In 1907 she fell headlong downstairs at Kilmun and never fully recovered

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from the shock. She died three years later at Hastings, but was buried by her own request at Kilmun, where a handsome Celtic cross marks her grave. [Basic sources are Elizabeth Blackwell's autobiography, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895), later reprinted in Everyman's Library, 1914, with a bibliography of her writings and a supplementary chapter by Robert Cochrane; and her Essays in Medical Sociology ( 2 vols., 1902), which contains her major publications and addresses. Though a popularized work, the principal biography remains Ishbel Ross, Child of Destiny (1944). Elizabeth Blackwell is treated in detail also in Elinor Rice Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwell(1967). Likewise useful are the annual catalogues of the Woman's Medical College of the N.Y. Infirmary and the following articles and pamphlets: N.Y. Academy of Medicine, In Memory of Dr. Elizabeth and Dr. Emily Blackwell ( 1 9 1 1 ) ; sketches by her niece, Alice Stone Blackwell, in Woman's Jour., June 12, 1909, and June 4, 1910; Malcolm S. Johnston, Elizabeth Blackwell and Her Alma Mater ( 1 9 4 7 ) ; Victor Robinson, "Elizabeth Blackwell," Medical Life, July 1928; Samuel Sanes, "Elizabeth Blackwell; Her First Medical Publication," Bull, of the Hist, of Medicine, June 1944; Laurence G. Roth, "Elizabeth Blackwell—1821-1910," Yale Jour, of Biology and Medicine, Oct. 1947; Annie Sturges Daniel, " Ά Cautious Experiment.' The Hist, of the N.Y. Infirmary for Women and Children and the Women's Medical College of the N.Y. Infirmary," Medical Woman's Jour., May 1939-Dec. 1942; Annis Gillie, "Elizabeth Blackwell and the 'Medical Register* from 1858," British Medical Jour., Nov. 22, 1958. Blackwell Family Papers (diaries, correspondence, etc. ) are in the Library of Congress and the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. The Columbia Univ. Library has 149 letters of Elizabeth Blackwell to her friend Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. The N.Y. Infirmary has her certificate of citizenship, issued at Philadelphia on Apr. 13, 1849.] ELIZABETH H. THOMSON

B L A C K W E L L , Emily (Oct. 8, 1 8 2 6 - S e p t . 7, 1 9 1 0 ) , pioneering woman physician, was born in Bristol, England, the sixth child and fourth daughter of the nine surviving children of Samuel and Hannah ( L a n e ) Blackwell. Among her older sisters was ELIZABETH BLACKWELL, the first woman of modern times to receive a medical degree. Although only five when her family moved to America and eleven when her father died in 1838, she was exposed to the stimulating and enlightened atmosphere which Samuel Blackwell, a sugar refiner, reformer, and Dissenting lay preacher, created for his children and which the older ones provided for the younger after his death. T h e family, which had moved from New Jersey to Cincinnati,

Ohio, shortly before Blackwell's death, took up residence in 1844 at nearby Walnut Hills, on the grounds of Lane Theological Seminary, founded by Lyman Beecher. There Henry Ward Beecher and HARRIET BEECHER STOWE were among their friends. Redheaded Emily was painfully shy and retiring, though she gradually developed a confidence to match her tall, sturdy appearance. A good student, like her sisters mostly taught at home, she loved reading, played the piano well, performed scientific experiments in the attic of the Blackwell home, and was deeply fond of nature, having a near-professional knowledge of birds and flowers. In 1848, having decided to follow Elizabeth into medicine, she began reading under Dr. John Davis, demonstrator in anatomy at the Medical College of Cincinnati. To earn money for her education she took teaching posts at Henderson, Ky., and later at Cincinnati, though she disliked teaching and expressed her impatience in her diary: "Oh, for life instead of stagnation. I long with such an intense longing for freedom, action, for life, and truth. . . ." Elizabeth gave her advice and every encouragement, but at the same time warned her: "A blank wall of social and professional antagonism faces the woman physician that forms a situation of singular and painful loneliness, leaving her without support, respect or professional counsel." Neither this nor the fact that she was turned down by eleven medical schools, including Elizabeth's alma mater in Geneva, N.Y., altered Emily Blackwell's determination. In the summer of 1852, after an unsuccessful trip to Dartmouth Medical School, she obtained, with Elizabeth's help and the influence of their friend Horace Greeley, the chance to walk the wards at New York's Bellevue Hospital. Finally accepted by Rush Medical College in Chicago, she began attending lectures in October 1852. But the State Medical Society censured Rush for admitting a woman, and its doors were closed to her after the first year. Emily Blackwell again spent the summer with Elizabeth in New York, gaining in her sister's charity dispensary what practical experience she could. As autumn approached she was happily admitted to the medical college of Western Reserve University in Cleveland for her second year. In March 1854, following her graduation with honors from Western Reserve, Emily Blackwell sailed for Britain, where she was accepted as a student by Sir James Young Simpson in Edinburgh. Sir James was then stirring up a storm in the medical world by his use of chloroform in childbirth, and with him Emily

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gained valuable experience. In return she made Greek and Latin translations for him. She declined an invitation from Florence Nightingale to join in her nursing work in the Crimea, and from Edinburgh went to London, Paris, Berlin, and finally to Franz von Winckel's clinic in Dresden. Backed by Sir James' unqualified recommendation, she was able to gain access to clinics and hospitals for observation. In 1856, after two good years of postgraduate study, she returned to New York to join her sister. Elizabeth Blackwell was still struggling to win recognition and earn a living. Since most of the house she had bought had to be rented for necessary income, they slept in the attic and ate in the cellar. With Emily's help and the backing of Quaker friends, Dr. Elizabeth was now able to enlarge her dispensary into a hospital, chartered as the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, which could afford women the opportunity of consulting physicians of their own sex and provide clinical experience for women physicians. Emily's rich endowment of administrative ability and practical sense were invaluable in converting a rented house into a hospital of sixteen beds, modeled after the Children's Hospital in London where she had worked under Dr. William Jenner. Emily was responsible for the surgery, but nursing, housekeeping, and other duties were also part of the early days, not to mention benefits, fairs, and other fundraising expedients. Devoting her full time to the infirmary, Emily Blackwell did not maintain a private practice. When Elizabeth went to England for a year in 1858 and M A R I E ZAKRZEWSKA departed soon after for Boston, Emily was left in complete charge. That spring she and one of the women trustees traveled to Albany to urge that the infirmary be placed on the list of institutions receiving state support. By stating their case informally to a number of influential men before the matter came to a vote in the legislature, they secured for the infirmary not only financial assistance ($1,000 a year) but a measure of official recognition. So ably did Emily Blackwell manage the hospital that larger quarters were soon required, and in 1860, the year after Elizabeth returned from England, they moved to a house on Second Avenue and Eighth Street. The annual report for that year records that 3,680 patients were treated—130 in the infirmary, the rest in the dispensary. In 1866 a "sanitary visitor" was appointed to give care and instruction in simple principles of hygiene to the indigent in their homes; this Out-Practice or Tenement House Service was the earliest instance of medical social service in the United

States. Four-month courses for nurses were started in 1858, lengthened to two years in 1885, and reorganized and enlarged in 1894. In 1868, under Elizabeth Blackwell's direction, a medical school was established at the infirmary to provide for women a level of training that was available nowhere else. With Elizabeth's move to England a year later, the full responsibility for the infirmary and college fell upon Emily Blackwell. For the next thirty years she served as dean and professor of obstetrics and diseases of women (later gynecology). Among other members of the distinguished faculty were M A R Y P U T N A M J A C O B I and Elizabeth Cushier, a brilliant graduate of the college who became eminent in gynecological surgery. By 1874 the institution had again outgrown its quarters, and Emily Blackwell once more adapted a mansion (5 Livingston Place) into a hospital, where 7,549 patients were treated in 1876. In 1889 a nearby site was purchased on which was erected a six-story building for the college. The unusual laboratory space and facilities, the quality of the curriculum, and the extent of the opportunities for clinical observation and training guaranteed one of the most thorough medical educations available in America. In 1876 the full three-year graded course had become obligatory, a period of training at that time required by few other medical schools; it was extended to four years in 1893, when eightynine students were enrolled. In 1877 the college year was lengthened to a full eight months —two or three months longer than that of most medical schools. Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell had always believed that women should be taught together with men. When in 1898 the new Cornell University Medical College in New York accepted women on equal terms, Emily Blackwell felt that a separate school was no longer needed and, the following year, arranged for the transfer of her students to Cornell. In its thirty-one years the Woman's Medical College had graduated 364 women physicians. The New York Infirmary for Women and Children continued, and still exists. Emily Blackwell became a member of the New York County Medical Society in 1871, an honor which her extreme shyness had caused her to refuse on several previous occasions. Active, like her sister, in the social purity movement, she served on a citizens' committee which fought (and ultimately defeated) a movement for the licensing of prostitution. In 1882 she invited her colleague Dr. Elizabeth Cushier to move into the East 20th Street house—formerly the residence of A L I C E and

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CARY—where she was living with her eleven-year-old adopted daughter, Anna. This was the beginning of a close and devoted companionship. The two women spent part of the summer of 1887 abroad, and they returned to Europe for eighteen months beginning in 1900, the year they retired. Thereafter they spent their summers in a home they had built on the rocky coast of Maine at York Cliffs and their winters in Montclair, N.J. In September 1910 —just three months after her sister's d e a t h Emily Blackwell died of enterocolitis in York Cliffs at the age of seventy-three. After Unitarian services in Boston, her ashes were buried at Chilmark, Mass., where her adopted daughter and many of the Blackwells had settled.

N.Y. Infirmary for Women and Children and the Women's Medical College of the N.Y. Infirmary," Medical Woman's Jour., May 1939-Dec. 1942; Elise S. L'Esperance, "Influence of the N.Y. Infirmary on Women in Medicine," Jour, of the Am. Medical Women's Assoc., June 1949; "Autobiog. of Dr. Elizabeth Cushier," ed. by Elizabeth B. Thelberg, Medical Rev. of Revs., Mar. 1933; obituaries in N.Y. Times, Sept. 9, 1910, and Lancet, Sept. 24, 1910. Ishbel Ross' biography of Elizabeth Blackwell, Child of Destiny (1949), also contains information about Emily, as does Elinor Rice Hays, Those Extraordinary Blackwells (1967).]

Although less well known than her sister, Emily Blackwell left her own strong imprint on medicine in nineteenth-century America. If Elizabeth was the humanitarian and reformer, Emily was the true physician, and her legacy to her profession continues to multiply in the women physicians who inherit the high standards she set and transmitted through her students. Two of them have left descriptions of her. JOSEPHINE BAKER mentions her as having had a commanding presence, a noble face, and a low, calm voice of uncanny quality. "She inspired us all with the vital feeling that we were still on trial and that, for women who meant to be physicians, no educational standards could be too high. . . . I think not many of us realized that we were going out into the world as test cases, but Dr. Blackwell did" (Fighting for Life, 1939, pp. 3 3 - 3 5 ) . Dr. Elise L'Esperance (d. 1959), distinguished pathologist, pioneer in cancer detection, and first woman professor on the Cornell Medical College faculty, has written: "Although Dr. Emily Blackwell's contribution to the success of the New York Infirmary was not so spectacular as that of her older sister, still she brought to this young hospital and college an executive and medical ability that was unsurpassed by the best medical men of the day . . ." (Journal of the American Medical Women's Association, June 1949, p. 2 5 8 ) .

BLAKE, Lillie Devereux (Aug. 12, 1 8 3 3 Dec. 30, 1913), author and suffragist, was born in Raleigh, N.C., the older of the two surviving daughters of George Pollok (or Pollock) Devereux and Sarah Elizabeth (Johnson) Devereux. Christened Elizabeth Johnson Devereux, she was a great-great-granddaughter, on both her mother's and father's sides, of Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan divine. In addition, she was descended from Thomas Pollok, early colonial governor of North Carolina, and from Samuel Johnson, the first president of King's (later Columbia) College. Her grandfather John Devereux was an Irishman who had come to North Carolina after serving in the Royal Navy. When her father, a Yale graduate, whose plantation was a part of the original Pollok estate, died in 1837, the family moved to the Johnson home in Stratford, Conn., settling soon afterward in nearby New Haven. Lillie attended a girls' school conducted there by the Misses Apthorpe, and after its closing she was tutored privately by a divinity student from Yale. At thirteen she was confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

PHOEBE

[Alice Stone Blackwell, "An Early Woman Physician," Woman's Jour., Oct. 6, 1906, and Sept. 10, 1910, and "Reminiscences of Emily Blackwell," ibid., Sept. 17, 1910; annual catalogues of the Woman's Medical College of the N.Y. Infirmary; N.Y. Academy of Medicine, In Memory of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dr. Emily Blackwell (1911); Howard A. Kelly, A Cyc. of Am. Medical Biog. (1912), I, 89-90; Elizabeth Cushier, "In Memory of Dr. Emily Blackwell," and Eliza Mosher, "Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell," Woman's Medical Jour., Apr. 1911; Annie Sturges Daniel, " Ά Cautious Experiment,' The Hist, of the

ELIZABETH H. THOMSON

B L A C K W E L L , Lucy Stone. See STONE, Lucy.

t

Proud and high-spirited from the beginning, she always needed, as she wrote later, "an occupation and an object in life" (Blake and Wallace, p. 3 3 ) . Before her marriage she fulfilled this need by strenuously participating in the social world of New Haven. She was strikingly attractive and took delight in the deliberate captivation of the local beaux. The suit of her tutor was only the first of many which she casually rejected. This period of her life ended on June 20, 1855, with her marriage to Frank Geoffrey Quay Umsted, a young Philadelphia lawyer. The couple lived in St. Louis for two years, but despite the birth of a daughter, Elizabeth Johnson Devereux, in February 1857, Mrs. Umsted felt bored, and the family moved to New York City later that year. It was at this time that she began seriously to

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Blake write; her first published story, with the fitting title "My Last Conquest," appeared anonymously in Harper's Weekly for Nov. 14, 1857. A second child, Katherine Muhlenbergh Devereux, was born in July 1858, and another story, together with some verses entitled "Despair," came out that year in the Knickerbocker Magazine. Feeling that "the starry crown of Fame" was within her reach, she began a novel, Southwold, which was published under her own name in February 1859. Despite a mixed critical reception it had a good sale. She was able to enjoy this success for only three months, however; on May 10 she found her husband dead of a bullet wound, an apparent suicide. She soon learned that her family's fortune, which had been dwindling since her father's death, was utterly spent. As a result she was forced to use her literary talents to provide financial support as well as emotional satisfaction. In the winter of 1861-62 she was a Washington correspondent for the New York Evening Post and the World. She penned short stories quickly and easily, and most of them managed to reach print under various pseudonyms, either in the newspapers or in such magazines as the New York Leader, the Home Journal, and the Weekly Mercury. By 1882 she had published approximately 500 stories and articles, a novelette, and four more novels. On May 9, 1866, she was married to Grinfill Blake of Maine, an employee of a New York wire company, who became a devoted but conspicuously passive husband, dogged by poor health, which cost him his job in 1879 and his life in 1896. The marriage was childless. In 1869 Mrs. Blake became attracted to the woman suffrage movement, in which her good looks and personal charm soon won her the prominence she craved. She took particular satisfaction in her newly discovered oratorical ability: "In all my varied life," she wrote at this time, "there has never come to me a keener delight than the intoxication of thrilling a crowd by my words. . . . I am only fully satisfied when the whole throng bends and sways at my will, as a field of wheat yields to the touch of the summer wind" (ibid., p. 85). From this time on, her life was devoted entirely to the movement. As president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association (1879-90) and of the New York City Woman Suffrage League (1886-1900) she led the periodic struggles for a state suffrage amendment, won the vote for women in school elections (1880), and secured the enactment of laws providing for the presence of women doc-

Blake tors in mental institutions (1888) and of matrons in police stations (1892) and requiring chairs for saleswomen. She also agitated for the appointment of women census recorders in 1880 and for the granting of pensions to Civil War nurses. Her wit and grace were effective not only in her legislative efforts but also in altering the popular image of a suffragist. From 1870 to 1900 her speeches were a regular feature of the annual gatherings of the National (later National American) Woman Suffrage Association. In 1888 she toured California and other Western states, and in 1893 she spoke at the Congress of Women of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She was noted for her humor, and newspapers delighted in such quips as: "Woman's sphere is bounded on the north by a husband, south by a baby, east by a mother-in-law and west by a maiden aunt." In addition she enlisted her literary talents in the cause, publishing a feminist novel, Fettered for Life; or Lord and Master (1874); a volume of stories titled A Daring Experiment (1892); and Woman's Place To-day (1883), originally a series of lectures delivered in New York City to refute the antisuffrage sermons of a local minister, Morgan Dix. Gradually, however, Mrs. Blake incurred the enmity of SUSAN B. ANTHONY. Her efforts to win the socially prominent women of New York to the suffrage cause through such events as the Pilgrim Mothers' Dinners, held annually from 1892 to 1906, were regarded coolly by the Quaker Miss Anthony, as was her founding in 1886 of the Society for Political Study to work for a variety of legislative gains rather than for suffrage alone. In 1895 Miss Anthony accepted the creation by the national association of a "Committee on Legislative Advice" chaired by Mrs. Blake, but she was suspicious of anything that might divert attention from the suffrage issue, and in 1899 Mrs. Blake's committee was abolished in somewhat underhanded fashion. Personal factors were not absent; Mrs. Blake was a vain woman who did not easily abide real or imagined slights, while the plain Miss Anthony perhaps saw in her gifted co-worker a rival for power. When Miss Anthony retired as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900, Mrs. Blake was urged by E L I Z A B E T H CADY STANTON to run for that office; but when it became apparent that she could not win, owing to Miss Anthony's support of CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT, she withdrew her candidacy. Embittered, she left the national association and organized (March 1900), again with Mrs. Stanton's support, the National Legislative

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Blake League. As head of this group Mrs. Blake worked to correct some legal abuses, notably the loss of citizenship suffered by a woman upon marrying a foreigner, but the league never achieved truly national stature and did not survive its founder. Throughout these years her personal financial situation, relieved by continued newspaper and magazine writing and occasional "purses" made up by friends, remained precarious. After 1905, illness forced her to discontinue her efforts. She died at a sanatorium in Englewood, N.J., at the age of eighty, of "shock and old age" after a fall in which she had broken her hip. Following cremation, memorial services were held at the Church of the Messiah of Dr. John Haynes Holmes in New York City. Her ashes were buried in the Episcopal Cemetery in Stratford, Conn. Her daughter Katherine Devereux Umsted Blake ( 1 8 5 8 - 1 9 5 0 ) attained some prominence in education and reform circles as a teacher and principal in New York City public schools ( 1 8 7 6 - 1 9 2 7 ) ; she was the first woman to become treasurer of the National Education Association ( 1 9 1 2 ) and was a member of Henry Ford's abortive "Peace Ship" expedition of 1915. [The most useful published source of information is Katherine Devereux Blake and Margaret Louise Wallace, Champion of Women: The Life of Lillie Devereux Blake ( 1 9 4 3 ) , which draws extensively on the subject's diaries, an uncompleted autobiography, and other manuscript materials now in the collection of Mrs. Blake's papers ( 2 , 0 0 0 items) at the Mo. Hist. Soc., St. Louis. A smaller collection, mostly dealing with Mrs. Blake's suffrage work of the 1880's, is in the Sophia Smith Collection at the Smith College Library. See also Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1 9 4 2 ) ; Mary K. O. Eagle, ed., The Congress of Women ( 1 8 9 4 ) , pp. 3 2 - 3 5 ; and, on Katherine D. Blake, Bernard Baruch, "A Real T e a c h e r , " N.E.A. Jour., Sept. 1 9 5 0 ; and N.Y. Times, F e b . 3, 1950. F o r a fuller catalogue of Mrs. Blake's contributions to the woman's rights movement, see Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, vols. I l l and IV ( 1 8 8 6 - 1 9 0 2 ) , and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XI, 61. T h e year of her birth is listed incorrectly there and in most other references.] WILLIAM

BLAKE, Mary Jane Safford. See Mary Jane.

R.

TAYLOR

SAFFORD,

BLAKER, Eliza Ann Cooper (Mar. 5, 1 8 5 4 Dec. 4, 1 9 2 6 ) , kindergarten educator, was born in Philadelphia, Pa., the first of three children of Jacob and Mary Jane (Gore) Cooper. Her father, a descendant of English Quakers, was an ardent abolitionist who was wounded in the Civil War and became a semi-invalid, dying

when Eliza was fifteen. Her mother, an energetic woman of Pennsylvania German stock, worked as a seamstress and shopkeeper to support and educate her children. Eliza attended the public schools and graduated as valedictorian from the Girls Normal School of Philadelphia in 1874. After two years of teaching in the city schools, she became interested in the ideas of Friedrich Froebel and his American d i s c i p l e , ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY, t h r o u g h

a demonstration kindergarten conducted at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 by Ruth Burritt. Feeling that she had found her real calling, Eliza Cooper enrolled in Miss Burritt's kindergarten training school in Philadelphia and, after completing the course in 1880, began teaching in the Vine Street Kindergarten. On Sept. 15, 1880, she was married to a childhood playmate, Louis J. Blaker. In 1882 Mrs. Blaker, recommended by both Miss Burritt and Miss Peabody, was invited by the Hadley Roberts Academy, a private school in Indianapolis, to come to the Indiana capital and organize a kindergarten at that institution. Feeling that a change of environment might benefit Blaker, who had been in poor health, the couple decided to make the move. After only a few months, however, Mrs. Blaker left the academy to open a free kindergarten—the city's first—for a newly founded charitable organization, the Indianapolis Free Kindergarten Society. This small school was only the first of many established by the society under Mrs. Blaker's leadership during the next several decades. The number grew to sixty, including kindergartens for Negro children coming from the South and for the children of southern and eastern European immigrants who were crowding into the city in those years. Her schools played an important role in the acculturation of these new residents, for in connection with the regular kindergarten activities Mrs. Blaker introduced some of the features of a settlement house, including mothers' clubs and nurseries, classes in domestic science for the girls, shop classes for boys, and directed playground recreation. The kindergartens were entirely supported by private funds until 1901, when a state law, passed largely through Mrs. Blaker's effective lobbying, permitted the levying of a local tax for their support. Although she remained supervisor of kindergartens for the Indianapolis Free Kindergarten Society until the end of her life, Eliza Blaker probably made an even larger contribution through her work in teachers' education. When she came to Indianapolis in 1882 she began preparing kindergarten teachers in her own home. This early training school became in

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1905 the Teachers College of Indianapolis, sponsored by the Free Kindergarten Society and led by Mrs. Blaker, who as president officiated over the education of an estimated twenty thousand girls during her lifetime. Since she believed strongly that the training of children was properly a feminine task, all her regular students and all of the full-time faculty were women. Her institution, through which she strongly influenced the work of the kindergarten movement throughout the state of Indiana and elsewhere, was later affiliated with and, after her death, absorbed by Butler University in Indianapolis. Not an original thinker or a radical reformer, Eliza A. Blaker was a deeply religious person—she and her husband were Presbyterians— who believed that love was the controlling law of life; she applied this Froebelian and Christian conception to her work with children and teachers. A home-loving, rather reserved and modest woman, she helped increase women's educational and occupational opportunities. She never, however, supported the woman suffrage movement as did many feminists of the time. Her husband carried on a successful business career in Indianapolis, while encouraging and loyally supporting his wife's work in education, until his death in 1913; they had no children, but took into their home several young relatives and needy students. Mrs. Blaker was a founder and president of the Indianapolis Council of Women, chairman of a women's relief committee after the devastating Indianapolis flood of 1913, and a leader in the International Kindergarten Union and the National Education Association. In 1917 Hanover College conferred upon her the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. A speaker at a reception given in her honor by the women of Indianapolis a few months before her death summed up her contribution to the city in the statement that Mrs. Blaker had been to Indianapolis what J A N E ADDAMS was to Chicago. After Louis Blaker's death her energies declined, but she was still active as president of Teachers College when she suffered a heart attack and died at her home in Indianapolis at seventy-two. She was buried beside her husband in Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis. [Mrs. Blaker left no personal papers, but in the possession of the Eliza A. Blaker Club, Indianapolis, are manuscript notes of some of her lectures and short biographical sketches by persons who knew her. Other unpublished materials are Virginia Negley Hollingsworth's master's thesis, "Hist, of the Teachers College of Indianapolis," in the Butler Univ. Library, and the monthly and annual reports of the president and secretary of Indianapolis

Teachers College, in the College of Education of Butler Univ. The authoritative biography is Emma Lou Thornbrough, Eliza A. Blaker: Her Life and Work (1956). Other published materials include: Indianapolis Free Kindergarten Soc., Annual Reports, and a booklet, Indianapolis Free Kindergarten Soc., 1882-1942 (1942); Pictorial and Biog. Memoirs of Indianapolis and Marion County, Ind. (1893), p. 236; Logan Esarey, Hist, of Ind. . . . Also an Account of Indianapolis and Marion County (4 vols., K. M. Rabb and William Herschel, eds., 1924), IV, 846-48; Blanche Foster Boruff, comp., Women of Ind. (1941), pp. 48-50, 121; obituary in Indianapolis News, Dec. 6, 1926.] CLIFTON J. PHILLIPS

BLANCHAN, Neltje. See Blanchan De Graff.

DOUBLEDAY,

Neltje

BLANKENBURG, Lucretia Longshore (May 8, 1845-Mar. 29, 1937), suffragist, clubwoman, and civic reformer, was the daughter of HANNAH E . M Y E R S LONGSHORE, Philadelphia's pioneer woman physician. On both sides she came of Pennsylvania Quaker stock. She was born on a farm near New Lisbon in northeastern Ohio, where her maternal grandfather, Samuel Myers, had settled in 1833. There her mother married Thomas Ellwood Longshore, a schoolteacher who had moved west from his native Bucks County, Pa. In 1845, four years after their marriage, Longshore returned east to Attleboro, Pa., taking his wife and their two children: Channing, three, and the six-monthold Lucretia—named for the Quaker reformer L U C R E T I A M O T T . In 1850 the family moved to Philadelphia so that Hannah Longshore might enter the new Female Medical College (later the Woman's Medical College); she graduated with its first class in December 1851. The prejudice and hostility she met as a woman physician made a deep impress on her daughter. At her mother's graduation Lucretia noted the police on hand to prevent male medical students from disrupting the ceremonies; and one of her teachers later told other children not to play with her because she was the daughter of "an improper person." The girl thus early vowed to work for equal rights for her sex. She grew up in a home attuned to reform. Lucretia Mott was a frequent caller. The Longshores belonged to the local antislavery society, and a runaway slave woman once hid in their house while en route to Canada. Lucretia was graduated from the Friends' Central School in Philadelphia and the local Bryant and Stratton Commercial College. It was her family's hope that she, too, would become a doctor, and she enrolled in the Woman's Medical College, but found medicine not to her lik-

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Blankenburg ing and left after one term. On Apr. 18, 1867, in a Quaker ceremony, she was married to Rudolph Blankenburg ( 1 8 4 3 - 1 9 1 8 ) , a young German immigrant—son of a Reformed Lutheran pastor—who had come to America to seek a business career. Helped by his wife in his early years, Blankenburg opened a yarn, linen, and notions store in 1872 and three years later founded a successful textile firm. With his business he combined a strong interest in civic reform that culminated in his election as mayor of Philadelphia in 1911. The three children born to the Blankenburgs all died young, Emma (born in 1870) at six months, and two subsequent daughters, Marion ( 1 8 7 3 ) and Julia ( 1 8 7 8 ) at eight and thirteen—both victims of diphtheria. The Blankenburgs later, however, brought up a niece and nephew. Meanwhile Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition of 1876 had stimulated an interest in civic and social welfare in which both Blankenburgs took part. With her husband, Mrs. Blankenburg participated in the city's new Society for Organizing Charitable Relief ( 1 8 7 8 ) , serving on its central committee and as a local visitor. In 1878 also she joined the recently founded women's New Century Club, a great factor, as she later wrote, in deepening her interest in public affairs. Her charity visits having convinced her of "the need for many civic improvements," she gave her leadership, largely through the New Century Club, to a succession of causes: the successful introduction of the city's first police matron ( 1 8 8 6 ) , the appointment of ANNA HALLOWELL to the Board of Public Education ( 1 8 8 6 ) , the selection of two women as factory inspectors ( 1 8 9 1 ) . She also helped ELIZA SPBOAT TURNER organize the New Century Guild, a working women's club, and taught bookkeeping for two years in the program of evening classes out of which the Guild developed. The central concern of her later years was the woman suffrage movement. As early as 1884 susAN Β. ANTHONY had enlisted her active support. In 1892 Mrs. Blankenburg succeeded the influential MARY GREW as president of the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association, a post she held for sixteen years. With coaching from Miss Anthony, she became an effective speaker, testifying on many occasions before legislative and Congressional committees. When, in 1908, she was elected auditor of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, she resigned her Suffrage Association post in order to give her full effort to winning over the woman's club movement to the cause. In 1914 the General Federation adopted the resolution she had sponsored endorsing woman suffrage.

She also served the federation as first vicepresident ( 1 9 1 2 - 1 4 ) . During the early years of the twentieth century Mrs. Blankenburg joined other women in supporting every effort for municipal reform. Many women helped bring out the reform vote that elected her husband mayor in 1911. During his four-year term Mrs. Blankenburg was widely reputed to be "co-mayor," so closely had husband and wife always worked together. Actually, while Blankenburg accepted his wife's advice gladly, he relied primarily upon his cabinet of dedicated young reformers, and Mrs. Blankenburg seems to have sought quite consciously to limit her role to the social and ceremonial. Other interests of Mrs. Blankenburg's later years were prohibition and world peace. She remained an independent Republican, deploring the reactionary policies of Pennsylvania's Vare machine, but at the same time finding the New Deal too centralistic in comparison with her favored concept of voluntary reform at the local level. An old-fashioned Quaker lady in dress and concern for civic righteousness, she had at the same time a lively sense of humor and an optimistic conviction, held to the end of her life, that women were improving morally, intellectually, and spiritually. Advanced years did not stem her vigor; in 1920, at seventy-five, she made a motor trip across the continent and back. She died at Philadelphia of pneumonia in her ninety-second year and was buried in Fairhill Cemetery, Germantown, Pa. [Lucretia L. Blankenburg, The Blankenburgs of Phila. ( 1928), largely drawn from twenty-four volumes of scrapbooks at the Hist. Soc. of Pa. in Phila., combines a biography of her husband with her own autobiography. Also helpful are two briefer sketches: by Nicholas B. Wainwright in Notable Women of Pa., ed. by Gertrude B. Biddle and Sarah D. Lowrie (1942), pp. 222-24; and by Helen C. Bennett in her Am. Women in Civic Work (1915), pp. 209-27. There are references to Mrs. Blankenburg's suffrage work in Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, vols. IV-VI (1902-22). See also obituaries in the N.Y. Times, Phila. Evening Ledger, and Phila. Inquirer, all for Mar. 29, 1937. Indexed Phila. newspapers in the Free Library of Phila. are helpful. Donald W. Disbrow's unpublished doctoral dissertation (Univ. of Rochester, 1957), "The Progressive Movement in Phila., 1910-1916," contains a long account of her husband's administration as mayor; see also sketch of Rudolph Blankenburg in the Diet. Am. Biog., and various contemporary magazine articles about the Blankenburgs, 1890 to 1918.]

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DONALD W. DISBROW

Blatch

Blatch

BLATCH, Harriot Eaton Stanton (Jan. 20, 1856-Nov. 20, 1940), woman suffrage leader, was born in Seneca Falls, N.Y., the younger of two daughters and sixth of seven children of Henry Brewster Stanton and his wife ELIZAB E T H ( C A D Y ) STANTON, both descendants of pre-Revolutionary English settlers. Her father, a lawyer and state senator (1849—53), was an outspoken abolitionist who faced angry proslavery mobs in the years before the Civil War. Her mother, a principal leader of the woman's movement in America, inspired and helped plan the historic woman's rights convention held at Seneca Falls in 1848, eight years before Harriot's birth. The young girl was educated at private schools in Seneca Falls, New York City, and Englewood, N.J., and at Vassar College, where she graduated with honors in 1878, but her most valuable education took place in the Stanton home, where the exchange of ideas was the yeast of living. After graduation, Miss Stanton spent a year at the Boston School of Oratory, and then traveled abroad ( 1 8 8 0 - 8 1 ) as a tutor and companion to several young girls, living with them in Germany. She was called back to the United States to help her mother and SUSAN B. ANTHONY with the monumental History of Woman Suffrage. When she pointed out that the history dealt solely with their own National Woman Suffrage Association and did not mention the rival group led by LUCY STONE, the two redoubtable editors gave her the job of rectifying the omission. Her account of the American Woman Suffrage Association, appearing in the second volume (1881) as a concluding chapter of almost one hundred pages, greatly facilitated the reconciliation and merger of the two organizations nine years later. On Nov. 12, 1882, Harriot Stanton was married in a London Unitarian chapel to William Henry Blatch, an English businessman, later head of the May Brewing Company, whom she had met on shipboard while returning to America the preceding winter. They lived for twenty years in Basingstoke, a small town some forty miles west of London, and had two children, Nora Stanton, born in 1883, and Helen Stanton (1892), who died in childhood. Rapidly adapting to English life, Mrs. Blatch aligned herself with the vigorous social movements then afoot. She served on the executive committees of the Women's Local Government Society and the Fabian Society, learning to know as friends and collaborators such young Socialists as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Ramsay MacDonald, and George Bernard Shaw. Although still living in England, she

earned a M.A. degree from Vassar in 1894 with a statistical study of English villages. Her English associates invited her to run for office on the London School Board, but she declined, since she objected on principle to the law by which, on marrying an Englishman, she automatically lost her American citizenship. Among British woman suffrage organizations, the one making the greatest impact on her was the short-lived Women's Franchise League, founded in 1889 by Mrs. Jacob Bright and Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, later leader of the militant suffragists; she was deeply impressed by this group's success in organizing an active suffrage movement among the mill hands and factory workers of Britain's industrial North and Midlands. In 1902 the Blatch family moved to the United States. Mrs. Blatch renewed her ties with the woman suffrage movement and, finding it bogged down in apathy, set herself to remedy matters. Drawing on her English experience, she launched in 1907 a new suffrage organization, the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women. The league's membership included some well-known writers and reform figures, but its real strength and novelty lay in the nearly 20,000 women employed in factories, laundries, and garment shops who soon flocked to its banner. It shattered precedent by holding open-air meetings, inaugurating the first suffrage parades (1910), sending working women to testify at Albany legislative hearings, campaigning in the election districts, and stationing women watchers at the polls. By 1910, after it had become the Women's Political Union and had initiated the drive for a state constitutional amendment for woman suffrage, this effective organization had infused new life into the suffrage movement, inspiring similar efforts in other states. Mrs. Blatch was a persistent and expert lobbyist in Albany for a suffrage amendment, using parades, mass delegations, and the threat of opposition at the polls to support her efforts. Before the 1912 election she secured signed pledges of support from a majority of candidates for the legislature, and in January 1913 that body voted by an overwhelming majority to submit a suffrage amendment to the electorate in 1915. When, however, the state leader, CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT, in preparation for this crucial 1915 vote, brought New York's proliferating suffrage organizations together as the Empire State Campaign Committee, the Women's Political Union remained aloof. Mrs. Blatch never found it possible to work with Mrs. Catt, whose methods she felt were overcautious and whose leadership she distrusted.

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Blatch In August 1915 William Blatch was accidentally killed through contact with a fallen power line on the estate of a neighbor at Shoreham, Long Island. After regaining her American citizenship by taking the oath of allegiance, Mrs. Blatch sailed for England to settle his affairs. When she returned to the United States the following year she did not take part in the successful campaign which finally won the vote in New York state in 1917. Instead, the Women's Political Union merged with the Congressional Union, founded two years before by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns to work exclusively for a federal suffrage amendment. Mrs. Blatch had already joined the Congressional Union as an individual in 1913, and had helped formulate its decision to oppose Democratic candidates in the 1914 Congressional elections on the ground that the party in power should be held responsible for failure to enact a suffrage amendment. In 1917 she helped fuse the Congressional Union with the Woman's Party, organized to marshal the votes of enfranchised Western women against Democratic incumbents in 1916. Although both major parties endorsed suffrage at their conventions, Mrs. Blatch nevertheless campaigned against President Wilson throughout the West. In order to be able to vote herself she established residence in Kansas, choosing the state where her mother had campaigned for suffrage almost fifty years earlier. Mrs. Blatch was deeply stirred by the European struggle which had begun in August 1914. During her trip abroad after her husband's death she had observed women's changing role in wartime England, France, and Germany. She returned to America convinced that the war was being fought for democratic principles, that it would advance the feminist cause, and that the United States should enter. When this occurred in April 1917, Mrs. Blatch's life changed sharply in focus. She favored the continuation of active work for woman suffrage, but as head of the Food Administration's Speakers Bureau and as a director of the Woman's Land Army, organized to provide needed additional farm labor, she gave her undivided efforts to the war. Her book Mobilizing Woman-Power, published early in 1918, described how European women were doing their share and urged American women to give similar support and to assume responsibility for binding up the wounds of war once it was over. After the Armistice she began a second book, planned to show "the constructive results of the Great War," but, as she put it, "circumstance honestly faced" during her five months in postwar Europe forced her to con-

trary conclusions. A Woman's Point of View (1920) dealt eloquently with the devastation of war, its roots in national hatreds and ambitions, and the role of education and of women in helping to avoid another such struggle. For the next twenty years Mrs. Blatch remained a staunch protagonist of the cause of women, especially of working women. But she broke with the National Women's Trade Union League and the National Consumers' League, believing their advocacy of special protective legislation for women misguided. Instead she aligned herself with the National Woman's Party in its campaign for a federal Equal Rights Amendment, and for several years served as chairman of its Congressional committee. Her socialist sympathies, dating from her years in England, led her to join the Socialist party and to undertake several candidacies for public office in the 1920's, but her disagreement with the party's stand on protective legislation for women workers and her feeling that it was unwilling to utilize the abilities of its women members led her to give up active work. She remained a consistent backer of liberal causes, however, and worked vigorously for the League of Nations and for world peace, protested the antiradical campaign of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, favored amnesty for wartime political prisoners, deplored America's hostile attitude toward Soviet Russia, and endorsed Robert M. La Follette for president in 1924. A testimonial dinner in New York marked her eightieth birthday. Three years later, after suffering a fractured hip, she moved to a nursing home in Greenwich, Conn., where she died in 1940 of a heart attack. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City. Harriot Stanton Blatch was an unimpressive five feet five inches tall, but the dignity of her presence, her magnificent crown of brown braids, later white, and her vivid blue eyes gave her an arresting appearance. She was a fiery speaker, unequivocal in expressing her opinions, yet capable of changing her mind. She greatly admired her mother and in 1922 collaborated with her brother Theodore in editing Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences. Her mother's boldness had shocked the cautious feminists of her day. Her own militancy likewise often upset her more timid colleagues, but it helped bring new life into the woman suffrage movement at a critical period. [Mrs. Blatch's autobiography, written with Alma Lutz, Challenging Years ( 1 9 4 0 ) , is the basic source. See also N.Y. Times obituaries of Mrs. Blatch and her husband, Nov. 21, 1940, and Aug. 3, 1915;

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Blavatsky Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15; Rose Young, "The Women Who 'Get Together' " ( on the various N.Y. suffrage organizations), Good Housekeeping, Dec. 1913; Outlook, Dec. 28, 1912, pp. 9 3 1 - 3 4 ; Charles A. Beard, "The Woman's Party," New Republic, July 29, 1916; and Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle ( 1 9 5 9 ) . The N.Y. Times Index, 1906-40, contains occasional references, while Dame Christabel Pankhurst, Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (1959), depicts the late nineteenth-century British suffrage movement which so influenced Mrs. Blatch. The Library of Congress has twelve volumes of Mrs. Blatch's papers for the period 1903-12; others are in the possession of her daughter, Mrs. Nora Stanton Barney, and of Mrs. Harriet Allaben. Information on certain points from Mrs. Barney and from Mrs. Vera Douie of the Fawcett Library, London. Death record from Conn. State Dept. of Health.] ELEANOR

FLEXNER

BLAVATSKY, Helena Petrovna Hahn (July 31, 1831-May 8, 1891), occultist, principal founder of the Theosophical Society, was born near Ekaterinoslav (now Dnepropetrovsk) in the Russian Ukraine, the first of three children of Peter Hahn, an artillery captain of German descent, and his wife, Helena Fadeev, daughter of privy councilor Andrei Fadeev and (under the pseudonym "Zenaida R.") the author of several mordant novels about life in provincial Russia. Educated by governesses who indulged her taste for supernatural folktales, and deeply impressed by the haunting liturgy of the Russian Orthodox service, Helena grew up a wild and imaginative girl. Her mother died when she was twelve, whereupon she was sent to live with her grandfather Fadeev, the governor of Saratov on the Volga. Later his household moved to Tiflis, where, on July 7, 1848, sixteen-year-old Helena Hahn was married to Gen. Nikifor Vasilievich Blavatsky, the forty-year-old vice-governor of a neighboring province. Soon regretting her rashness, she ran away after three months to Constantinople, where (according to the memoirs of her cousin, the Russian statesman Count Sergei Y. Witte) she became an equestrienne in a circus. In 1850 she visited Egypt and explored Cairo with Albert L. Rawson, a young American student of Islam. Returning to Constantinople, she became the mistress of a minor Hungarian opera singer, Agardi Metrovich, whom she thereafter accompanied on European tours. During a stay in Paris she worked for a time with Daniel Dunglas Home, a celebrated spiritualist of the day. Returning to Russia in 1858, she spent two years with her sister in a village near St. Petersburg and at her grandparents' residence in

Tiflis, where she amused friends and relatives with spirit messages and other mysterious phenomena. An attempted reconciliation with Blavatsky ended with the reappearance of Metrovich, with whom she moved to Kiev. She soon left for Ozoorgetty, a remote Georgian army outpost, where, in 1861 or 1862, she gave birth to a son, Yuri, who lived only five years. The man she named as the father, Baron Nicholas MeyendorfF of Tiflis, did not deny the possibility, but thought Metrovich the more likely candidate. Tacitly accepting this conclusion, Metrovich and Madame Blavatsky embarked for Italy, where they remained until after Yuri's death. By 1870 they were living in Odessa, where Madame Blavatsky struggled to support them both by giving singing lessons and working in various shops and factories. In 1871 they embarked on the S. S. Eumonia for Cairo, where Metrovich hoped to revive his faltering career. On June 21, however, the vessel exploded at sea and Metrovich lost his life. Madame Blavatsky, one of seventeen survivors, continued on to Egypt. Now taking up spiritualism in earnest, she tried to organize a Société Spirite, but her séances were characterized by various petty deceptions and soon collapsed. She drifted back to Odessa, then to Paris, and on July 7, 1873, arrived, via steerage, in New York City. Here she lived in a Home for Working Women on the Lower East Side, doing catchpenny journalism and various odd jobs. In June 1874 she invested a small paternal legacy in a Long Island farm owned by Russian immigrant friends, but the venture proved abortive. The turning point in her life came that October when she read in the New York Daily Graphic of the séances being conducted by the Eddy brothers of Chittenden, Vt. She hastened to Vermont, displayed her own psychic aptitude, and ingratiated herself with Col. Henry Steel Olcott, the lawyer and spiritualist who had written the Graphic articles. Olcott was deeply impressed by this exotic Russian, and the following March, when he received a mysterious message from "Tuitit Bey" of "The Brotherhood of Luxor" instructing him to become her neophyte, he readily yielded. Their relationship was strained when on Apr. 3, 1875, Madame Blavatsky unexpectedly (and bigamously) married Michael Betanelly, a young and impoverished Russian immigrant from Philadelphia. By July she had returned to New York, however, and she and Olcott, who had given up his family and former life, established themselves in an apartment which became a focal point for a small coterie of mystics and dabblers in the occult.

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Blavatsky Here, on Sept. 7, 1875, was born the Theosophical Society, named by an English member, Charles Sotheran, who had discovered the word, meaning "divine wisdom," in the dictionary. Olcott was chosen chairman, and later president; William Quan Judge, a young Irish clerk in Olcott's law office, was made secretary-treasurer (later, as head of the American section, he led a schism from the parent group ) ; and Madame Blavatsky, who preferred to remain in the background since she was not a good speaker, became corresponding secretary. The organization's declared object was "to collect and diffuse a knowledge of the laws which govern the universe." By 1880 three basic goals had emerged: to promote the "Universal Brotherhood of Humanity"; to investigate the "unexplained laws of Nature and the psychical powers latent in man"; and to study comparative religion, philosophy, and science. Madame Blavatsky was particularly eager to distinguish the new movement from spiritualism, which was then under a cloud of suspicion and scandal. Mediums, she said, were the dupes of "undeveloped" spirits. The Theosophical approach to the unknown, by contrast, was through contact with the Mahatmas (Masters), a highly evolved but not supernatural order of mankind. The Mahatmas, isolated in their Egyptian (later Tibetan) retreats, had chosen Madame Blavatsky as their channel of communication with the outer world, and through her transmitted a steady stream of letters to true believers. To the Mahatmas she generously credited the authorship of her first book, Isis Unveiled. A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (2 vols., 1877), although skeptics traced relationships to a variety of published works on religion and philosophy. This potpourri of occult lore, designed to demonstrate that all religions and cults are based on identical cosmic myths and symbols, includes her first pretense to having spent a good portion of her early life in Tibet, a claim that later won wide acceptance. When the Theosophical Society failed to thrive in America, Madame Blavatsky (or Ή.Ρ.Β.," as she now called herself) and Olcott decided to move to India, a land known for its occult lore and one where Olcott had recently established a promising contact with the Arya Samaj, a strong new organization advocating a return to the ancient principles of Hinduism. Before setting out for India, Helena Blavatsky took out American naturalization papers, correctly anticipating that she might be regarded by the British authorities as a Russian spy. On Feb. 16, 1879, she and Olcott ar-

rived in Bombay, the city which remained their headquarters for three years while they made frequent forays elsewhere in the country. The advance contact they had established with the Arya Samaj did not prove fruitful and was eventually dissolved. The adoption of Buddhism as their basic religion by Madame Blavatsky and Olcott during a trip to Ceylon in 1880 weakened their influence, since the majority of Indians were of other faiths. But their stress, beginning in 1880, on universal brotherhood and their receptive approach to Indian culture won influential supporters from native ranks, prefiguring the later link between Theosophy and Indian nationalism. Following the establishment of a new magazine, the Theosophist, a few converts were also made in the generally hostile British ruling circles. Chief among these was A. P. Sinnett, editor of the influential Allahabad Pioneer, whose The Occult World (1881) was the first extensive exegesis of the new belief. Dismissed for making the Pioneer an outlet for Theosophical propaganda, Sinnett returned to England, where he breathed new life into the faltering London branch of the movement. In 1882, with the aid of wealthy Indians, Madame Blavatsky and her followers purchased the grounds for a beautiful international headquarters at Adyar, on the outskirts of Madras. Here, with the help of her young Hindu "chelas," or assistants, she amazed visitors with various psychic marvels, including "precipitated" or materialized written communications from the Mahatmas, most notably one Koot Hoomi. Her reputation grew despite occasional embarrassing setbacks, as in 1883 when a "Koot Hoomi" letter was proved to have been plagiarized from a recent address by an American Theosophist. At this apogee of her career, Helena Blavatsky was a person of curious contradictions. Far from spiritual in appearance, she was extremely obese, with protruding eyes and short crinkly hair. She loved to play solitaire, smoked incessantly, and frequently gave way to towering rages and profane outbursts drawn from the forty languages she was said to have at her command. While taking great relish in attracting new converts, she always retained a wry self-awareness that was one of her more appealing traits. In 1883, while being lionized at Ootacamund (colloquially known as Ooty), the summer capital of southern India, she could describe herself in a personal letter as "clad in half Tibetan, half nightdress fashion" and "hanging like a gigantic nightmare on the gracefully rounded elbows of members of the Council," while "smelling brandy and soda

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enough to kill a Tibetan yak" (Williams, p. 2 0 4 ) . Though without illusions about her own "psychic gifts," she never lost the hope that there were genuine occult mysteries she might someday penetrate. In 1884, accompanied by Olcott and several Indian followers, she traveled to England, where a challenge to her authority had arisen in the persons of Sinnett, who aspired to independent communication with the Mahatmas, and Dr. Anna Kingsford, who wished to assimilate Theosophy into Christianity. At first all went well, and the chastened Britishers won for their leader a respectful hearing in London literary, scientific, and social circles. Throughout the summer of 1884 Madame Blavatsky and her entourage were interviewed by representatives of the Society for Psychical Research, an organization founded two years earlier by a group of eminent British scholars and authors, including Henry Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore. This body was apparently about to issue a favorable report when sensational news arrived from Adyar. Dissension among the caretakers had prompted one of them, Madame Emma (Cutting) Coulomb (whose connection with Madame Blavatsky dated from the Société Spirite days), to turn over to the missionaries at the Christian College of Madras a collection of Blavatsky letters which revealed her full panoply of tricks and ruses, particularly as perpetrated in a cleverly equipped "Shrine Room." These were published in 1884 (Emma Coulomb, Some Account of My Intercourse with Madame Blavatsky from 1872 to 1884), and the Society for Psychical Research at once sent an investigator, Richard Hodgson, to Adyar. Hodgson's exhaustive report, published in the society's Proceedings in December 1885, included a famous estimate of Madame Blavatsky: "For our own part, we regard her neither as the mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history" (p. 2 0 7 ) . Failing to win over the dispirited Adyar group during a final brief trip to India, Madame Blavatsky settled permanently in Europe in 1885.

(1886) is a generally sympathetic treatment. Having survived the Coulomb revelations, the S.P.R. report, and Sinnett's probings, Madame Blavatsky took new courage. Serious defections, such as that of the Indian scholar and mystic T. Subba Rao, were partially compensated for by new followers, including Countess Constance Wachtmeister of Sweden, with whom she lived in Würzburg in 1885 and 1886, and the wealthy Bertram Keightley, who in 1887 installed her in his London household. Here she founded the Blavatsky Lodge of Theosophists, with a secret "Esoteric Section" under her sole authority; edited a new magazine, Lucifer; and, with extensive assistance, completed The Secret Doctrine. The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (2 vols., 1889). This erudite and chaotic work purports to be a commentary on the "Book of Dzyan," a poetic masterpiece which Madame Blavatsky had discovered in a secret Tibetan library. Though various scholars exposed its many borrowings and blunders, the work was hailed by Theosophists as a masterful summation of their beliefs. In the same year appeared The Voice of the Silence, a collection of aphorisms allegedly culled from the same source. One result of The Secret Doctrine was that Madame Blavatsky obtained the recruit she had been pursuing since 1883—Mrs. Annie Besant, erstwhile atheist, materialist, social reformer, and Fabian Socialist. Confessing her conversion to Theosophy in May 1889, Mrs. Besant at once moved to take over the reins of the tottering movement. It was at Mrs. Besant's London home that Helena Blavatsky died in 1891, at fifty-nine, of Bright's disease and influenza. Her body was cremated, and the ashes, at Colonel Olcott's direction, divided into three parts, to be preserved in the three centers of her work: Adyar, London, and New York. After Madame Blavatsky's death the Theosophical Society, under Mrs. Besant's guidance, grew into a widely known and influential world movement, though its membership remained small and splintered; one of the principal dissident groups was the Theosophical Society in America, led by Mrs. KATHERINE AUGUSTA

On the heels of this disaster came new problems when A. P. Sinnett expressed a desire to write her biography. The true story of her life, she wrote in distress to a Russian friend, would be "a saturnalia of the moral depravity of mankind" (Williams, p. 2 7 9 ) . Sinnett, however, uncritically accepted the version told him by his subject and her well-primed sister, and his Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky

[The best biographies of Madame Blavatsky are Carl E. Bechofer-Roberts, The Mysterious Madame (1931), and Gertrude M. Williams, Priestess of the Occult (1946); see also John Symonds, Madame Blavatsky, Medium and Magician ( 1959 ). Personal accounts by her followers include: Albert L. Rawson, "Mme. Blavatsky," Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, Feb. 1892; Countess Constance Wachtmeister et al., Reminiscences of H. P. Blavatsky and "The Secret Doctrine" (1893); Henry S. OI-

TINGLEY.

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"Affliction has broken my spirit," she wrote. "I grow daily weaker and more emaciated, and depressed." She died at Tomhanick in 1783, at the age of thirty-one, and was buried in the Reformed Protestant Dutch burial ground at Albany. Seven years later her poems began to appear in the New-York Magazine, to which her surviving daughter, Margaretta, now eighteen, was a precocious contributor. Thirteen appeared from February 1790 to December 1791. Then, from September 1790 to January 1791, her prose narrative, "The History of Maria Kittle," ran serially, and in April and May 1791, a shorter tale entitled "The Story of Henry and Ann" came out. In May 1793 subscribers were solicited for a volume of The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker, in Prose and P A U L S. B O Y E R Verse, which appeared in October, supplementBLEECKER, Ann Eliza (October 1752-Nov. ed by writings by her daughter. Mrs. Bleecker's poems are sentimental and derivative—a 23, 1783), author, was born in New York City, Biblical paraphrase, elegies, patriotic and perthe third daughter and youngest of four chilsonal, thoughts on death and on the joys and dren of Brandt Schuyler, a prosperous merlimitations of rural life. The catbird, whippoorchant who died two months before her birth, will, and native thrush sing among her verses, and his wife Margaret (or Margareta) Van but against backgrounds and moods borrowed Wyck. A bright, lively girl, by inheritance adfrom books. The History of Maria Kittle, issued mitted to the best society of the Hudson Valley, she is said even as a child to have been ' in book form in Hartford in 1797, retells in graphic though sentimental detail what she had skilled in making verses. On Mar. 29, 1769, not heard of atrocities during the French and Inyet seventeen, she was married to John James dian wars. Far more realistic are the twentyBleecker of New Rochelle, N.Y., a gentleman four letters included in the Posthumous Works, trained for the law who preferred to cultivate which set forth both the terrors and enthusiinherited lands in upper New York state. After asms of a sensitive, society-bred young woman two years in Poughkeepsie, the couple moved to Tomhanick ( Tomhannock ), eighteen miles who in a wilderness garden reads Homer, Theocritus, Shakespeare, Gray, and even Chaucer north of Albany, where "blooming gardens, orand Donne, while behind her in the forest chards, and well-cultivated fields" provided a lurk horrors such as these books do not repastoral setting which inspired Mrs. Bleecker veal. Now playful, passing on village gossip or to further writing. During the Revolutionary complaints about Yankee volunteers who "eat War, forces of General Burgoyne, "burning and all my ducks and sausages," or lively prattle murdering all before them," suddenly invaded about balls where "we laugh and chat and sing her frontier Eden in the summer of 1777, while in spite of winter and wars," they are at other her husband was on his way to prepare a setimes grim in description of "our stricken neighcure retreat for the family in Albany. Mrs. borhood" and "our woods which are infested Bleecker fled toward Albany in panic, a baby by wolves and bears that growl at our very in her arms and another child trudging by her dooryard." Few contemporary reports present side. Months of hardship followed, which saw more vivid accounts of wartime conditions on the death of her mother, her younger daughter that American frontier. Arbella, and many friends. After Burgoyne's surrender the family returned to Tomhanick, Besides bringing her mother's writings bewhere Bleecker became active in the patriot fore the public, Margaretta Van Wyck Bleeckmilitia. During the winter of 1779, their lands er herself displayed an early literary bent. now threatened by Tory marauders, Mrs. Born probably in New York City, on Oct. 11, Bleecker was forced again to flee to Albany. 1771, she seems to have spent most of her girlHer husband was captured by Loyalists in the hood at Tomhanick. After her mother's death summer of 1781 and rescued only as he was Peggy Bleecker, to her father's distress, freabout to be carried across the Canadian borquented advanced, even Jacobin intellectual der. At this time she suffered a nervous colcircles in New York. Between 1790 and 1793 lapse from which she never fully recovered. she was a frequent contributor of poems to the cott, Old Diary Leaves ( 6 vols., 1 8 9 5 - 1 9 1 0 ) ; Annie Besant, H. P. Blavatsky and the Masters of Wisdom ( 1 9 0 7 ) ; Alice L. Cleather, H. P. Blavatsky as I Knew Her ( 1923 ) ; Bertram Keightley, Reminiscences of H.P.B. ( 1 9 3 1 ) ; and Mary K. Neff, comp., Personal Memoirs of H. P. Blavatsky (1937.) Critical reminiscences include Count S. Y. Witte, Memoirs ( 1 9 2 1 ) ; and V. S. Solovyoff, A Modern Priestess of Isis ( 1 8 9 5 ) . Source materials, besides Madame Blavatsky's own books, include A. Trevor Barker, ed., Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett ( 1924, published in New York as The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky to A. P. Sinnett). The literature of controversy includes the Coulomb book; the Proc. of the Soc. for Psychical Research, vol. I l l ( 1 8 8 5 ) ; and Harold E . and William L. Hare, Who Wrote the Mahatma Letters? ( 1 9 3 6 ) . See also Arthur H. Nethercot, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant ( I 9 6 0 ) . ]

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New-York Magazine. On July 14, 1792, she was married to a French physician named Faugeres, described as a profligate adventurer who squandered the fortune left to her in 1795 on the death of her father, but who himself died in 1798, a victim of yellow fever. Penniless, Margaretta Faugeres then taught at an academy in New Brunswick, N.J., and later in Brooklyn, but her misfortunes had broken her health. Like her mother before her and her only child, Margaretta Mason, after her, she lived only about three decades, dying on Jan. 14, 1801. The published works of Margaretta Faugeres include a volume of Essays in Prose and Verse (1795), the poems varied in meter, lively, imitative, patriotic, and intense; and Belisarius: A Tragedy (1795), in blank verse. [Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck, Cyc. of Am. Literature (1855), I, 365-66; Margaretta V. Faugeres, "Memoirs of Mrs. Ann Eliza Bleecker," The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker (1793); Rufus W. Griswold, The Female Poets of America (1848), pp. 28-29, 35-37; James C. Hendrickson, "Ann Eliza Bleecker: Her Life and Works" (unpublished M.A. thesis, Columbia Univ., 1935); Lillie D. Losche, The Early Am. Novel (1907), pp. 66-67; Moses Coit Tyler, The Literary Hist, of the Am. Revolution, 1763-1783 (1897). See also George W. Schuyler, Colonial N.Y. (1885), II, 171, 173-79; Joel Munsell, The Annak of Albany, VI (1855), 135.] LEWIS LEARY

BLISS, Anna Elvira. See Park.

FERGUSON, Abbie

BLISS, Lizzie Plummer (Apr. 11, 1864-Mar. 12, 1931), art collector, philanthropist, one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, was born in Boston, Mass. Known to her family and friends as Lillie, she was the younger of two daughters and second of four children of Cornelius Newton Bliss, a native of Fall Biver, Mass., and Elizabeth Mary (Plummer) Bliss of Boston. Her father, a textile commission merchant, moved his family in 1866 to New York City, where h e became president of Bliss, Fabyan & Company. For many years he headed the Protective Tariff League, and from 1892 to 1908 he was treasurer of the Republican National Committee; though normally shunning political office, he served for two years (1897-99) as Secretary of the Interior under President McKinley. Lillie was privately educated. Because Mrs. Bliss was in poor health, Lillie served as her father's hostess during his official career. Despite their prominence, the family lived outside the public eye, and Miss Bliss' preference for anonymity may have obscured much

of the support she gave to New York's cultural life. By 1907 she was a backer of the Kneisel Quartet. She also served on the advisory committee of the Juilliard Foundation, which supported musical education, publication, and performance. In the early years of the century Miss Bliss began to visit art galleries. Discovering one day a group of paintings by Arthur B. Davies, she realized that "what Davies was doing in paint was precisely what the musicians were doing" (McBride, p. 241). Her purchase of a Davies canvas in 1907 began her career as a collector. Conservative in his own work, Davies was informed and enthusiastic about contemporary European art. Miss Bliss, despite her mother's objections, went to his studio for tea and toured the galleries under his guidance, often joined by MARY QuiNN SULLIVAN. She probably provided financial backing for the epochal Armory Show of 1913 organized by Davies and others, which first introduced many Americans to the strange new forms of modernism. At the Armory Show Miss Bliss bought two Renoir landscapes, a Degas oil and pastel, and two Redons, thus inaugurating what was to become one of the finest holdings of modern French art in the United States. In the years following she began to purchase Gauguin and Cézanne, in time acquiring twenty-seven paintings by the latter. Seurat was another favorite, and by the end of her life she was buying the work of twentieth-century artists, Matisse, Modigliani, and Picasso among them. She also continued until his death to purchase Davies' paintings, of which she came to own the largest private collection in the country. At the insistence of her family Miss Bliss kept many of her finest modern canvases hidden away in the attic for years (her mother permitted the hanging of a few Cézannes), and she held her formal soirees without benefit of wine. But a wide circle of friends delighted in her unusual synthesis of a shy, kindly personality with a sharp, independent, and vigorous aesthetic judgment. For this latter Davies was partly responsible, but not for the courage and vivacity with which she defended her new tastes. Besides people in the art world, her guest list included stage performers such as Walter Hampden, Ruth Draper, and Ethel Barrymore, and she retained the friendship of musical personalities like Richard Aldrich and Charles M. Loeffler. In the early 1920's cultural New York still refused to recognize officially the existence of Post-Impressionist art. With her friends John Quinn and LOUISINE WALDRON ELDER HAVEMEYER, Miss Bliss induced the Metropolitan

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Museum of Art to hold a Post-Impressionist show in 1921, but this gesture had little permanent impact. John Quinn's fine collection of modern paintings was scattered after his death, despite the hopes of friends that it might form the nucleus of a permanent collection of modern art. Davies had been particularly interested in such a project. W h e n Miss Bliss discovered that A B B Y A L D R I C H R O C K E F E L L E R and Mary Quinn Sullivan shared her interest in establishing a modern gallery, the three got together at a famous 1929 luncheon meeting and asked A. Conger Goodyear, a founder of the Albright Art Gallery of Buffalo, to head their combined effort. T h e result was the launching of the Museum of Modern Art. After her mother's death Miss Bliss gave up the family house in the Murray Hill section and moved into a new Park Avenue apartment with a two-story gallery for her collection. She herself died there of cancer soon afterward, at the age of sixty-six; she was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City. In the last months of her life she had shifted her patronage from art to charity, foregoing the purchase of a much-wanted Van Gogh. Her will included handsome bequests to the New York Hospital, the Broadway Tabernacle (Congregational), and the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (of which her brother Cornelius N. Bliss was president). Most important, however, was her provision for the Museum of Modern Art, ingeniously ensuring it a permanent life. She left the museum a collection of 150 pieces, including works by the major modem French masters, on the condition that the museum be established on a "firm financial basis" within three years. Her brother Cornelius, executor of the estate, interpreted the provision to require an endowment of one million dollars, but because of the depression lowered the sum twice; despite the difficult years the museum managed to raise $ 6 0 0 , 0 0 0 and thus keep the bequest. This generous gesture was significant as representing the moment when modern art came of age in America. It was feared by some that Miss Bliss' bequest would either turn the museum into a kind of purgatory where contemporary works awaited recognition before inclusion in the Metropolitan Museum's collection or else freeze it into just one more repository of older works. Either distortion Miss Bliss would have found intolerable, for she consistently opposed ossification and rigidity in taste. In her famous "From a Letter to a National Academician," published after her death in the museum's catalogue of her collection, she reproached older artists for their superciliousness

and intolerance, " a state of mind incomprehensible to a philosopher who looks on and enjoys watching for . . . the new men in music, painting, and literature. . . ." These were men who required only freedom of expression and friendly encouragement, and her bequest was meant to institutionalize this aim. Her friendships, her "high-minded curiosity," in Royal Cortissoz's phrase, represented an ideal commitment to enduring art values, whatever their specific temporal forms. Always intent upon opening new horizons, Lillie Bliss helped ensure that later generations of Americans would find in their own country an unrivaled collection of the art of the modern age. In this she performed a service not only to public taste, but to younger artists who would find their clients from among the audience educated in awareness by the Museum of Modem Art. [Museum of Modern Art, Memorial Exhibition: The Collection of the Late Miss Lizzie P. Bliss (1931) and The Lillie P. Bliss Collection ( 1 9 3 4 ) ; Geoffrey T. Hellman, "Profile of a Museum," Art in America, Feb. 1964; A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years (1943); N.Y. Times, Mar. 13, 16 (editorial), 20, 22 (sec. VIII), May 16, 17, June 7, 1931; files of Museum of Modern Art; death record from N.Y. City Dept. of Health. See also: John H. Bliss, Genealogy of the Bliss Family in America ( 1 8 8 1 ) ; article on Miss Bliss' father in Diet. Am. Biog.; Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (1963); Henry McBride, "The Palette Knife," Creative Art, Apr. 1931; Frederic Thompson, "The Am. Luxembourg," Commonweal, July 29, 1931; Time, May 25, 1931, p. 29; Victor B. Danek, "A Hist. Study of the Kneisel Quartet" (unpublished doctoral thesis, Indiana Univ., 1962), pp. 70-71.] NEIL

HARRIS

B L O O M E R , Amelia Jenks ( M a y 27, 181&Dec. 30, 1 8 9 4 ) , temperance reformer, woman's rights editor, and suffragist, was b o m in Homer, Cortland County, N.Y., one of the youngest of "at least four daughters and two sons" of Ananias and Lucy ( W e b b ) Jenks. Her father, a clothier, had moved to central New York from Rhode Island. Little is known of Amelia's early life. Her education appears to have been limited to instruction at home from her mother and some rudimentary training in a district school, but was sufficient to permit her, at the age of seventeen, to teach in the village of Clyde, N.Y., north of Seneca Falls. After only one term there she went to live with her sister Elvira in the nearby town of Waterloo, where for two or three years she was a governess and tutor in the household of Oren Chamberlain. There she met and became engaged to Dexter Chamberlain Bloomer, a

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young law student of Seneca Falls, who soon became a prominent local attorney, town clerk, antislavery reformer, and co-editor of a Whig newspaper called the Seneca County Courier. They were married in Waterloo on Apr. 15, 1840, the word "obey" being omitted from the bride's vows. Settling in Seneca Falls, Amelia Bloomer began to write articles for her husband's newspaper on "social, moral, and political questions." She also contributed short pieces to a local temperance journal called the Water Bucket. In 1848, as an officer of a newly formed Ladies' Temperance Society, she joined some of its members in a decision to print a "little temperance paper," although the project finally fell to her alone; christened the Lily, it began publication in January 1849. Mrs. Bloomer had attended the celebrated woman's rights convention held in July 1848 at Seneca Falls under the leadership of E L I Z A B E T H CADY STANTON and LUCRETIA MOTT, though she took no active part in the proceedings. Possibly her success as deputy postmistress, her husband having appointed her to that position when he became postmaster of Seneca Falls during the administration of Zachary Taylor, strengthened her feminism, for the Lily presently began to print articles on woman's rights as well as temperance, many of them contributed by Mrs. Stanton. In March 1850 Mrs. Bloomer herself began to write on this theme. Her views on temperance were uncompromising, but regarding the ballot she assumed at this time a moderate position, declaring that woman "must gradually prepare the way for such a step by showing that she is worthy of receiving and capable of exercising it." Perhaps more important to the cause than her own writings was her introduction of Mrs. Stanton to SUSAN B. ANTHONY i n

1850.

Though Mrs. Bloomer in the Lily had defended the wearing of "pantelettes" by the actress FANNY K E M B L E as early as December 1849, her association with the famous costume for which her name was chiefly to be remembered began in the winter of 1850-51 when ELIZABETH SMITH M I L L E R , daughter of the noted reformer Gerrit Smith, visited Mrs. Stanton and appeared on the streets of Seneca Falls wearing full Turkish pantaloons and a short skirt. Mrs. Stanton adopted the new style, and soon Mrs. Bloomer was defending it in the Lily. Her articles were noticed in the New York Tribune, and as various newspapers picked up the story, a fad of national proportions developed. Subscriptions to the Lily doubled almost overnight, and its editor was deluged with letters asking for patterns and information about

the new garb, which thus became known as the "Bloomer Costume." Mrs. Bloomer, although at first "amazed at the furor I had unwittingly caused," decided to give unflinching support to the new garment; "For some six or eight years," she subsequently recalled, "I wore no other costume." Like other feminist leaders, however, she came to feel that this controversial attire drew attention away from more important aspects of the woman's rights struggle and gave it up, leaving the cause to another feminist editor, LYDIA SAYER HASBROUCK. Beginning in 1852, when she addressed a meeting of the Daughters of Temperance in Rochester on behalf of the right of women to divorce drunken husbands, Mrs. Bloomer added lecturing to her advocacy of reform. Especially noteworthy was her speaking tour of New York state in February 1853 with Susan B. Anthony and other feminist leaders, highlighted by a mass meeting at Metropolitan Hall in New York City. That same year, after attending the National Woman's Rights Convention in Cleveland, she lectured in Columbus, Indianapolis, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee. Continuing meanwhile in the temperance movement, always her basic interest, she was active in the Good Templars, a reform group organized along Masonic lines, becoming Deputy Grand Chief Templar of the state lodge. She attended an international temperance conclave in New York City in September 1853 and, when women were refused seats, helped organize a separate "Whole World's Temperance Convention." At the end of 1853 the Bloomers moved to Mount Vernon, Ohio, where Dexter Bloomer had purchased an interest in the Western Home Visitor, a reform weekly. Becoming assistant editor of the Visitor, Amelia Bloomer also continued to edit the Lily, which had now attained a national circulation of over 6,000, and to lecture throughout Ohio and Indiana on temperance and woman's rights. Quite willing to act upon her beliefs, she hired a young woman as a compositor for the Lily and retained her, despite a strike by her husband's male typesetters. But Bloomer, eager to live on the frontier, soon decided to move west to Council Bluffs, Iowa. That city's poor rail connections and lack of good printing facilities led Mrs. Bloomer to sell the Lily; it was purchased by Mary B. Birdsall of Richmond, Ind., but lapsed in December 1856. Council Bluffs, where the Bloomers settled in April 1855, remained their home for the rest of their lives. During her early years there Mrs. Bloomer worked to establish churches and Good Templar lodges and to advance the cause

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Bloomer of woman suffrage. In 1856 she addressed the territorial house of representatives of Nebraska at Omaha, winning passage of a suffrage bill ( though the measure later died in the senate). She was active in relief work during the Civil War, organizing the Soldiers' Aid Society of Council Bluffs in 1861; in 1865 she spent three weeks at the Chicago Sanitary Fair after having helped assemble the Iowa contribution to it. After the war her pace slackened, the reflection of advancing age and, perhaps, the Bloomers' increasing prosperity, as her husband developed a thriving land business and became mayor of Council Bluffs. Mrs. Bloomer in 1871 became president of the Iowa Woman Suffrage Society, organized the year before, and she helped work for the Iowa legal code of 1873 which "almost entirely abolished the legal distinction between men and married women as to property rights" (Bloomer, p. 2 4 0 ) . Still wielding a vigorous pen, she contributed a spate of articles and letters to newspapers and other journals in defense of her ideas. She was less active on the national scene, however, although she represented Iowa at the meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in New York City in 1869. Sharing considerable time with these concerns, however, were her domestic duties. She enjoyed competing for culinary prizes at the Pottawattamie County Fair and was an enthusiastic gardener. The Bloomers had no children of their own, but adopted a boy and a girl whom they raised to maturity. Mrs. Bloomer, a Presbyterian by upbringing, had become an Episcopalian in the early 1840's and continued active in that church throughout her life, although in later years she took some interest in Christian Science. Never robust, she suffered from stomach trouble and other ailments in her closing years. In 1894 she spent some time at Manitou Springs, Colo., undergoing electrical treatments. She died of a heart attack shortly after returning to Iowa and was buried in Fairview Cemetery at Council Bluffs. Small in stature, Mrs. Bloomer was described by an admirer in 1852 as "graceful, of a rather coquettish mien," and as having "a slight figure and elegant form" (newspaper clipping in Amelia Bloomer scrapbook, Council Bluffs Free Public Library). Less flattering was a Seneca Falls resident who recalled her as "not at all a handsome woman, rather plain, on the contrary" ( W o m a n ' s Journal, Aug. 14, 1880, p. 2 5 9 ) . Earnest and argumentative, with little sense of humor, she was capable of giving unintended offense to associates. "Her criticisms, possibly, were sometimes too unsparing," her

husband admitted after her death. Essentially a propagandist rather than an original thinker, she never doubted the Tightness of her ideas or the desirability of seeing them imposed, by force if need be, upon others; and she found personal satisfaction in identifying herself with what she thought to be the highest impulses of her age. [The most helpful source for a study of Amelia Bloomer and her ideas, largely because of the long quotations which it makes from her speeches, letters, and articles, is D. C. Bloomer, Life and Writings of Amelia Bloomer ( 1895 ). A complete run of the Lily is available on microfilm in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. Manuscript letters and other papers pertaining to her career are at the Seneca Falls (N.Y.) Hist. Soc. and the Council Bluffs (Iowa) Free Public Library. The best recent evaluation of Amelia Bloomer is the perceptive sketch in Margaret Farrand Thorp, Female Persuasion (1949). Also useful on specific phases of her career are Paul Fatout, "Amelia Bloomer and Bloomerism," N.Y. Hist. Soc. Quart., Oct. 1952; and Philip D. Jordan, "The Bloomers in Iowa," Palimpsest, Sept. 1939. On her husband, see John H. Keatley, "Hon. D. C. Bloomer," Annals of Iowa, Jan. 1874; and O. L. Baskin, ed., Hist, of Pottawattamie County, Iowa (1883), pp. 162-65. Scattered references to Mrs. Bloomer are contained in Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, vols. I-III (1881-86), and she contributed to the third volume the greater part of a chapter on developments in Iowa.] w . DAVID LEWIS

B L O O M F I E L D - M O O R E , Clara Sophia Jessup. See MOORE, Clara Sophia Jessup. B L O O M F I E L D - Z E I S L E R , Fannie. See LER, Fannie Bloomfield.

ZEIS-

B L O W , Susan Elizabeth (June 7, 1843-Mar. 26, 1916), kindergarten educator, was bom in Carondelet, a suburb of St. Louis, Mo., one of three daughters and two sons of Minerva (Grimsley) and Henry Taylor Blow. Her father, of English ancestry, with modest Virginia forebears, was an educated man, a wealthy entrepreneur, and a leader in St. Louis business and political circles; later one of the organizers of the Republican party in Missouri, he served two terms in Congress ( 1 8 6 3 - 6 7 ) . Her mother, the daughter of a noted St. Louis manufacturer, was an especially pious woman. Both were Presbyterians. A thoughtful and seriousminded young woman, Susan Blow was educated by private tutors until she was sixteen, after which she had two years at Miss Haines' School in New York City. She then studied at home—chiefly Calvinist divines, the Brownings, Cousin, and Madame de Staël—and sought, de-

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spite her father's objections, some compelling vocation. In 1869-70 she lived for fifteen months in Brazil, where her father was United States minister, and afterward traveled in Europe. While in Germany she encountered the kindergarten work of Friedrich Froebel and acquired some of the teaching devices or "gifts" used in his classes. Upon her return in 1871, Miss Blow approached William T. Harris, superintendent of the St. Louis schools, about the possibility of introducing kindergartens into the school system. Harris, a Hegelian scholar and the central figure of the philosophical group known as the "St. Louis Movement," had recently sought to interest his teachers in the kindergarten. With his encouragement, Miss Blow went to New York in 1872 to study under Mme. MARIA KRAUS-BOELTÉ, a disciple of Froebel's widow. On her return, she offered to supervise a kindergarten without pay if the St. Louis school board would provide a room and salaried teacher. Her offer was accepted, and the first public school kindergarten in America opened in September 1873 at the Des Peres School in the Carondelet section of St. Louis. The following year Miss Blow founded a training school for kindergartners; from its classes came many women who directed kindergartens and training schools elsewhere, including ELIZABETH HARBISON and Laura Fisher. By 1880 kindergartens had been adopted throughout the city's public schools, and the system, over which she unofficially presided, was one of several centers from which the kindergarten movement spread across the country. During these years Susan Blow came increasingly under the influence of Harris, studying with him not only Froebel but also Hegel, Dante, and Goethe. During a lecture by Harris on German idealist philosophy, so she later recalled, "the scales fell from my eyes" and "I beheld Eternal Reality. . . . My intellect was born again . . ." (Kindergarten Review, June 1910, p. 592). Serene in her new "knowledge of abiding truth," she became probably the leading woman participant, along with ANNA C. BRACKETT, in the St. Louis Movement, organizing study classes, giving courses to her kindergartners in philosophy and literature taught by herself, Harris, and Denton Snider, attending the Concord School of Philosophy in 1880, and publishing A Study of Dante in 1887. Miss Blow's participation in the kindergarten movement was an outgrowth of these philosophical interests and her desire for service and accomplishment, rather than of any concern for contemporary social problems. She interpreted Froebel according to Harris' He-

gelian idealism. "Whatever the human being can become exists in him from the first as potentiality," she said, and therefore "the child shall be educated through self-expression." The true self, she believed, was the ideal self. "Latent in each child is generic humanity, and . . . to find out what the child may do we must study what man has done. The typical deeds of man as revealed in history are the erection of social institutions . . . religion . . . the practical and fine arts . . . literature, science, and philosophy." Froebel's series of "gifts" and games penetrated to the "embryonic forms of . . . [these] truly human activities" and nourished and enlarged them. She conceived the kindergarten as devoted both to the service of childhood and the self-culture of young women. Seeing the same universal ideals embodied in motherhood as in the understanding and practice of Froebelian principles, she felt no conflict between the supreme ideal of motherhood she upheld in her books and the goal of self-development and cultural accomplishment she followed in her own life and urged on her kindergartners. A woman of strong will, accustomed to a commanding social position, Miss Blow held rigidly to her educational views. Exhaustion forced her to retire from most kindergarten activities in 1884, and she began to travel to recover her strength. Her ill health was accompanied by a deepening melancholia, associated with an inability to reconcile her idealist philosophy with her Calvinist faith. In 1886-87 a group of her St. Louis students challenged her theory and authority by making kindergarten innovations; her opposition to the changes virtually cut her off from the kindergarten movement in her home city. Leaving St. Louis permanently in 1889, she established residences in Cazenovia, N.Y., and in Boston, and under the care of the Boston neurologist James Jackson Putnam, with whom she formed a philosophical friendship, she gradually recovered her health. She also strengthened her faith in Harris' philosophy and, probably during this period, became converted to the Episcopal Church; she apparently felt little conflict during her later years between these two commitments. She now entered upon the final stage of her career as the leading American defender of orthodox Froebelian theory and practice. Beginning in 1894, she wrote five volumes for William Harris' International Education Series detailing her views. Traveling under the auspices of kindergarten associations in the East and Midwest, she lectured extensively on kindergarten subjects, literature, and philosophy.

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Blow She was a lecturer at Teachers College, Columbia University, 1 9 0 5 - 0 9 ; and she served on the advisory committee and principal policy group of the International Kindergarten Union, the Committee of Fifteen (later Nineteen), almost continuously until her death. While she supported innovations consistent with Froebel's program, such as nature study and home visitation, she opposed alteration of Froebel's sequence of gifts and games and neglect of his Mother Play. Although Miss Blow's own early work had helped stimulate educational reform, she played a largely obstructionist role during these last decades when the kindergarten movement was being joined to other movements for progressive education. The valuable criticisms she sometimes made of some of the newer trends were too closely tied to a rigid kindergarten program and idealist metaphysics to be effective. A woman of intelligence and verve, she tried to keep abreast of new developments in psychology and philosophy. She followed Dr. Putnam a little way into Freud and encouraged him to read Bergson, but her intellectual adventures always caused her anxiety and she hastened to reaffirm her set beliefs. Her knowledge of philosophy remained superficial, and her thinking constricted and largely derivative. She died in New York City in 1916 of heart failure following a longstanding condition of general arteriosclerosis. After a funeral at Christ Church (Episcopal), St. Louis, she was buried in that city's Bellefontaine Cemetery. A full-length portrait of Susan Blow by Gari Melchers hangs in the Missouri state capítol. [The principal biographical sources are Laura Fisher's sketch in Pioneers of the Kindergarten in America (1924), pp. 184-203; Denton J. Snider, The St. Louis Movement (1920); and letters from Susan Blow to William T. Harris, Harris Papers, Mo. Hist. Soc., St. Louis, which contain new information on her education, illness, spiritual crisis, relations with Dr. Putnam, and role at Teachers College. Further information on her later life and thought is contained in her correspondence with Dr. Putnam, soon to be published by Harvard Univ. Press under the editorship of Nathan Hale, Jr. Another collection of her letters (to Miss Fanniebell Curtis, 1901-16) is in the archives of the Assoc. for Childhood Education International, Washington, D.C. For information on her family background see: on Henry Blow, Diet. Am. Biog. and Si. Louis Globe-Democrat, Sept. 12, 13, 1875; on Minerva Blow, ibid., July 2, 1875. For biographical details on Miss Blow see N.Y. Times and St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Mar. 29, 1916; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Mar. 27, 1916; and death certificate, N.Y. City Dept. of Health. For her St. Louis kindergarten activities, see Board of St. Louis Public Schools, Annual Report, 1873-77; her article "The

Hist, of the Kindergarten in the U.S.," Outlook, Apr. 3, 1897; Nina Vandewalker, The Kindergarten in Am. Education (1908); Ilse Forest, Pre-School Education (1927); David H. Harris, ed., A Brief Report of the Meeting Commemorative of the Early St. Louis Movement (1922); Charles Perry, ed., The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy (1930). For her later kindergarten activities, see Columbia Univ. Catalogue and Teachers College Announcement, 1904-09; Patty S. Hill, "Reminiscences of Miss Blow," Internat. Kindergarten Union, Proc., 1916; G. Stanley Hall, Educational Problems, I (1911), 29-31, 39. For Miss Blow's ideas, see her own educational writings: Symbolic Education (1894), the fullest statement of her philosophy; the introduction to her translation of Froebel's Mother Play (2 vols., 1895); Letters to a Mother on the Philosophy of Froebel (1899); Kindergarten Education (1900); Educational Issues in the Kindergarten (1908), a critique of Herbartian, child study, and Deweyan reforms in the kindergarten; "The Kindergarten Ideal," Outlook, Aug. 7, 1897; and "The Service of Dr. Harris to the Kindergarten," Kindergarten Rev., June 1910, a biographical as well as philosophical account of her relations with Harris' philosophy.] DOROTHY ROSS

BLY, Nellie. See

SEAMAN,

Elizabeth Cochrane.

BOARDMAN, Mabel Thorp (Oct. 12, 1 8 6 0 Mar. 17, 1 9 4 6 ) , Red Cross leader, was bom in Cleveland, Ohio, the eldest of three daughters and three sons of Florence (Sheffield) and William Jarvis Boardman. Her mother was a daughter of Joseph Earl Sheffield, New Haven merchant and benefactor of Sheffield Scientific School at Yale. Her father, a highly successful lawyer, educated at Trinity College in Hartford and the Yale law school, was descended from William Bradford, first governor of the Plymouth colony, and from Senator Elijah Boardman of Connecticut, whose extensive landholdings in the Western Reserve had drawn his son, Mabel's grandfather, to Ohio in the 1820's. Educated in private schools in Cleveland and New York, Mabel Boardman spent her late teens and twenties in travel, volunteer work at the Children's Day Nursery, and other activities typical of her class. A four-year European sojourn with her uncle, William Walter Phelps, while he served as United States minister to Germany ( 1 8 8 9 - 9 3 ) , stimulated an interest in politics and international affairs. Upon her return, her parents having moved to Washington, D.C., she was soon drawn into the circle of socially prominent women who were serving on the board of the Children's Hospital. When the Spanish-American War broke out, she joined energetically in efforts to recruit and support army nurses.

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Boardman

Mabel Boardman's connection with the American Red Cross began seemingly by chance. When in 1900 a Congressional charter sought to place the nineteen-year-old organization on a firmer basis, Miss Boardman was among the more than fifty incorporators listed —an action taken, she always maintained, without consulting her. Yet though hitherto little aware of the Red Cross, she quickly plunged into its affairs, at a time of growing controversy. The society's indifferent showing in the Spanish-American War had stirred discontent with the highly individualistic management of its aging founder, CLARA BARTON. Miss Boardman herself found the sharp-tongued Miss Barton unattractive and her informal methods of handling contributions disorderly. Convinced that the public would have little respect for the Red Cross so long as Clara Barton headed it, she took a seat on the executive committee and began to work quietly but steadily toward a major reorganization. Miss Barton, who viewed all criticism as heresy, still had loyal followers, however, and the board split into two warring factions. The conflict came to a head in December 1902 when Miss Boardman proposed a number of additions to the governing body. Miss Barton not only defeated the Boardman slate but pushed through new bylaws making herself president for life. Now convinced that the Red Cross must be completely rid of Miss Barton, Mabel Boardman, a lifelong Republican, turned for aid to influential political friends, including Anna Roosevelt Cowles, sister of the President, and Secretary of War William Howard Taft. Within a month the White House announced that the President and his cabinet were severing all connections with the Red Cross, and a memorial was submitted to Congress calling for a Congressional investigation of alleged financial malfeasance and general mismanagement by the Barton regime. The Barton forces retaliated by suspending Miss Boardman and her sympathizers. The unhappy controversy ended only when a high-level investigative committee appointed by former Secretary of State Richard Olney, general counsel of the Red Cross, cleared Miss Barton in return for her tacit assurance that she would resign as president. This she did, and a new board sympathetic to Miss Boardman was elected in June 1904. Even during this struggle Miss Boardman had been giving thought to the future direction of the Red Cross and studying foreign Red Cross societies. She spent the autumn of 1904 drafting a revised Congressional charter that established the Red Cross as a quasi-governmental institution with its principal officer

to be named by the president of the United States and its accounts to be audited annually by the War Department. Introduced in December, it passed with a minimum of debate and was signed into law by President Roosevelt on Jan. 5, 1905. As expected, Roosevelt promptly named Taft the head of the revitalized organization, while Miss Boardman was reinstated as a member of the executive committee and given an office in the State-War-Navy Building next to the White House. With single-minded concentration she threw herself into the task of reshaping the Red Cross into an organization of many programs, carried out by large numbers of well-trained volunteers, yet one that would remain always mindful of its special relationship to the government and its ultimate aim of preparedness for great national emergencies. This purpose could best be accomplished, she thought, by enlisting the support of influential and well-to-do men and women whose social position matched her own. She traveled throughout the country organizing state and local units. She cajoled such proud and heretofore independent professional groups as the American Nursing Association into supporting Red Cross entry into the field of public health nursing, established Red Cross first aid and lifesaving courses, won for the Red Cross a major role in military preparedness planning, and hired a professional staff to develop sound disaster-relief policies. Under Miss Boardman's leadership the American Red Cross built up a permanent endowment fund of nearly two million dollars and erected on federal land in the heart of Washington a monumental headquarters irreverently nicknamed the "Marble Palace." For this structure, conceived as a memorial to the women of the Civil War, Miss Boardman raised $400,000 from a few friends and obtained a matching grant from Congress. Receptive to all money-raising ideas, she welcomed the suggestion of E M I L Y PERKINS B i s s E L L of Delaware that Christmas seals be sold to raise funds to combat tuberculosis and finance Red Cross projects. Although she enjoyed travel, visiting the Japanese Red Cross in 1905 and accompanying Taft on an economic mission to the Philippines in 1908, Miss Boardman pointedly avoided rushing to disaster scenes. She wanted no one to compare her to Clara Barton; disaster relief was a job for skilled professional supervisors and organized community volunteers. All this Mabel Boardman did as a volunteer, shunning the chairmanship of the executive committee when it was offered to her. The chairman must be a man, she maintained, in

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Boardman whom people of importance would have confidence. Nevertheless, Ernest P. Bicknell, staff director of the Red Cross in this period, wrote many years later: "Miss Boardman was the chief, make no mistake about that. . . . [The Central Committee and the Executive Committee] confined themselves almost exclusively to registering and approving her decisions and recommendations" (Dulles, p. 8 3 ) . When war broke out in August 1914 Miss Boardman threw her energies into European relief. For the first year, the Red Cross was neutral, shipping medical supplies to Central and Allied powers alike. But as American sentiment and diplomacy shifted, the cherished concept of Red Cross neutrality was undermined, and Miss Boardman found her influence waning. As it became apparent that she could neither delegate authority nor administer multimillion-dollar war relief projects singlehandedly, men who had been content to follow her lead moved to the center of the stage. Eliot Wadsworth, vice-chairman of the executive committee, assumed administrative control in 1916, to be superseded in April 1917 by Wall Street banker Henry P. Davison, who was named chairman of a newly created Red Cross War Council. For the balance of the war Miss Boardman had to content herself with such minor matters as the design of uniforms for women volunteers and visits to Red Cross hospitals in England, France, and Italy. The first months after the end of the war were equally trying. The newly appointed peacetime chairman, Dr. Livingston Farrand, looked to professional staff rather than to volunteers for advice, and Miss Boardman was not immediately reelected to the executive committee when the War Council was dissolved in February 1919. Turning to other activities as a respite, she accepted appointment in September 1920 to the Board of Commissioners of the District of Columbia, the three-man governing body of Washington, and spent the next six months visiting every hospital and welfare agency in the city. By 1921 she had resumed an active though diminished role in Red Cross affairs. The organization at this time was struggling with a fundamental issue: should the reputation, strength, and resources gained during the war be turned to peacetime social service programs? Miss Boardman was among those who maintained that taking on permanent welfare responsibilities would require far larger resources than the Red Cross could command and would divert it from its charter responsibilities. Her recent intensive exposure to welfare work outside the Red Cross had shown

her not only how great, but also how complex, were the needs in this field. The Red Cross, she told the national convention in October 1922, had been founded "to meet the great international, national and smaller local emergencies" and it should not attempt "to maintain regular normal services to its community." Dr. Farrand's successor, the economy-minded John Barton Payne, was influenced by such advice in evolving his "common-sense approach" whereby local chapters carried on programs sufficiently broad to keep volunteers trained for emergencies, but avoided any duplication of health and welfare activities already provided by other organizations or local governments. As for Miss Boardman, she was given a free hand to establish the Red Cross Volunteer Special Services program and to make of it what she could. Now, willingly and without rancor, she let others run the organization while for seventeen years she concentrated on building an elite corps of carefully selected, thoroughly trained volunteers. Nurses Aides, Motor Corps, Home Service, and the famed Gray Ladies were among these units, each of which was given its own insignia and distinctive uniform. In city after city, admission to the Special Services came to depend increasingly on the social standing of the applicant. This was true to a marked extent in the District of Columbia Red Cross chapter, formed by Miss Boardman and her close friends in 1905 and thenceforth dominated by her. She raised the money for a second "marble palace" in 1930 to house "her" chapter, and its volunteer leadership was drawn from the inner circle of Washington society. Doubtless Miss Boardman thought she was describing all Red Cross volunteers when she observed in 1934 that "Women of wealth and position have frequently told me they've never been so happy in their lives as when doing Red Cross work," but she was speaking of a fast vanishing era. America in the depression years cared little about the happiness of women of wealth, and the effort to maintain high social standards for the Volunteer Special Services was a source of increasing resentment. Nevertheless, the élan of Miss Boardman's uniformed groups did attract volunteers who would perhaps not otherwise have become involved in charitable work at all, and represented a source of continuity and strength in many weak Red Cross chapters in the 1920's and '30's. With another war looming in 1940, Miss Boardman at eighty began to relinquish her many Red Cross committee assignments. She resigned as director of the Volunteer Special

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Boardman Services in August 1940. Her retirement in January 1944 from the District of Columbia Chapter was the occasion for a great civic tribute attended by over a thousand volunteers. In December of that year she resigned from the central committee, the governing board of the national organization, and also from the nominal post of secretary of the Red Cross. Whether standing erect, walking with a quick step, or presiding with quiet dignity at a committee meeting, Mabel Boardman was always an impressive woman. She wore a Red Cross uniform whenever possible and on other occasions dressed in conservative good taste. Her hair was generally worn in pompadour style and her hats grew a bit more outdated as the years wore on. She bore a marked resemblance to Queen Mary of England, and cherished the frequently told story that the Duke of Windsor, on his first visit to Washington, caught a glimpse of her and exclaimed, "Good Lord—there's Mother!" Generous and broad-minded (save for a never-relinquished prejudice against Clara Barton), she defended even during the harsh days of World War II her right to retain Japanese decorations given her for earthquake relief. When asked about enemy atrocities, she replied that such stories were usually gross distortions. Among the many honors that came to her were medals from nine countries and honorary degrees from Yale ( 1 9 1 1 ) , Western Reserve University ( 1 9 1 3 ) , Smith College ( 1 9 1 6 ) , and George Washington University ( 1 9 2 1 ) . She died at the family house on Ρ Street in 1946, of coronary thrombosis. She was interred in the Chapel of Joseph of Arimathea at the Washington Cathedral (Episcopal), where a plaque commemorates her Red Cross service. Although the tributes at her death and for some years thereafter emphasized her creation and leadership of the Red Cross Volunteer Special Services, her reputation rests ultimately on her work in the 1905—15 decade. In those years she salvaged a floundering organization, drastically reformed its structure, and transformed it into a major and highly respected national institution. [Mabel Boardman's personal papers are in the Library of Congress. The archives of the Am. Red Cross in Washington contain voluminous correspondence, news clippings and minutes of metings in which she participated or her policies were debated, and copies of eight pamphlets and twentyfive magazine articles written by her, 1905-35. Her book, Under the Red Cross Flag at Home and Abroad (1915), describes her earlier activity in the organization. See also Ernest P. Bicknell's Pioneer-

ing with the Red Cross ( 1935) and In War's Wake, 1914-1915 (1936), and other books by Miss Boardman's colleagues. A series of detailed unpublished historical monographs by independent scholars, commissioned by the Red Cross in 1946 and covering the period 1881-1945, is available at Red Cross headquarters. Foster Rhea Dulles, The Am. Red Cross: A Hist. (1950), draws on these monographs and is the first published work to portray the Boardman-Barton struggle objectively and to assess Miss Boardman's role. On her family, see Charlotte Goldthwaite, comp., Boardman Genealogy, 1525-1895 (1895).] GEORGE MC KEE ELSEY

BOARDMAN, Sarah Hall. See JUDSON, Sarah Hall Boardman. B O D L E Y , Rachel Littler (Dec. 7, 1831-June 15, 1 8 8 8 ) , chemist, botanist, dean of the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the elder daughter and third of five children of Anthony Prichard Bodley, a carpenter and later a pattern maker, and Rebecca Wilson (Talbott) Bodley; she had two older brothers and two younger sisters. Her mother, a Quaker of English extraction, had moved with her parents from Winchester, Va., to western Pennsylvania and thence to Cincinnati. Her father, of eighteenth-century Scotch-Irish descent, had come from Montgomery County, Pa. Their children were reared in the Presbyterian faith. As a young girl Rachel was impressed with the reports of returned missionaries from abroad and later volunteered for mission work but was rejected because of delicate health. Until she was twelve she studied in a private school run by her mother. She then entered the Wesleyan Female College in Cincinnati. After graduating with a classical diploma in 1849, she taught at the college until 1860, advancing to the position of preceptress in the higher college studies. Having developed a special interest in chemistry and botany, Miss Bodley enrolled in 1860 for advanced study in the natural sciences at the Polytechnic College in Philadelphia. She next (February 1862) accepted a position teaching natural sciences at the Cincinnati Female Seminary. At the same time she undertook the classification and mounting of an extensive plant collection bequeathed to the seminary, an exacting research project which filled her leisure hours. Some years before, on a summer tour of the Great Lakes, Rachel Bodley had met Isaac Barton, a corporator (board member) of the Female Medical College (renamed in 1868 the Woman's Medical College) in Philadelphia; and during her scientific study in that city she had visited the college and met two members

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Bodley and E M E L I N E H O R T O N In 1865, at thirty-three, she was appointed to the first chair of chemistry at the college. She continued her research interests at her new post. Soon after her appointment she made an original study of sea plants, and on summer trips to various parts of the United States she collected botanical specimens, carrying with her a special trunk containing specimen sheets and drying paper. She gave summer lectures on botany and other subjects, and was an active participant in scientific societies: the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, to which she was elected in 1871, the New York Academy of Sciences (corresponding member, 1876), the American Chemical Society (charter member, 1876), and Philadelphia's Franklin Institute (1880), at which she gave, by invitation, six lectures on "Household Chemistry." As first vice-president of the Priestley Centennial Association, she played a leading role in the gathering of scientists at Priestley's Pennsylvania burial place in 1874 to honor the hundredth anniversary of his discovery of oxygen. Warm-hearted and enthusiastic, she got along well with men and women alike.

with her and her mother at their home near the college. Her extensive letter writing helped make the Woman's Medical College known in other parts of the world, and it drew students from as far away as India and Japan. Outside the college, Dean Bodley served as an elected school director in Philadelphia's 29th School Section ( 1 8 8 2 - 8 5 and from 1887 to her death ) and as one of the women visitors appointed in 1883 by the state Board of Public Charities to inspect local charitable institutions. She died in Philadelphia of a sudden heart attack in 1888, at the age of fifty-six. She was buried in Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati.

Upon the resignation, in January 1874, of Emeline Cleveland, Rachel Bodley was chosen to succeed her as dean of the Woman's Medical College. Over the next fourteen years Dean Bodley lengthened the course of instruction to three years; expanded opportunities for clinical training, including the construction of a surgical amphitheatre; and appointed able new faculty members, among them Dr. CLARA

B O E L T E , Maria. See

of its staff,

A N N PRESTON

CLEVELAND.

MARSHALL

and

Dr.

ANNA

E. H R O O M A L L .

The

college awarded her an honorary M.D. degree in 1879. In 1881, by means of a questionnaire, Dr. Bodley made an extensive statistical study of the college's graduates, published in pamphlet form as The College Story. Her report (which found that 166 out of the 189 graduates who replied were actively and successfully engaged in medical practice, many of them combining careers with marriage) won considerable attention; Thomas Wentworth Higginson hailed it as "the first really good and careful collection of facts . . . bearing on the professional life of woman" (quoted in Bolton, p. 167). A particular interest of Rachel Bodley was medical missionary work. From her first years at the college she had encouraged students to enter this field, and she followed with pleasure the careers of such graduates as CLARA S W A I N and A N N A S. KUCLER in India and M A R Y H. F U L T O N in China. Always hospitable, she often invited young returning missionaries to stay

[Gulielma F. Alsop, Hist, of the Woman's Medical College, Phila., Pa., 1850-1950 (1950); Sarah K. Bolton, Successful Women (1888), chap, viii; Papers Read at the Memorial Hour Commemorative of the Late Prof. Rachel L. Bodley, M.D. (pamphlet, 1888 ) ; obituary in Woman's Jour., June 23, 1888; printed obituary by Caroline H. Dali in Dall Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; printed and MS. material in the library of the Woman's Medical College; information about Anthony Bodley from Cincinnati Hist. Soc.] GULIELMA FELL ALSOP KRAUS-BOELTÉ,

Maria.

BOGLE, Sarah Comly Norris (Nov. 17, 1870Jan. 11, 1932), librarian, was born in Milton, Pa., to John Armstrong Bogle, a chemical engineer, and Emma Ridgway (Norris) Bogle. Both parents were natives of Milton; the Bogles had been prominent in Pennsylvania business and public affairs for several generations. Carefully brought up, Sarah was privately tutored for six years before attending Miss M. E. Stevens' school in Germantown, Pa., where she also taught briefly. She later studied for a year at the University of Chicago and traveled abroad extensively. With an abundance of energy and intelligence, she felt the need for disciplined stimulation, and in 1903, at thirty-two, she entered the library school of Drexel Institute in Philadelphia. After graduating in 1904, she spent three years as librarian at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa., where her executive skills helped bring about the completion of a library building. In 1909 Sarah Bogle was for a short time with the Queens Borough Public Library in New York City, but before the end of the year she accepted a position as a branch librarian at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Pa. Here she had full opportunity to develop her professional skills. In 1911 she was made head of the children's department at the main library and principal of the training school for

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Bogle children's librarians. In the next eight or nine years she became a leader in library work with children, while exploring educational and practical problems in librarianship. During her years as head of the school it became the Carnegie Library School, a department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology. She was president of the Association of American Library Schools in 1917-18 and, from 1917 to 1920, a member of the council of the American Library Association. In 1920 Miss Bogle moved to Chicago to accept the position of assistant secretary of the American Library Association, a post she held for the rest of her life. Working closely with the secretary, Carl H. Milam, she helped develop a strong headquarters staff, at a time when the A.L.A. was expanding its leadership in the profession, and directed a variety of undertakings. Her previous experience as an educator suggested her appointment as secretary to the A.L.A.'s Board of Education for Librarianship in 1924, and this position she also held until her death. In this capacity she worked to guide library schools throughout the country to higher professional standards. Her advice was often sought by college presidents and other educational leaders, as well as by foundation executives; after her death, Frederick P. Keppel of the Carnegie Corporation of New York paid special tribute to her "aid to the corporation in placing its funds in fruitful channels" (Bulletin of the American Library Association, January 1938, p. 13). In the summer of 1923 Miss Bogle conducted a library course in Paris as a member of the American Committee for Devastated France. From this successful experiment stemmed the Paris Library School, an international school conducted from 1924 to 1929 under the auspices of the American Library Association with Miss Bogle as the director and principal fund raiser. Then and later, she attended many conferences where she presented American library methods to European colleagues. In 1930 she was the A.L.A. representative at the International Library Committee meetings in Stockholm, Sweden (the only woman delegate), a delegate to the British Institute for Adult Education, and a member of the committee of experts for the study of children's literature under the International Bureau of Education in Geneva. She was the obvious choice in 1931 to head a committee of the International Federation of Library Associations to discuss a permanent international library school based in Paris. At the request of the Carnegie Corporation, Miss Bogle visited the Virgin Islands in 1929

to survey library needs; as a result of her inquiry, the corporation granted $10,000 to reorganize and expand library facilities on this American outpost in the Caribbean. She also served as the American Library Association's liaison member on the University of Chicago's library curriculum study, which resulted in six textbooks for library education. In 1930 the Southeastern Library Association asked Miss Bogle to help investigate the development of library schools in thirteen Southern states. This study proved especially valuable as a check on the quality of the agencies rapidly springing up to meet the demand for trained librarians in schools. Miss Bogle, according to an associate, was a large, well-groomed woman with good carriage and beautiful blond-gray hair always perfectly in place. She was an Episcopalian by religion. Dedication to her profession kept her actively concerned with every aspect of librarianship. She died of cancer at the age of sixty-one in White Plains, N.Y., the home of her brother J. Norris Bogle, and was buried in the Milton (Pa.), cemetery. In 1951 she was one of forty leaders of her profession elected to a "Library Hall of Fame." The Bogle Memorial Fund of the American Library Association, established by gifts from her associates and from the Carnegie Corporation, perpetuates her name. [Harrison W. Craver, "Sarah C. N. Bogle: An Appreciation," Bull, of the Am. Library Assoc., Aug. 1932, pp. 488-90; Everett O. Fontaine, "People and Places of the Milam Era," ibid., May 1964; articles on the Bogle Memorial Fund in ibid., Jan. 1938, p. 13, and Sept. 1938, pp. 620-21; Library Jour., Mar. 15, 1951, pp. 4 6 7 - 6 8 ; III. Libraries, Jan. 1952, pp. 5 - 6 ; obituaries in Bull, of the Am. Library Assoc., Feb. 1932, Library Jour., Jan. 15, 1932, and N.Y. Times, Jan. 12, 1932. See also annual reports of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, 1909-20; of the Training School for Children's Librarians (later the Carnegie Library School), 1911-20; and of the Am. Library Assoc., 1920-32. Death record from N.Y. State Dept. of Health, which includes Miss Bogle's date of birth.] SARAH

K.

VANN

BOISSEVAIN, Inez Milholland (Aug. 6, 1886Nov. 25, 1916), lawyer, feminist, suffragist, was bom in Brooklyn, N.Y., the elder daughter and first of three children of Jean (Torrey) and John Elmer Milholland. Her mother was of Scottish descent; her father, whose Irish parents had settled in Lewis, N.Y., was a reporter and editorial writer for the New York Tribune who later developed a pneumatic-tube system for carrying city mail which he introduced with great success in Europe and Amer-

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Boissevain ica. An inveterate champion of worthy causes, including Negro rights, prison reform, and woman suffrage, he passed on to his daughter an independent and reformist temperament. Inez attended the Comstock School in New York, Kensington High School in London, and the Willard School in Berlin before entering Vassar College in 1905. At Vassar her reforming spirit flourished under the influence of CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN'S Women and Economics (1898), then "the Bible of the student body" (Blatch and Lutz, p. 108). Pausing long enough to set a college record in the basketball throw, she enrolled two-thirds of her fellow students in a campus suffrage organization, where she lectured to them on socialism. When Mrs. Gilman and the New York suffragist HARRIOT STANTON BLATCH visited Vassar, Inez Milholland defied a college ban and organized a meeting in a nearby cemetery. After her graduation in 1909 she applied to the law schools of Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia, and Harvard, but found them closed to women. New York University admitted her, however, and she received an LL.B. degree in 1912. Joining the New York firm of Osbome, Lamb, and Garvan, she specialized in criminal and divorce practice. Her true interest, however, lay in working for reform causes. She enthusiastically joined the suffrage campaign of Mrs. Blatch's Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later the Women's Political Union), thereafter lecturing, arranging rallies, testifying at legislative hearings, and marching in parades—white-robed and riding a white horse on one memorable occasion in March 1913. She became a fervent advocate of the rights of labor, and in the shirtwaist and laundry workers' strikes of 1910 she walked on picket lines, raised money, and gave legal counsel to the strikers. In 1914, speaking before a management group, the National Dry Goods Association, she denounced working conditions in that industry. She joined the Women's Trade Union League, the National Child Labor Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Fabian Society of England. While her father had reconciled his reforming zeal with religious fundamentalism and adherence to the Republican party, Inez Milholland defiantly proclaimed herself a Socialist. As she became more deeply involved in these crusades, she began to move in the remarkable and talented circle of radicals, artists, and bohemians living in Greenwich Village in the years before World War I. She became a close friend of Max Eastman, the handsome

young editor of a struggling radical magazine, the Masses, who helped plan strategy in the shirtwaist strike and joined her in suffrage meetings as far away as Ohio. In December 1912 she introduced Eastman to the wealthy society leader Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont (ALVA SMITH VANDERBILT B E L M O N T ) , who contributed several thousand dollars to keep the debtridden Masses afloat. When the magazine was indicted in 1913 for allegedly libeling the Associated Press, Inez Milholland presided at a mass defense meeting at which Lincoln Steffens, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others spoke. From this collaboration a romantic attachment developed between Eastman and Miss Milholland (whom he called "My Amazon") ; during one "exalted week" he wrote her a sonnet avowing, "I was a child, until the radiant dawn, / Your beauty, woke me." Disillusionment set in, however, and in his mature years Eastman wrote: "Inez, for all her radical opinions, lived a high-geared metropolitan, function-attending, opera-going, rich girl's life. Her time was full of meaningless appointments, and her house always full of male guests—a kaleidoscopic succession of men about town, millionaires, bounders, authors, opera singers, labor fakers, with now and then an earnest socialist or a real celebrity" (Enjoyment of Living, pp. 322, 324). For several months in early 1913 Miss Milholland edited a new "Department for Women" in McClure's Magazine. Her own contributions included an article, "The Woman and the Man" (April 1913), in which she called for "a more natural observance of the mating instinct" unfettered by any "external force" such as marriage. She herself, however, was married in London on July 15, 1913, following a shipboard romance, to Eugen Jan Boissevain, a New York importer and son of a prominent Amsterdam newspaper publisher. The newlyweds settled at Harmon-on-Hudson, N.Y., in a sumptuous "bungalow" originally built by the opera singer LILLIAN NORDICA. An "adventurous man of business," energetic and with a "romantic zest," Boissevain enjoyed his role as husband of a gallant feminist leader (Floyd Dell, Homecoming, 1933, pp. 304, 309); later, after Inez' death, he married the poet EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY. With the outbreak of World War I Inez Boissevain found a fresh outlet for her restless energy in the enthusiastic espousal of pacifism. In the spring of 1915 she sailed for Italy with Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the wireless, a warm friend ever since a romantic Atlantic crossing and brief engagement in 1903. Securing credentials as a war correspondent

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Boissevain from a Canadian newspaper, she entered the war zone and wrote a series of pacifist articles until the Italian government in September requested her departure. She returned briefly to the United States, only to set off for Europe again in December on Henry Ford's "Peace Ship." She left this group in Stockholm, however, complaining of undemocratic procedure in the choice of leaders, and by January 1916 was once more in the United States. That year she participated in a garment workers' strike and helped win a last-minute reprieve for Charles Stielow, a laborer sentenced to die for murder, by bringing new evidence to a New York Supreme Court judge in a midnight automobile dash from her home to New York City. Increasingly, however, the burgeoning suffrage movement absorbed her attention. She joined the Congressional Union and its successor, the National Woman's Party. When, in the summer of 1916, the Woman's Party undertook to rally enfranchised women in the Western states against the Democratic party because of its failure to support a federal suffrage amendment, Inez Boissevain, though suffering from pernicious anemia and urged by her husband and father to conserve her strength, undertook a Western tour in support of the campaign. That September she collapsed while speaking in Los Angeles. After a ten-week hospitalization marked by apparent improvements, relapses, and repeated transfusions, she died in Los Angeles, barely thirty years of age. A memorial service was held in Madison Square Presbyterian Church, New York City, with burial at her parents' estate, Meadowmount, in Essex County, N.Y. On Christmas day her suffrage associates, hailing her as a martyr to the cause, held a memorial service for her in Statuary Hall in the national Capitol. Earlier, the citizens of Elizabethtown, N.Y., had in her honor changed the name of Mount Discovery in the Adirondacks to Mount Inez. The popular appeal of her beauty and youthful idealism had been a valuable asset to the causes she supported. [Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XVI, 216; Mabel W. Cameron, comp., Biog. Cyc. Am. Women, I (1924), 19-22; Who's Who in America, 1914-15; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15; Harper's Weekly, May 30, 1914 (for her Dry Goods Assoc. speech); Frank M. White, "Where There Are Women There's a Way," Good Housekeeping, Aug. 1918 (on the Stielow case); and various references in N.Y. Times, 1913-16 (see Index), especially Sept. 28, 1915, and Jan. 30, 1916, on her wartime adventures. Her Greenwich Village associations and personal life are noted in Allen Churchill, The Improper Bohemians (1959);

Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living ( 1948 ) ; and Degna Marconi, My Father, Marconi ( 1 9 6 2 ) . On her suffrage work see: "The Spokesman for Suffrage in America," McClure's, July 1912; Harriot S. Blatch and Alma Lutz, Challenging Years ( 1 9 4 0 ) ; and Inez H. Irwin, The Story of the Woman's Party (1921). On her father see Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1 9 4 2 ) , and Harry W. Baehr, Jr., The N.Y. Tribune ( 1 9 3 6 ) . On Eugen Boissevain: N.Y. Times, Aug. 31, 1949. On her death, funeral, and memorial services: ibid., Nov. 26 and 27 (obituary), Dec. 3 and 26, 1916.] PAUL

S.

BOYER

BOIT, Elizabeth Eaton (July 9, 1849-Nov. 14, 1932), textile manufacturer, was born in Newton, Mass., where her father, James Henry Boit, a stationary engineer, was engaged in paper manufacturing; he was afterward janitor of a school building in Newton Lower Falls. On her father's side she was descended from John Boit, a Huguenot merchant who had come to Boston in the mid-eighteenth century; her mother, Amanda Church (Berry) Boit, was from Bridgton, Maine. Elizabeth, the second in a family of six daughters, attended the Newton public schools and nearby Lasell Seminary; tradition has it that she was not very good in mathematics, a curious deficiency in view of her later business career. At the age of eighteen she began work as a timekeeper in the Dudley Hosiery Knitting Mill in Newton Lower Falls. Within five years (by 1872) she had advanced to the position of forewoman of the finishing or sewing department. In spite of the influx of girls into New England textile factories, a forewoman was still a great novelty. In 1883, when she was thirty-four, Miss Boit became superintendent of the Allston Mills, established by H. B. Scudder, who had been agent of the Dudley mill. Another employee of the Dudley mill, Charles N. Winship, also went to work for Scudder. Winship, who was fourteen years younger than Miss Boit, possessed inventive and mechanical ability. After five years (in 1888) the two decided to go into partnership on their own, with Winship looking after production and Miss Boit managing the office and financial matters. Her brother-in-law, George W. Morse, a corporation lawyer, encouraged her to take this important step. Under the name of Winship, Boit and Company, they founded the Harvard Knitting Mill, specializing in women's underwear, at 626 Main Street, Cambridge. They began with three knitting machines, five finishing machines, and a work force of twenty-five, producing some twenty dozen garments a day. After

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Boit a year they moved to Wakefield, Mass., a growing suburban town. Girls and women were available there to work in the mill at from five to twelve dollars a week, and many women in the surrounding towns were eager to crochet the finishing touches in their homes. By 1896 the business employed 160 persons in the mill, plus 200 on the outside; together they were turning out 300 dozen garments a day. With an annual business of $250,000, they were ready for their own plant; it was completed in 1897. Their products, which now included men's and children's underwear as well, were marketed under the names Merode and Forest Mills. William Iselin & Company of New York City were the selling agents; they were succeeded by Lord and Taylor of N e w York, and Brown, Durrell of Boston. As the business continued to grow, enlargements to the plant were necessary in 1901, 1903, 1907, and 1911. At its height the firm occupied a floor space of eight and a half acres, numbered 850 employees, possessed 500 knitting and 500 sewing machines, and turned out 2,000 dozen garments daily. It was the fifth in size, measured by number of employees, among the knitting mills of Massachusetts in the year 1909-10. In 1920 a profit-sharing plan was instituted; this continued until 1927, b y which time $228,000 had been distributed. Miss Boit's personal interest in the welfare of the mill girls was reflected in her habit of ordering u p a streetcar for them on rainy days. Elizabeth Boit built a substantial stucco house, with extensive gardens, on Prospect Street, overlooking the town of Wakefield. A companion, E m m a May Bartlett, lived with her. As the leading businesswoman of the town, she did not neglect community relations, though many of her charities were not made known. She helped support the Wakefield Home for Aged Women, which took her name in recognition of her aid. A member of the Baptist Church, she also gave to all the churches in town. She was a director of the Wakefield Cooperative Bank. By the late 1920's she had turned over to Charles Winship her interest in the business, though she continued to visit the mill daily as long as her health permitted. The last four years of her life were clouded by illness, and she died of a combination of circulatory ailments and diabetes. She was buried in Lakeside Cemetery, Wakefield. The business continued, under the direction of the Winship family, until 1956. The centers of Elizabeth Boit's life were the mill and her family. To outsiders she may have

seemed austere and old-fashioned; to her family she was, though unmistakably the head, also a generous benefactor. Through her business acumen, she had contributed to Wakefield's economic well-being over a forty-year period. Not without reason was it said that the smartest man in Wakefield was a woman. [The records of the business seem not to have survived; it is reported that Miss Boit was not one to keep her own correspondence. A niece, Mrs. Clinton W. Crafts, and a grandniece, Mrs. C. Nelson Bishop, both of Reading, Mass., have supplied information. Biographical sketches may be found in Julia Ward Howe, ed., Representative Women of New England (1904), pp. 255-56; and Edwin P. Conklin, Middlesex County and Its People (1927), III, 62-63. Each carries a picture of the subject as she appeared at the time of publication. See also Wakefield Daily Item, Nov. 15, 16, and 17, 1932. Information about the firm may be found in textile directories such as Davison's Textile Blue Book and Official Am. Textile Directory. A short account is in Proc. of the 250th Anniversary of the Ancient Town of Redding (1896), pp. 348-49.] ROBERT W .

LOVETT

BOLTON, Sarah Tittle Barrett (Dec. 18, 1814Aug. 4, 1893), poet, was b o m in Newport, Ky., the oldest of six children of Esther (Pendleton) and Jonathan Belcher Barrett. Her grandfather Lemuel Barrett (or Barritt), who had come to America from England before 1754 and served as a colonel in the Maryland militia during the Revolutionary War, had married Sarah Tittle, of a distinguished and patriotic Maryland family, and later settled near Cynthiana, Ky. Sarah Barrett's mother came of the Virginia Pendletons and was a first cousin of President James Madison. Early in Sarah's girlhood the Barretts journeyed by flatboat and on horseback to a frontier farm in Indiana, on Six-Mile Creek northeast of Vernon. The wilderness fascinated the sensitive girl, and there she began composing verses even before she could write. Such later poems as "The Pioneer Grandmother" recall her experiences. When she was nine, her father moved to Madison, Ind., to educate his children. There, in two months, Sarah learned to read and to write down her own verses, and began to devour knowledge. When she was thirteen her first published verse appeared in the Madison Banner, and from then until her marriage three years later her poetry was generally printed weekly in Madison or Cincinnati newspapers. Through her writing she became acquainted with Nathaniel Bolton of Madison, a young editor who in 1822 had helped establish the Indianapolis Gazette; they were married on Oct. 15, 1831.

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Bonaparte

The couple immediately made the long journey on horseback to Indianapolis, where Bolton for several years edited the Indianapolis Democrat. Two children, Sara Ada and James Pendleton, were born to them. Because of losses suffered as a result of standing security for debts of friends, Bolton was forced to convert their farm home west of Indianapolis into a public tavern, and from 1836 to 1845 Mrs. Bolton did the housework and cooking and kept ten cows. The tavern became a social center, with state legislators and distinguished men frequently present. In 1851 Nathaniel Bolton was chosen by the legislature as state librarian. As part of his duties, he was custodian of the State House and its grounds. When, that year, in preparation for a forthcoming meeting of Western governors, it became necessary to recarpet the house and senate chambers, Mrs. Bolton purchased carpeting in Cincinnati and with practically no assistance sewed the strips in ten days, composing meanwhile her famous poem of courage despite odds, "Paddle Your Own Canoe." The Boitons moved in 1854 to Washington, where Nathaniel served as clerk of a committee of the United States Senate. In 1855 President Pierce appointed him consul at Geneva, Switzerland. Mrs. Bolton found in European settings and legends a new stimulus to poetry, though she remained a staunch patriot with strong democratic sympathies, as seen in her poem "Lake Leman." The death of her husband, in Indianapolis in 1858, and that of her daughter saddened her life, inspiring such poems as "Two Graves." She cared for her grandson and traveled to Europe to further his education. On Sept. 15, 1863, she was married to Judge Addison Reese of Canton, Mo., and lived with him for two years; but the marriage proved a failure, and for other than legal purposes she resumed the name Sarah T. Bolton. Her final home, "Beech-Bank," was five miles southeast of Indianapolis; it has since become the Sarah T. Bolton Memorial Park. She died in Indianapolis in 1893, at seventy-eight, of the complications of old age, and was buried there in Crown Hill Cemetery. Mrs. Bolton was reared a Methodist and was a staunch Democrat. A leader in the early movement for woman's legal rights, she aided Robert Dale Owen in his successful fight in the state constitutional convention of 1850 and the legislature of 1851 for personal property rights for married women, writing many influential articles for newspapers in various parts of the state. Described by Owen as a "dainty little lady," she was graceful, with brown eyes, dark brown hair, a melodious voice, and a re-

fined air. Her poetry, appearing mostly in newspapers and periodicals, was later collected in Poems (1865), The Life and Poems of Sarah T. Bolton (1880), and Songs of a LifeTime (1892). A facile versifier, she used difficult forms effectively, but much of her poetry, while reflecting a sincere religious spirit, seems today sentimental and trite. Nevertheless, until the advent of James Whitcomb Riley, she enjoyed for many years public acclaim as the unofficial Hoosier laureate. She was in addition one of the first literary women of the Mississippi Valley. [The Life and Poems of Sarah T. Bolton ( 1 8 8 0 ) ; clipping file on Sarah T. Bolton in Ind. State Library; William W . Woollen, Biog. and Hist. Sketches of Early Ind. ( 1 8 8 3 ) ; Jacob P. Dunn, Greater Indianapolis ( 1 9 1 0 ) ; information furnished by Lloyd Bolton Mann, great-great-grandson of Sarah T. Bolton. See also: William T. Coggeshall, The Poets and Poetry of the West ( 1 8 6 0 ) ; and Arthur W . Shumaker, A Hist, of Ind. Literature (1962).] ARTHUR W .

SHUMAKER

BONAPARTE, Elisabeth Patterson (Feb. 6, 1785-Apr. 4, 1879), celebrated figure in an early and ill-starred international marriage, was born in Baltimore, Md., the fourth of thirteen children and eldest daughter of William and Dorcas (Spear) Patterson. Her mother was the daughter of William Spear, a well-to-do Baltimore merchant of Irish ancestry. Her father, of humble origin, had emigrated from County Donegal, Ireland, at the age of fourteen, arriving in Philadelphia in the spring of 1766. By the end of the century he was well established in the shipping business in Baltimore and had achieved such prosperity that President Jefferson once spoke of him as "the wealthiest man in Maryland, perhaps in the United States." His fortune had been won in the lucrative West Indies trade during and following the American Revolution, supplemented by shrewd investments in real estate in Baltimore and nearby counties. Elisabeth ("Betsy") was educated in part by her mother and for a short time attended a French school in Baltimore run by a Madame Lacomb, a refugee from Santo Domingo, under the patronage of the French Sulpicians of Baltimore. Though her parents were Presbyterians, she herself had no strong religious ties. In 1803 Jerome, youngest brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, appeared in Baltimore en route home after naval service in the West Indies, where he had met people from the Baltimore ships and possibly some of the Pattersons. Betsy Patterson was then eighteen,

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Bonaparte by contemporary accounts a beautiful girl, if somewhat vain. Only a few months after being presented to her, and despite the frantic protests of the French legation, the nineteen-yearold Jerome married the Baltimore heiress, on Christmas Eve, 1803. The ceremony was performed by Bishop John Carroll of Baltimore, a friend of the Patterson family. The French chargé d'affaires had warned the bride's father that such a marriage could easily be considered null and void in France, for French law required registration in a notary's books. Since Jerome was on naval duty at the time, he could be considered subject to French laws, and his case was further weakened by his age, twentyfive being the legal age in France for marriage without parental consent. Because of all this, William Patterson withheld his consent for some two months, but finally yielded, he said, in order to avoid scandal. Patterson's fears were justified, for the marriage was never recognized by the imperial family, and Napoleon, seeking to annul it, appealed to Rome. The Pope refused to intervene, finding the Baltimore ceremony to have taken place in compliance with canon law. Napoleon then managed, on Mar. 2, 1805, to prevent registration in the books of any French notary and finally, on Oct. 6, 1806, to win a declaration of nullity from the ecclesiastical court of the archdiocese of Paris. Shortly after the marriage the young couple tried to sail for France, but they were delayed by Jerome's unwillingness to return on a French naval vessel and the failure of a series of alternative plans. They finally got away on March 10, 1805, in a ship chartered for them by William Patterson; by this time Madame Bonaparte's pregnancy had made haste advisable if the child was to be born on French soil. Jerome landed in Lisbon, but his wife was not allowed to accompany him. While he went to Italy to make peace with his brother, Elisabeth, refused entry in all ports under French control, went on to England, where her son was born July 7, 1805, and named for his father. She returned to Baltimore with her child two months later. Jerome had been forced to yield to his brother's demands that he abandon his wife, but he wrote her secretly and apparently planned to rejoin her when his military duties were over and escape was easier. On his return, however, from a cruise to the south Atlantic he found himself confronted with arrangements to marry Princess Catherine of Württemberg; this he reluctantly did on Aug. 12, 1807. Six years later Elisabeth secured a divorce from the Maryland legislature.

Known in America as Madame Bonaparte and in Europe as Madame Patterson, she was given a pension by Napoleon of $12,000 a year for her maintenance and that of her son. In 1815, after Napoleon's downfall, she returned to Europe, hoping to appeal to the Restoration government in Paris for a continuation of the pension. She was not successful. She had, however, made fortunate investments and had also managed to live and educate her son largely at the expense of her father. The result was that she had built up a fortune which permitted her to spend most of her life between 1815 and 1834 in fashionable European resorts and cities frequented by titled expatriates—Paris, Geneva, Aix-les-Bains, Florence, and the baths of Lucca. Excessively proud of her son, she hoped he might one day be recognized by his father's family. But although both the boy's father and his uncle Joseph Bonaparte, who lived in Philadelphia, liked young Jerome and arranged for him to visit their families, they were unwilling to compromise the status of the children of the second marriage by full recognition of the first. Both were annoyed, as well, by the social ambitions of young Jerome's mother, whom they avoided. It was her particular goal to form a brilliant European alliance for her son, but her efforts were thwarted when in 1829, three years after graduating from Harvard, he married a Baltimore heiress—against his mother's wishes but with the blessing of his grandfather Patterson, his father, and his uncle Joseph—and took up the life of a country gentleman. The marriage brought Madame Bonaparte two grandchildren. The elder, Jerome Napoleon, born in 1830, graduated from West Point, then entered a regiment of the French army favored by the Bonaparte family, serving until 1870. The younger, Charles Joseph, born in 1851, graduated from Harvard, practiced law in Baltimore, became a civil service reformer, and served for some years in the cabinet of President Theodore Roosevelt, first as Secretary of the Navy and later as Attorney General. During her residence abroad between 1815 and 1834, Elisabeth Patterson Bonaparte enjoyed much attention, in part because of a romantic interest in her Bonaparte connections and in part because of her beauty and wealth. She returned to Baltimore during her father's last illness, in 1834. By his will he gave her only small legacies, leaving most of his wealth to her brothers. Infuriated, she broke with them, as she had previously with their father; and she maintained only business relations with her son and grandsons. It was, neverthe-

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tionales. For a brief historical summary, based on documents, together with a detailed analysis of the legal aspects of the case, see Sidney Mitchell, A Family Lawsuit (1958). No other accounts, either in article or book form, can be taken seriously. A biography, begun by Mrs. Quynn before her death and based on the Bonaparte Collection, is being completed by her husband, Prof. William R. Quynn.]

less, largely at her instance that her son and older grandson went to France in 1854 after Napoleon I I I had become emperor. T h e y were well received by their kinsman, who arranged for a certificate of legitimacy for the son and for the grandson's commission in the French army. When Napoleon's uncle, "old Jerome," and his two children by his second wife protested their use of the Bonaparte name, the Emperor sought to relieve the embarrassment by conferring titles on his American cousins, but they refused them. In 1861, a year after her former husband died, Elisabeth Patterson Bonaparte brought suit in a French court to establish her claim as wife and widow, although it was known that Jerome had left nothing but debts; but she had put herself in a weak position by her American divorce in 1 8 1 3 and lost the case. Disappointed that she attracted less attention in Europe as she grew older, Madame Bonaparte had after 1840 made her home in Baltimore. She had never, either in Europe or America, lived on a scale that permitted her to entertain socially and had always depended on the hospitality of others. Now, in Baltimore, she lived in a cheap room in a boardinghouse, surrounded by a few relics of her days abroad, regaling the other guests at table with accounts of the days when she had known, and been courted by, bearers of great names; much of the legend that has surrounded her stems from these tales. Though respected by those with whom she had business relations, she had few friends. She was a familiar sight in Baltimore, where she walked about, collecting her ground rents, dressed in the clothes she had saved from her days of glory. Her son died in 1 8 7 0 ; she had not seen him for years. She herself died in Baltimore in 1879 at the age of ninety-four. She was buried in that city's Greenmount Cemetery. [Madame Bonaparte spelled her name both "Elisabeth" and "Elizabeth," but more commonly the former. The main source for her life is the Bonaparte Collection in the Md. Hist. Soc. in Baltimore. This consists of hundreds of letters addressed to her, mostly during her early years, and a few drafts of letters written by her. Two collections of letters, including some in the Bonaparte Collection, have been published, both very badly: William Saffell, The Bonaparte-Patterson Marriage (1873), and Eugène L. Didier, The Life and. Letters of Madame Bonaparte (1879). Both contain narrative which is based on tradition without historical foundation. There are documents for the period 1803—15 in the archives of both the French and British foreign offices. There is also material for later periods in the reports sent back to Paris from the French legation in Rome, now also in the Archives Na-

DOROTHY

MACKAY

QUYNN

B O N D , Carrie Jacobs (Aug. 11, 1 8 6 2 - D e c . 28, 1 9 4 6 ) , author and composer of artlessly sentimental songs, was born in Janesville, Wis., the only child of Hannibal Cyrus Jacobs and his wife Mary Emogene (or E m m a ) Davis, both natives of Vermont. Her grandfather Davis owned a hotel in Janesville. Her father dealt successfully in grain and other produce until his sudden failure and death in 1873. According to Carrie, most of the family were "musical": her father was an amateur flutist, and her grandmother Jacobs was a first cousin of John Howard Payne, the author of "Home, Sweet Home." By four young Carrie could pick out tunes on the family piano; by six she could play certain pieces by ear, and by nine she could approximate (again by ear) that war-horse of the day, Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody. From nine until seventeen she studied piano off and on with local "professors," among them C. G. Titcomb and J. W . Bischoff, and dreamt of being a song writer. Her general education took her through the public schools of Janesville. At eighteen she was married (reportedly at Racine, Wis., on Dec. 25, 1 8 8 0 ) to Edward (Edwin?) J. Smith of Janesville, by whom she had one child, Fred Jacobs Smith (born July 23, 1 8 8 1 ) , and from whom she separated in 1887 and was later divorced. On June 10, 1889, came marriage in Racine to an older man, Frank Lewis Bond, a physician, with whom Carrie spent happy years among the miners and loggers of Iron River in the upper peninsula of Michigan. When his death from a fall on the ice in 1 8 9 5 left her almost penniless, in poor health, and with her son to support, she moved to Chicago and began an uphill struggle against poverty. She ran a small rooming house and painted china—a genteel art in which she had received rudimentary training during girlhood. She also continued to write the songs with which she had tried to supplement the family income during Dr. Bond's last year. ( H e r first published compositions, "Is My Dolly D e a d ? " and "Mother's Cradle Song," were copyrighted by the firm of Brigham in Chicago on Dec. 31, 1 8 9 4 . ) For some years most of

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Bond her songs remained in manuscript, bringing her money only through her rendition of them at social gatherings and, later, at concerts. She had no training or pretentions as a singer, but rather declaimed her songs in a deep voice with an expressive style that was more recitation than singing. Gradually Mrs. Bond's personality, together with a genuinely moving element in the songs themselves, created a growing circle of friends and admirers, among whom were some professional singers who helped create a public demand for her work. One of these was the contralto Jessie Bartlett Davis, who lent her the money to publish, in 1901, under her own name, Seven Songs as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose. In this little collection were "I Love You Truly" and "Just a Wearyin' for You," two of her most popular songs, which were later issued separately in countless editions and arrangements. The composer Ethelbert Nevin, whose "The Rosary" may have served as a model for some of Mrs. Bond's most characteristic compositions, also encouraged her. The actress Margaret Anglin arranged three recitals for her in New York, in the midst of a busy theatrical season (1906— 07), and helped to publicize them; other friends secured an invitation from President Roosevelt for her to sing at the White House. Still another friend was the writer and craftsman Elbert Hubbard; in emulation of his Roycroft Shop in East Aurora, N.Y., Mrs. Bond set up, in 1901, the Bond Shop—first in her home and later, in 1906, on more spacious premises elsewhere in Chicago. She not only wrote the music and most of the texts for her songs, but also designed their cover pages, which in both word and picture often featured the wild rose. With her son as helper and eventual business manager, she even did her own publishing and selling, through the firm of Carrie Jacobs-Bond and Son (Chicago, 1906; Hollywood, 1910; taken over by the Boston Music Company in 1922). Other groups of songs appeared in the years following 1901, but the climax of Mrs. Bond's creative career came in 1910 with the publication of her masterpiece, "A Perfect Day." As she recalled in later years, she wrote the words after viewing a sunset from Mount Rubidoux, near Riverside, Calif, (where she had moved on the advice of her physician), and the music three months later during a moonlight drive across the Mojave Desert. Popularized initially by the baritone David Bispham, this song in hardly more than a decade sold over five million copies in some sixty different arrangements, with about fifty

phonograph and piano roll recordings issued by 1925. Not only did "A Perfect Day" crown and epitomize Carrie Jacobs Bond's career as author and composer, but it appeared at the right psychological moment, combining as it did the pathos and optimism of the era that came to an end with the Great War. In that war it proved a favorite with soldiers as well as civilians, both in its original form and as a vehicle for parody. No great successes followed "A Perfect Day," though Mrs. Bond continued to write her songs, which are said to have numbered over 400 though only about 170 were published; one of her last, "Because of the Light," was copyrighted in December 1944 when she was eighty-two. Nevertheless, it was in the decade following 1910—the decade of World War I, woman suffrage, and prohibition—that her prominence reached its peak. But with the decline of the parlor piano, the growing sophistication of concert audiences, and the cynicism and disillusionment that came in the wake of the war, the conditions favorable to Mrs. Bond's roses of melody passed gradually away. Yet three or four of her songs have remained alive, more by virtue of their music than their texts. Historically, they represent a final flowering of the nineteenth-century genteelly sentimental song in American popular music. Though nominally an Episcopalian, Mrs. Bond once confessed that "my religion is to believe that there are almost as many roads to heaven as there are people to travel them." In her later years tragedy again marred her life: in 1928 her son killed himself in a fit of depression following an illness. In the literary field, Mrs. Bond published a volume of memoirs, The Roads of Melody (1927), and a collection of philosophical comment and verse, The End of the Road (1940), as well as contributing to numerous periodicals. For over thirty years her home was in southern California, and it was there, in Hollywood, that she died in her eighty-fifth year of heart failure following a cerebral hemorrhage. She was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, where a bronze plaque in the Memorial Court of Honor bears Herbert Hoover's tribute to her "heart songs that express the loves and longings, sadness and gladness of all peoples everywhere." [The principal biographical source is Mrs. Bond's The Roads of Melody, although like all accounts of her life it must be read cautiously so far as facts are concerned. Among the more interesting magazine and newspaper treatments are Neil M. Clark in American Mag., Jan. 1924; Dorothy Walworth

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in Independent Woman, Nov. 1945; and the obituary in the Ν.Ύ. Times, Dec. 29, 1946. There are also various encyclopedia articles, of which the most helpful has been that in the Nat. Cyc. Am, Bìog., XXXVI, 96. Particular details were verified by the Racine County record of her second marriage ( county officials found no record of the first ) ; by the death records of herself and her son ( Calif. Dept. of Public Health); and by Forest Lawn Memorial Park.] WILLIAM LICHTENWANGER

BONFANTI, Marie (c. 1847-Jan. 25, 1921), ballerina, also known as Maria and Marietta, was born in Milan, Italy. Her father, Joseph Bonfanti, died when she was only a year old. When she was nine, her mother entered her in the ballet academy of the distinguished theoretician Carlo Blasis, where she studied for five years. In the spring of 1861 she made her debut in the small town of Cuneo, Italy, and that same autumn was engaged as prima ballerina italiana at the Teatro alla Scala, Milan. After appearances at the Teatro alla Canobbiana, Milan, and in Madrid, where she performed before Queen Isabella of Spain, she went to London. In 1865 she danced at Covent Garden in the pantomime of Cinderella, or The Magic Pumpkin. Her next engagement took her to America, where on Sept. 12, 1866, she made her debut at Niblo's Garden in New York in the opening performance of the sensational and long-lived extravaganza The Black Crook. Often called "the first musical comedy," The Black Crook was the prototype of an endless series of gaudy shows which combined lavish costumes and scenery, tuneful, inconsequential music, complicated but meaningless plots, and generous portions of all kinds of dancing, from classical ballet to "Amazonian marches" and eccentric dances performed in tights and costumes which were, for Victorian times, decidedly abbreviated. Bonfanti, as principal dancer, managed to invest this and succeeding productions with a personal artistry which, during her moments on the stage, lifted them to a higher level of theatrical experience. The Black Crook ran until January 1868 and was followed immediately by The White Fawn, a similar extravaganza which continued for 175 performances. In 1869 Bonfanti and a large company of dancers traveled overland across the still unsettled continent to San Francisco, where they appeared in a spectacular version of Robinson Crusoe. Returning to New York the following year, Bonfanti starred in the first of many revivals of The Black Crook. In 1876 she danced in Augustin Daly's production of the play Life, portray-

ing the Spirit of the Sun in a ballet of snowflakes; and in 1882 she appeared in Franz von Suppé's operetta Donna Juanita and in Léo Delibes' ballet Sylvia. Among the many other productions in which she danced were the extravaganzas The Children in the Wood (1873), Humpty Dumpty (1880), Aladdin, Sardanapalus, The Merry War, and The Arabian Nights (1887). Bonfanti also made many appearances in the ballet divertissements of grand opera. She led the Triumphal Dance in CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG'S presentation of Aïda in Philadelphia early in 1879. In 1884 she toured the United States as prima ballerina of the Milan Italian Grand Opera Company. During the season of 1885-86 she held the same position with the Metropolitan Opera Company, New York, dancing in Goldmark's Queen of Sheba, Meyerbeer's Le Prophète, and the Walpurgis Night ballet in Gounod's Faust. In The Twelve Temptations, produced in 1888, Bonfanti danced the role of America in a "Ballet of Nations." After touring the United States, she spent the years 1891-94 in Europe. Upon her return to New York she opened a ballet school, where she continued to teach until 1916. A remarkable artist, Bonfanti was known not only for the vitality and great technical precision of her dancing, but for her vivacity and charm and the apparent spontaneity with which she was able to invest the most arbitrary and stylized positions. When she made her New York debut in 1866, the art of ballet, which had reached a pinnacle in the 1840's with the American tour of the superb Viennese dancer Fanny Elssler and the emergence of a handful of native American ballerinas such as MARY ANN L E E and JULIA TURNBULL, was already on the decline. After struggling almost alone for more than a quarter of a century to exemplify and perpetuate the classical style she had learned in her youth, she lived to see the first stirrings of the twentiethcentury renaissance of the dance in America with the tours of Adeline Genee, Anna Pavlova, and the Diaghilev Ballet. In her own teaching, Bonfanti was extremely strict, even severe, and followed the exact principles of her noted teacher, Blasis. She is said to have been the ballet teacher from whom Ruth St. Denis succeeded in learning "three of the basic five positions" before she abandoned all thought of becoming a classical ballerina and embarked on her very independent career as a pioneer of American modern dance. For ISADORA DUNCAN, LOIE F U L L E R , and other revolutionary innovators Bonfanti had nothing but scorn.

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Bonfils Early in her career Marie Bonfanti was married to George Hoffman, of a socially prominent New York family, and had one daughter (later Mrs. George B. Ruddell). She died of pneumonia at Roosevelt Hospital, New York City, early in 1921 and was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, New York. [Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo, vol. II (Rome, 1954); George C. D. Odell, Annals of the N.Y. Stage, vols. VIII-XIII (1936-^2); George Freedley, " T h e Black Crook and The White Fawn," Dance Index, Jan. 1945; "A Famous Dancer's Autumn," N.Y. Dramatic Mirror, July 17, 1909; death record from N.Y. City Dept. of Health. A number of souvenirs of Marie Bonfanti, including her ballet slippers and a crayon and charcoal portrait by F. Finck, are preserved at the Museum of the City of N.Y.] LILLIAN MOORE

BONFILS, Winifred Sweet Black. See Winifred Sweet. BONNER, Sherwood. See arine Sherwood Bonner.

MC D O W E L L ,

BLACK,

Kath-

BONNEY, Mary Lucinda (June 8, 1816-July 24, 1900), educator and Indian rights advocate, was born in Hamilton, N.Y., in an area largely settled by New Englanders. She was the fourth of six children of Benjamin and Lucinda (Wilder) Bonney, but only she and a younger brother survived infancy. Her parents both came from Chesterfield, Mass. Her grandfather Benjamin Bonney had been a Revolutionary officer and Massachusetts legislator. Her father was a farmer, her mother a former teacher. Mary attended the local Hamilton Academy and had two final years at E M M A WILLARD'S Troy (N.Y.) Female Seminary, graduating in 1835. Over the next fifteen years Mary Bonney held a succession of teaching jobs. After positions in Jersey City, New York City, and De Ruyter, N.Y., and at Troy Female Seminary, she moved in 1842 to South Carolina, where she taught in Beaufort and Robertville, returning north after six years to take teaching posts in Providence, R.I., and then at Miss Phelps' school in Philadelphia. In 1850— prompted, it is said, by a wish to provide a home for her mother—Miss Bonney called her friend Harriette A. Dillaye, a Troy Seminary teacher, to Philadelphia and with her set up the Chestnut Street Female Seminary. A longlived and successful undertaking, it was moved in 1883 to Ogontz, Pa., and renamed the Ogontz School for Young Ladies, with Miss Bonney remaining until 1888 as senior prin-

cipal. During her long tenure there she was credited with transmitting to her pupils a good measure of her own capacity for clear and vigorous thinking and devotion to principle. Her strong sense of duty also found expression outside her profession. Long concerned about the welfare of distant peoples, she served as an officer of the Philadelphia branch of the Woman's Union Missionary Society of America for Heathen Lands and, beginning in the 1860's, regularly donated funds to this interdenominational organization sending female missionaries to the secluded women of the Orient. In her own First Baptist Church she presided over a women's home missionary circle interested in Indians. When in the spring of 1879, following an invasion of the Indian Territory by Oklahoma "Boomers," she read in the newspapers of proposals in Congress to permit whites to take up land in this territory reserved by treaty to the Indians, she felt a sense of outrage. ("A moral wrong upon our Government! It took hold of me.") She first aroused her missionary circle, but its petition, prepared for circulation at the church's annual meeting, was crowded off the agenda by lack of time. At this juncture Miss Bonney received a visit from Mrs. A M E L I A s. QUINTON, a fellow Baptist, formerly a teacher in her school and an organizer in the temperance movement. Mrs. Quinton was deeply stirred by her friend's concern, and the two women "pledged ourselves to do what we could to awaken the conscience of Congress and of the people. I was to secure the money, and Mrs. Quinton was to plan and to work" (Willard and Livermore, p. 5 9 5 ) . That summer, with the help of volunteers, they began to circulate a petition calling for the honoring of treaties and an end to white encroachments on the Indian Territory. Thirteen thousand signatures were gathered; in February 1880 Mary Bonney and two members of her missionary circle carried them in a roll three hundred feet long to President Rutherford B. Hayes at the White House, and the petition was then presented in the House of Representatives together with a memorial letter written by Miss Bonney. Almost immediately the women began circulating a second petition urging the protection of Indian lands. By December Miss Bonney and Mrs. Quinton and their followers were organizing themselves as an interdenominational Central Indian Committee, and on Jan. 27, 1881, their second petition, representing 50,000 persons, was presented in the United States Senate by Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, Congres-

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sional spokesman for the growing popular sentiment for Indian reform. Later that year the group adopted a constitution and a new name, the Indian TreatyKeeping and Protective Association. With Mary Bonney as president, Amelia Quinton as general secretary and organizer, and an executive board nominated at their request by ministers of churches, the association began enrolling auxiliaries outside the state. In February 1882 Dawes brought before the Senate the women's third petition. Representing 100,000 people, it urged the allotment of tribal lands to individual Indians, a reform looking toward the end of reservations and the transformation of the Indian from a tribal subject into a fully assimilated American citizen. As embodied in the Dawes Act of 1887, allotment remained the official policy of the United States for almost fifty years, until its unforeseen consequences brought in turn a new reform. Spreading rapidly, the women's organization in 1882 adopted the name National Indian Association, but after the formation that December of a new group—the Indian Rights Association—under male leadership, it changed its name in 1883 to the Women's National Indian Association. With the men's group now sharing in the political work, the women moved toward new responsibilities. At their annual meeting in 1883, with Miss Bonney presiding, they planned missionary and educational work aimed at elevating the Indian woman and home through training in cookery and child care, as well as religious, vocational, and English-language instruction. Miss Bonney resigned as head of the association in November 1884 because of school responsibilities, but continued as honorary president and as a member of its executive board and missionary committee. In 1883 a third force had been added to the cause of Indian reform, the annual Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, which, taking up the call for land allotment, served as a clearinghouse and coordinating center for the movement in general. Miss Bonney attended the conference in 1886, the year before passage of the Dawes Act. Her leadership had set under way the first popular movement for Indian reform, and her personal contributions of some $1,600 over the first five years of her association's existence had met most of its expenses. In 1888 Mary Bonney, now in her seventies, retired from the Ogontz School. As a delegate of the Women's National Indian Association she traveled that year to London to attend the Centenary Conference on the Protestant

Missions of the World. There she met the Rev. Thomas Rambaut, who as a Baptist minister in Robertville, S.C., some forty years before had assisted in her conversion from the Episcopalianism of her youth to the Baptist faith. Twice a widower, Rambaut had retired from the presidency of William Jewell College in Missouri; he and Miss Bonney were married in London. They returned to settle in Hamilton, N.Y., where Rambaut died in October 1890, after which Mrs. Rambaut made her home with her brother. She died in Hamilton in 1900, at the age of eighty-four. In her piety, humanitarianism, and commitment to justice, she had, outside her profession, worked for the missionary and Indian causes, paid for the education of five ministers, four of them Negroes, sympathized with the struggling Cubans and Boers, and contributed funds for homeless Cuban and Armenian children. Her annual donations to the Women's National Indian Association ended only with her death. [For general biographical accounts see: Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) , under "Rambaut"; Nat. Cyc. Am.^ Biog., VI, 100-01; Mary J. Fairbanks, ed., Emma Willard and Her Pupils ( 1 8 9 8 ) ; and obituaries in the Indians Friend (Women's Nat. Indian Assoc.), Aug. 1900, Hamilton (N.Y.) Republican, July 26, 1900, and N.Y. Times, July 26, 1900. Other information from: MS. ledger of Miss Bonney, 1878-88 (Am. Baptist Hist. Soc., Rochester); Annual Reports of Women's Nat. Indian Assoc., 1 8 8 3 1900; Mary E. Dewey, Hist. Sketch . . . of the Women's Nat. Indian Assoc. ( 1 9 0 0 ) ; William W . Keen, ed., The Bi-Centennial Celebration of the Founding of the First Baptist Church of the City of Phila. ( 1 8 9 9 ) , pp. 122-23; Charles L. Bonney, The Bonney Family (2nd ed., 1898); Norman Fox, Preacher and Teacher: A Sketch of the Life of Thomas Rambaut ( 1 8 9 2 ) . ] IRENE JOANNE

WESTING

BONNIN, Gertrude Simmons (Feb. 22, 1876Jan. 26, 1938), Indian author and reformer, also known as Zitkala-Sa, or Red Bird, was born at the Yankton Sioux Agency in South Dakota, the third child of Ellen Simmons, a full-blooded Sioux. Though in adult life Gertrude was herself represented as of full Indian blood and as the granddaughter of the famous chief Sitting Bull, tribal census rolls indicate that her mother was older than Sitting Bull; and according to the Sioux agent's report on her application for a land allotment, her father was a white man. She was reared as a Sioux until her eighth year, when she left the reservation to attend a Quaker missionary school for Indians, White's Indiana

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Bonnin Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Ind., where her brother, ten years her senior, had recently completed a three-year course. Although eager for new experiences, she felt keenly the humiliations and unthinking mistreatment resulting from the white man's lack of understanding of the Indian culture. At the end of three years, as she later recalled, she returned to the reservation "neither a wild Indian or a tame one" (Atlantic Monthly, February 1900, p. 191). Miserable in this state of cultural dislocation, she went back after four years to the school and received her diploma three years later. Now nineteen, she defied her mother's wishes and went on to Earlham College in Richmond, Ind. During her two years' enrollment there (1895-97) she won prizes in oratory. Two years of teaching at the Carlisle (Pa.) Indian School followed. She then left to study at the Boston Conservatory of Music. In 1900, as violin soloist, she accompanied the Carlisle Indian Band to the Paris Exposition. During this period she also displayed literary talent, writing three evocative autobiographical essays that were published in the Atlantic Monthly and two stories based on Indian legends for Harper's Monthly. Her book Old Indian Legends (illustrated by the Indian artist Angel de Cora) was published in 1901. Returning to the Sioux country, Gertrude Simmons worked as an issue clerk at the Standing Rock Reservation. Here, on May 10, 1902, she was married to Raymond Talesfase Bonnin, another Sioux employee of the Indian Service. Later in 1902 they transferred to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah, where they remained for fourteen years. They had one child, Raymond O. Bonnin, born about 1903. From time to time Mrs. Bonnin was employed as a clerk and, briefly, as a teacher; she organized a brass band, in the manner of the Carlisle School, among the children of the reservation and undertook home demonstration work among the women. During these years she also became a correspondent of the Society of American Indians, thus inaugurating what was to be a lifework in Indian reform. The society, organized at Ohio State University in 1911 by Fayette McKenzie, a sociology professor, and six well-educated Indians, was the first Indian reform organization to be managed exclusively by Indians and to require that active members be of Indian blood. Its aims included not only governmental reforms—codification of laws relating to Indians, the employment of Indians in the Indian Service, the opening of the Court of Claims to all equitable claims of Indian tribes

against the United States—but also the preservation of the "true history of the race" and its records, as well as its "distinguishing virtues." Essentially, however, the society's aims were assimilationist: citizenship for all Indians, abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and termination of communal property holdings. Elected secretary of the society in 1916, Gertrude Bonnin moved with her husband to Washington, D.C., which remained their home thereafter. She carried on the society's correspondence with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, lectured from coast to coast as its representative, and for a year (1918-19) acted as editor of its periodical, the American Indian Magazine. After the demise of this first panIndian organization in 1920, she herself organized another, in February 1926: the National Council of American Indians. She remained its president until her death in 1938, lobbying in Washington on behalf of Indian legislation. Perhaps Gertrude Bonnin's most effective work, however, was in connection with the General Federation of Women's Clubs. In 1921 she persuaded the federation to establish an Indian Welfare Committee. In cooperation with the Indian Rights Association, the leading organization in the field, the General Federation then sponsored an investigation she conducted into the federal government's treatment of various tribes, and worked for the enfranchisement of the Indians as well as for improved education, hospitals, health centers, resource conservation, and the preservation of Indian culture. The federation was instrumental also in securing the appointment of an expert commission, headed by Lewis Meriam of the Institute for Governmental Research, to survey conditions among the Indians. The Meriam Commission's report (1928) led President Hoover to appoint leading members of the Indian Rights Association to the commissionership and assistant commissionership of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It also helped lay the groundwork for the reforms of the New Deal period in health, education, and conservation. Despite the well-intentioned work of Hoover's commission, however, the Indian Bureau proved no more able than other agencies to cope with the problems of drought and depression, and 1932 found Gertrude Bonnin and her husband persuading the Dakota Sioux to use their recently won voting rights on behalf of the Democrats. Raymond Bonnin, who had served as an army captain overseas in World War I, worked for a time during the 1920s as a law clerk in a Washington firm. In 1930 he was secre-

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Bonnin tary-treasurer of his wife's Council of American Indians. Both the Bonnins retained personal contacts with the Sioux and the Utes and continued to lobby on their behalf with Congress and with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Mrs. Bonnin lectured widely on Indian rights, dramatizing her Indian identity by appearing in Sioux costume. Her activities as an author apparently slackened after she abandoned the editorship of the American Indian Magazine. Her second book, American Indian Stories (1921), simply reprinted stories written at the beginning of the century. She retained her interest in music, and one of her last undertakings was the composition, with William F. Hanson, of an Indian opera, Sun Dance. She died in Washington, D.C., in 1938, at the age of sixty-one, of cardiac dilatation and kidney disease. Services were held in the Latter-Day Saints (Mormon) Chapel, and she was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Her husband survived her by four years. The literature of Indian reform gives much attention to the maladjustments suffered by white-educated Indians who returned to their own people. Less well known is the role of these educated Indians in pressing for "progressive" reforms both on and off the reservation. Gertrude Simmons Bonnin was an Indian progressive; her career indicates both the achievements and the frustrations attendant upon that role. [Gertrude Bonnin's four autobiographical articles for the Atlantic Monthly are in the issues of Jan., Feb., and Mar. 1900 and Dec. 1902; see also her short stories in Harper's Monthly, Mar. and Oct. 1901. Besides her books, mentioned above, she was co-author, with Charles H. Fabens of the Am. Indian Defense Assoc. and Matthew K. Sniffen of the Indian Rights Assoc., of Okla.'s Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes—Legalized Robbery (pamphlet, 1 9 2 4 ) , a report published by the Indian Rights Assoc. Biographical information is scattered. An important unpublished source is Record Group 75 (Indian Affairs ) in the Nat. Archives, Washington, D.C., which includes correspondence by and about Gertrude and Raymond Bonnin, the Sioux census records, and Agency Employee Service Records. The Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, has a letter by Mrs. Bonnin to Elaine Goodale Eastman, Mar. 8, 1935, commenting critically on current government Indian policies. Of published sources, the richest is the file of the Am. Indian Mag., 1 9 1 2 - 2 0 . The most useful published biographical accounts are: sketch (with picture) in Harper's Bazar, Apr. 14, 1900, p. 330; Who's Who in the Nations Capital, 1 9 3 4 - 3 5 ; Marion E . Gridley, ed., Indians of Today ( 1 9 3 6 ) , p. 19; Indian Truth, Feb. 1938, p. 3; and obituaries in the N.Y. Times, Jan. 27,

1938 ( inaccurate in some details ) and Washington Post, Jan. 27, 1938. On her work with the Gen. Federation of Women's Clubs, see its history: Mildred W . Wells, Unity in Diversity ( 1 9 5 3 ) , pp. 2 1 7 - 1 8 ; and Mrs. Joseph Lindon Smith, A Bull, on the Meriam Report ( 1 9 2 8 ) , published by the federation. On the Nat. Council of Am. Indians, see Indian Truth, Mar. 1926, p. 3. Other information from: Earlham College; D.C. Dept. of Health (death record); and, on her husband, military records in Nat. Archives and Washington city directories, 1 9 2 2 - 3 1 (courtesy of D.C. Public Library). Pictures of Mrs. Bonnin may also be found in Outlook, Mar. 9, 1921, p. 375; and Survey, Feb. 1, 1930, p. 523.] MARY E.

YOUNG

BONSTELLE, Jessie (Nov. 18, 1871-Oct. 14, 1932), actress, director, and theatre manager, christened Laura Justine but known as Jessie, was born on her father's farm near Greece, N.Y., the youngest of eight children of Helen Lovisa (Norton) and Joseph Frederick Bonesteele. Her father, formerly a lawyer in Rochester, N.Y., had turned to farming because of financial reverses shortly after the Civil War. Her mother, ill suited to life as a farmer's wife, devoted herself to Jessie, focusing upon this youngest child her own youthful theatrical ambitions. She tutored the girl at home, teaching her not only to read and write but also to sing, dance, and recite selections from Shakespeare. Jessie made her first public appearance at the age of two, singing temperance songs from the pulpit of the local church, and at seven she went on tour as a child reciter. Mrs. Bonesteele regularly took her daughter to Rochester theatres, where, watching the performances of such famous actresses as Sarah Bernhardt, HELENA MODJESKA, and CLARA MORRIS, she became thoroughly stagestruck. She secured her first acting role about 1883 in a road company of the melodrama Bertha, the Beautiful Sewing Machine Girl, which left Rochester to tour the West. When it disbanded in California she returned to Rochester, where she completed her formal education with a year or two of study at the Nazareth Convent school. In March 1886 she again took to the stage, in Howell, Mich., under the auspices of Edward D. Stair, a local newspaper publisher and family acquaintance, appearing in a "commedietta" compiled by Mrs. Bonesteele, in which she sang, danced, and performed short scenes in various dialects. For the next three years she toured under Stair's management, becoming—legend has it through a typesetter's mistake—Jessie Bonstelle and winning favorable comparison with

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Bonstelle the popular soubrette of the 1860's and 1870's. The death of her father in December 1890 and of her mother the following summer left Jessie on her own. In the fall of 1891 she went to New York City, where she joined the aging FANNY JANAUSCHEK'S company and toured the South for one season. In 1892 she secured a place in Augustin Daly's company in Philadelphia as a member of the chorus and understudy, but collapsed at the end of the season from physical and emotional exhaustion. On Apr. 23, 1893, she was married to Alexander Hamilton Stuart, an actor twenty years her senior whom she had first met in Mme. Janauschek's company. It was a happy union, and she benefited from her husband's guidance until his death in 1911. After two years in Forepaugh's Stock Company in Philadelphia, she and Stuart apparently moved to Rochester, where Jessie, now firmly established as a leading lady, played such roles as 'Madame Sans-Gêne, Camille, and Magda. As an actress, however, Jessie Bonstelle never attained first rank. Although she three times braved Broadway audiences and critics—in The Great Question, a drama of miscegenation, which closed in November 1908 after not quite a month at the Majestic Theatre; in William Vaughan Moody's ill-fated The Faith Healer in 1910; and in The Lady from Oklahoma (by E L I Z A B E T H JORDAN), which ran for thirteen performances in April 1913—her talent was limited. She was good in stock, a quick study with a fine sense of business, but she lacked, according to at least one critic, creative depth.

LOTTA CRABTREE,

It was, instead, as a director and theatre manager that Jessie Bonstelle achieved distinction. About 1900 the Shubert brothers, who were just beginning the development of their theatrical chain, invited her to start her own stock company in their Rochester playhouse. For the next five years she was busy acting, directing, and managing there, although she made occasional appearances in Philadelphia stock and at least one tour of the Canadian provinces. Beginning at this time, she also directed occasional New York productions for the Shuberts and for William A. Brady, and she was for many years associated with the Tonelli Stock Company and Proctor's 125th Street Theatre in Harlem. Her main career, however, continued to be in the Great Lakes region. Her success as managerdirector in Rochester brought her to the attention of Dr. Peter Cornell, a physician with strong theatrical interests (his daughter Katharine later became a Bonstelle protégée),

who invited her to bring a stock company to his Star Theatre in Buffalo, N.Y., in the summer of 1906. Cornell and E. D. Stair, who owned the Garrick Theatre in Detroit, the next year organized a firm (later, in 1915, renamed the Garrick Company when Miss Bonstelle became a voting member) under whose sponsorship Jessie Bonstelle conducted summer stock companies in Buffalo and, beginning in 1910, in Detroit. Alternating weekly between Buffalo and Detroit, Miss Bonstelle hired the companies, selected the plays, and directed, staged, and frequently acted leading roles in as many as ten productions a summer. She was herself seemingly indefatigable and expected no less of her company. The theatre was her life, but she intended that it be a profitable life, and she was a hardheaded businesswoman as well as an idealist. She chose her plays primarily from recent Broadway successes, discarding those she considered immoral or in poor taste. The list of her productions is composed largely of now unfamiliar titles interspersed with plays made popular by their stars, such as William Vaughan Moody's The Great Divide and Edward B. Sheldon's Salvation Nell. She showed a marked ability to recognize and develop talent; her companies included such gifted and later prominent young actors and actresses as William Powell, Winifred Lenihan, Ann Harding, Frank Morgan, James Rennie, and Katharine Cornell. Josephine Hull and Guthrie McClintic directed for her, while Jo Mielziner, later famed as a set designer, was one of her assistants and jack-of-all-trades. Prompted in part by her experience at the Northampton (Mass.) Municipal Theatre, which she directed with Bertram Harrison from 1912 to 1917, Miss Bonstelle became convinced that what she wanted was to establish a community-supported professional theatre. In 1924 she sold her interest in the Garrick Company and, with the backing of a group of Detroit businessmen, opened the Bonstelle Playhouse in that city on Jan. 1, 1925. The following March she added schools of drama and dance, with classes for adults and children. She continued to produce the same sort of plays she had directed in summer stock—professional productions in the Broadway manner—but when the playhouse became the Detroit Civic Theatre in 1928, backed by public subscription, a broader range was possible. She experimented with modern dress productions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, the former also being filmed for use in the Detroit public schools, and with special performances of such plays as The Merry Wives

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of Windsor, Sheridan's The Rivals, and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder. In 1929 she revived Dion Boucicault's After Dark, a vintage melodrama; it ran fourteen weeks in Detroit and then toured the East for three months under the auspices of William Brady. Despite the onset of the depression, she kept the theatre going until her death, and it continued for one year afterward. Miss Bonstelle was not an easy person to know; her ambition and determination often made her ruthless, a quality which earned her the affection and respect of those it helped and the antagonism and respect of those it offended. "She wasn't very pretty," Katharine Cornell has recalled; "her nose was too long, her face too, though her very expressive hands were quite lovely. She lacked taste in dress, and had none of the star quality of Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, or J U L I A M A B L O W E . Even her voice wasn't especially compelling. But none of these deficiencies seemed to matter. She was an amazing woman—all the more admirable for the way she subordinated her own career to those of others." Miss Bonstelle's religious interests included spiritualism and Christian Science. In June 1932 she traveled to Hollywood to discuss the possibility of directing films, but returned to Detroit after learning that she was fatally ill of cancer. She died at her Detroit home that fall at the age of sixty; after services in her theatre she was buried beside her husband in Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester, N.Y. Her significance in the American theatre lies in her success in establishing a profitable civic theatre, an accomplishment unique in the 1920s, and in her tutelage of an amazing number of actors and actresses who were to become well known on the legitimate stage. [William Luther Deam, "A Biog. Study of Miss Laura Justine Bonstelle-Stuart" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Mich., 1954); Margaret Storey and Hugh Gillis, Players' Nursery (mimeographed pamphlet, Dramatists' Alliance, Stanford Univ., 1940); clippings in Harvard Theatre Collection; Thomas H. Dickinson, The Insurgent Theatre (1917), pp. 40-43; Helen Christine Bennett in American Mag., Dec. 1927; Katharine Cornell, I Wanted to Be an Actress (1939); personal impressions provided by Miss Cornell. Miss Bonstelle's death record (from Mich. Dept. of Health) is the authority for her date of birth.] ANN TOWNSEND ZWART

BOOTH, Agnes (Oct. 4, 1841?-Jan. 2, 1910), actress, was born, by her own account, in Sydney, Australia, shortly after her mother, her grandparents, and her older sister had arrived

from London; her father, who stayed behind, died before she was born. She identifies him as "Captain Rookes of the British Army," though no officer of that name is found in the Army List, nor does a Rookes family appear in Australian birth or settlement records of the 1840's. Her mother was Sara Land, and she herself, she says, was christened Marion Agnes Land Rookes. The family met with reverses in Australia and, with an eye to self-support rather than any "stage infatuation," Agnes enrolled for two years, beginning when she was ten, at the ballet school of the Victoria Theatre in Sydney. There she progressed to dancing and acting roles. Her mother, she reports, had meanwhile remarried, and when her stepfather, the Rev. Henry Smeatham, an Anglican clergyman, received a call to California, they migrated there, apparently arriving early in 1858. The stepfather soon afterward lost his life as a missionary to the Indians. Returning to the stage, Agnes Land, as she was then billed, made her debut, apparently, with Mrs. John Wood ( M A T I L D A C H A R L O T T E V I N I N G W O O D ) at Maguire's Opera House, San Francisco, on Feb. 8 or 9, 1858, in a bill which paired The Corsair and Popping the Question. She also acted with the Woods in Sacramento, notably in The Pride of the Market. After joining the stock company at Maguire's Opera House, she played a great variety of roles, from Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream to the sensational Mazeppa. She also toured the California mining camps. On Feb. 11, 1861, she was married to a handsome fellow actor, Harry A. Perry. He died in 1863; according to one report the marriage had already ended in divorce. In June 1865, now as Agnes Perry, she ventured eastward to New York; and in October she played a series of comic parts at the Winter Garden Theatre with John S. Clarke's company. The following month, with characteristic versatility, she joined Edwin Forrest at Niblo's Garden, supporting him in a succession of Shakespearean and other tragic roles. Her next engagement took her to Boston, where for seven seasons, beginning in 1866, she was leading lady of the Boston Theatre. There, on June 29, 1867, she became the third wife of the actor-manager Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., son of the famous tragedian and brother of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth. In 1873 her husband took over the management of his brother Edwin's theatre and reintroduced her to the New York public in a French play, La Femme de Feu. According to the New York News (Jan. 16, 1874), her performance "established her . . . as the most finished and ef-

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fective emotional actress at present on the metropolitan stage" (Odell, IX, 386). The panic of 1873 ruined Booth financially, and to help him recoup his losses Mrs. Booth went on tour from 1874 to 1876. Her performance as Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra at Niblo's Garden in April 1877 attracted the attention of the influential manager A. M. Palmer, in whose company she appeared in the 1877—78 season, notably in the farce Pink Dominoes (Union Square Theatre, August 1877). She left this important professional association to join the new Park Theatre company of Henry Abbey as leading lady; her portrayal there of Belinda in W. S. Gilbert's Engaged (February 1879) has been called "one of the great and lasting hits of the American theatre" (Odell, X, 600). In 1881 Mrs. Booth joined the Madison Square Theatre, where she was to remain for the next decade, first under the management of Daniel Frohman and then once again under that of Palmer. For the latter, in 1886-87, she achieved one of the triumphs of her career as Mrs. Ralston in Sir Charles Young's celebrated melodrama Jim, the Penman. The theatre historian George C. D. Odell considered her acting in the pantomime scene, "with her successive thoughts mirrored in her face, . . . among the most notable bits of stage business I have ever witnessed" (XIII, 217). Meanwhile her husband had died in September 1883, and on Feb. 4, 1885, in Boston, she had married John B. Schoeffel, manager of Boston's Tremont Theatre and partner in the theatrical firm of Abbey, Schoeffel & Grau. In 1891, following Palmer's withdrawal from the Madison Square management, she retired temporarily to travel in Europe. Thereafter she was seen but seldom on the stage, though she toured the country in 1895-96 in The Sporting Duchess and in 1903 appeared in Charles Frohman's production of The Best of Friends. Agnes Booth was a seasoned trouper, her craft perfected by years of conscientious hard work and experience in a wide variety of roles. In A. M. Palmer's estimation, she was "far above the merely emotional actress" so common in her day; "her thoughtful art, aided by a certain spontaneity and heartiness, gave her great popularity and secured her undisturbed rank as altogether the best leading woman of a stock company during her sway in New York." She was a success as well in her personal life, respected in Boston society, happy in her last two marriages. She enjoyed domestic life, particularly the summer months at Masconomo House in Manchester-by-the-Sea, bequeathed to her by Booth, where she entertained lavishly and delighted in her aviary. For

some time before her death she suffered from arteriosclerosis; she died of pernicious anemia at her home in Brookline, Mass. Following a private Congregational service, she was buried in Manchester-by-the-Sea. In addition to her husband, she was survived by two sons by her second marriage, Sydney Barton Booth and Junius Brutus Booth III, both actors; two other children had died young. [MS. autobiography of Agnes Booth ( 15 pages, 1889) in Walter Hampden Memorial Library at The Players, N.Y. City; George C. D. Odell, Annals of the N.Y. Stage, vols. VIII-XV ( 1 9 3 6 - 4 9 ) ; Frederic E. McKay and Charles E. L. Wingate, eds., Famous Am. Actors of To-day ( 1 8 9 6 ) ; John B. Clapp and Edwin F. Edgett, Players of the Present, Part I ( 1 8 9 9 ) ; Frances E . Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893); Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1 9 4 2 ) ; obituaries in N.Y. Times and Boston Transcript, Jan. 3, 1910; clippings in Harvard Theatre Collection; A. M. Palmer, "The Hist, of the Union Square Theatre" (MS., Harvard Theatre Collection); records of her second and third marriages and death record from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics. Several accounts give Agnes Booth's birth year as 1843, but the record of her marriage to Booth gives her age in June 1867 as twenty-five.] PAT M. RYAN

BOOTH, Ellen Warren Scripps (July 10, 1863Jan. 24, 1948), philanthropist, co-founder with her husband of the Cranbrook Foundation, a Michigan educational and cultural center, was born in Detroit, the eldest of the three daughters and two sons of James Edmund and Harriet Josephine (Messenger) Scripps. Her mother was a native of Vermont. Her father, bom in London to a family having deep roots in the publishing business, was brought to America in 1844 at the age of nine and later began a journalistic career which culminated in 1873 in the founding of the Detroit Evening News. Edward Wyllis Scripps, founder of the ScrippsMcRae (later Scripps-Howard) chain of newspapers, was her uncle, E L L E N BROWNING SCRIPPS her aunt. Young Ellen Scripps, known as "Nellie," graduated from Detroit's Central High School. Sharing her father's interest in art and architecture, she accompanied her parents on sightseeing and picture-buying trips to Europe before her marriage. She was an active member of the Church of the Epiphany (Reformed Episcopal). On June 1, 1887, Ellen Scripps was married to George Gough Booth of Toronto, Canada, who became successively business manager and president of the Detroit Evening News, and ultimately head of Booth Newspapers, Inc., a Michigan chain. They had five children:

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James Scripps (born 1 8 8 8 ) , Grace Ellen ( 1 8 9 0 ) , Warren Scripps ( 1 8 9 4 ) , Henry Scripps ( 1 8 9 7 ) , and Florence Louise ( 1 9 0 2 ) . Henry and Warren succeeded their father as directors of Booth Newspapers. The Booths lived in Detroit until 1908, when they moved to Bloomfield Hills, about fifteen miles to the northwest, where Booth had purchased several hundred acres. There they built Cranbrook, a mansion named for his ancestral English village. For over a decade it remained solely a private estate, but the growing number of young children in the Booth clan suggested to Ellen Scripps Booth and her husband the need for educational facilities, and in 1918 they erected a meetinghouse which served as both church and primary school. Four years later they opened Brookside, a private school offering a full program of elementary education. This proved the first step in the establishment of a series of institutions on the Cranbrook estate. The Booths were extremely wealthy in their later years, Mrs. Booth in her own right as an heiress of the Scripps fortune, and they believed in the principle of the stewardship of wealth. Accordingly, in November 1927 they established the nonprofit Cranbrook Foundation with an endowment in plant and capital of over $10,000,000. Ultimately their contribution reached nearly twice that figure, with Mrs. Booth contributing more than a third. The principal purpose of the foundation, in the words of the deed of trust, was "to add to and strengthen the educational and cultural facilities within the State of Michigan," but the trustees, including the three Booth sons, were given considerable discretionary power. In 1927 they opened the largest unit in the growing group of institutions: Cranbrook School, a private preparatory school for boys. Kingswood, a school for girls, was added in 1931. The Cranbrook Institute of Science, primarily a science museum but with some research facilities, began operation in the same year. The Booths also erected in 1928 Christ Church Cranbrook, designed by Bertram G. Goodhue in the French Gothic manner. As connoisseurs and patrons of the fine arts, Mrs. Booth and her husband took special pleasure in establishing the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Beginning in 1928 as "a community of working artists and gifted students," the academy ultimately encompassed five buildings. It soon gained an international reputation for its training of advanced students in painting, architecture, sculpture, and handicrafts, its patronage and exhibits of modern art, and its extensive library. The director for twenty-four

years was Eliel Saarinen, the noted Finnish architect, who also designed several of the major Cranbrook buildings. Among the resident artists for many years was Carl Milles, the Swedish sculptor. Ellen Scripps Booth was a supporter of all these undertakings and a prime mover in some of them, notably Kingswood School Cranbrook. She was of a shy and retiring nature, however, and having made her benefactions, usually left to her husband, a man of enormous drive and energy, the major role in planning the Cranbrook complex. Unlike many philanthropists, the Booths had the pleasure of seeing their efforts reach fruition in their own lifetime. They spent their declining years at Cranbrook, where Mrs. Booth died in 1948 at eighty-four, of a stroke following a prolonged illness. She was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Birmingham, Mich. Her husband died fourteen months later, and the entire Cranbrook estate, including the original mansion, passed to the Cranbrook Foundation. [Arthur Pound, The Only Thing Worth Finding (1964), a biography of George Gough Booth; Henry Scripps Booth, The Cranbook Booth Family of America ( 1955 ) ; and James E. Scripps, Genealogical Hist, of the Scripps Family (privately printed, 1903), include some details about Mrs. Booth. Newspaper accounts of the Booths and their foundation appeared in the Ν.Ύ. Times, Dec. 31, 1927, Jan. 1, 1928, and Feb. 7, 1932. Other sources of information about Cranbook are George N. Fuller, ed., Michigan: A Centennial Hist, of the State and Its People ( 1939), II, 467 ff.; Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State ( 1941 ) ; Lee A. White et al., Cranbrook Inst, of Science: A Hist, of Its Founding and First Twenty-Five Years (1959); Albert Christ-Janer, Eliel Saarinen ( 1948); and the annual reports of the Cranbrook Foundation. Obituaries of Mrs. Booth appeared in the Ν.Ύ. Times and the Detroit News, Jan. 25, 1948. Dr. Arthur Pound and Henry Scripps Booth, Bloomfield Hills, Mich., provided insights and information impossible to obtain elsewhere. The archives at Cranbrook contain the Booth papers and other material pertaining to the foundation.] RODERICK

NASH

BOOTH, Evangeline Cory (Dec. 25, 1 8 6 5 July 17, 1 9 5 0 ) , fourth general of the Salvation Army, was born in the South Hackney section of London, England, the fourth of five daughters and next to youngest of the eight children of William and Catherine (Mumford) Booth. Named after Little Eva of Uncle Tom's Cabin, she was generally known by this short form of the name until her move to the United States, where, on the advice of F R A N C É S E . W I L L A R D , she used the more dignified Evangeline.

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In the year of her birth her father left the Methodist ministry to found an independent evangelistic organization that became the Salvation Army. The life of the whole Booth family centered around the Army, with its emphasis on personal religious commitment, strict moral principles, and unlimited compassion for the less fortunate. With her brothers and sisters, Eva often played at preaching and talked of souls and sinners, backsliders and penitents. Catherine Booth, the "Mother of the Salvation Army," was herself an inspiring preacher who demonstrated that women could be as successful as men in winning souls for Christ. Of the eight children, seven became prominent leaders in the Salvation Army. The family's religious solidarity even extended to the husbands of the three married daughters, who accepted the Booth name as a prefix to their own. No opportunities open to her brothers were denied Evangeline or her sisters. Since her mother strongly distrusted the contaminating influence of secular education, Eva was educated at home by tutors and governesses. At fifteen she donned a sergeant's uniform and began her practical training by selling the War Cry, the Army's newspaper, in the streets. She was given a Salvation Army post of her own when she was only seventeen. Dynamic in personality, she preached in rundown halls, sang in public houses, accompanying herself on the guitar, faced hostile magistrates on charges of "disturbing the peace," and melted hardened roughs. She made a striking appearance, with her tall, slender figure, flowing auburn hair, and handsome face dominated by deep, flashing eyes, and soon won the name "White Angel of the Slums." From her active ministry in the field, she was placed in charge of the International Training College at Clapton and given the command of the Salvation Army forces in the London area. Her most effective work in England was as a troubleshooter, sent wherever persecutions, either physical or legal, were most critical. In every case her keen common sense, winning personality, and ability to discover an unusual way to win her point brought victory to the Salvation Army. When trouble arose, General Booth's command would be: "Send Eva." Her first trip to the United States was on such a mission. Her older brother Ballington (1857-1940) and his wife, MATO BALLINGTON BOOTH, had in 1887 assumed command of the Salvation Army forces in the United States. Their leadership proved popular and effective. But their American experience made them question the wisdom of the absolute control

exercised over the Army from England and led to an estrangement from General Booth. When in 1896 they were suddenly ordered to relinquish their command, they resigned from the Salvation Army. Public opinion in the United States swung sharply against the Army and a secession movement loomed. Though Evangeline Booth was unable to prevent her brother's resignation, she helped regain public support and showed considerable initiative in holding the organization together until her sister Emma with her husband could assume command. Evangeline Booth then proceeded to neighboring Canada to head the Salvation Army forces there. Emma Booth-Tucker (Jan. 10, 1860-0ct. 28, 1903) was the fourth of the Booth children and second eldest daughter. Known as "The Consul," she was an active leader in the United States at the time the Salvation Army was inaugurating its extensive program of social work. As co-commander with her husband, Frederick St. George de Lautour Booth-Tucker, she traveled widely, speaking and visiting the Army's various social institutions, including some experimental farm colonies in the West. On one such trip she was killed in a train wreck near Dean Lake, Mo., at the age of forty-three. Her husband tried to carry on the work alone but found the burden too heavy. The logical successor was Commander Evangeline Booth, who had made an outstanding record in Canada. Thus in 1904 Evangeline Booth began her thirty-year career as leader of the rapidly growing Salvation Army forces in the United States. In this period the Army continued its evangelical efforts and expanded its broad program of social services—"rescue homes" for "fallen women" and hospitals for unwed mothers, food and shelter depots, salvage brigades for the unemployed, prison work, and aid to released convicts. Evangeline Residences, homes away from home for young working women, were established in more than a dozen large cities. The Army forged its emergency disaster service during the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. Its canteens for the American armed forces in France during World War I, with their "doughnuts for doughboys," won universal public enthusiasm and brought Evangeline Booth the Distinguished Service Medal in 1919. As the Salvation Army's officers and institutions increased, it became necessary to divide the administration in the United States into four territories, each with its own headquarters, training college, and edition of the War Cry. Still Commander Booth supervised the work in all four territories from national

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headquarters. Perhaps the climax of her administration was the dedication of a fine new headquarters building in New York City in 1930, the fiftieth anniversary of Salvation Army service in America. An able administrator, Evangeline Booth readily adapted herself to American conditions. Whereas in England the Salvation Army depended largely on the work and support of its own members, in the United States it early developed a broad group of unaffiliated sympathizers and benefactors. As far back as the 1890's an Auxiliary League had enrolled 6,000 members, among them the Rev. Lyman Abbott, Chauncey M. Depew, and Postmaster General John Wanamaker. Evangeline Booth continued and expanded this policy, enlisting as advisers such influential figures as Myron T. Herrick, Otto H. Kahn, Bishop William T. Manning, and Helen Gould Shepard. In 1919, capitalizing on the Army's wide popular prestige, she conducted its first national fund drive, a well-planned campaign that raised $16,000,000. Her own personal commitment to the United States was symbolized on Apr. 10, 1923, when she became an American citizen. Her American experience undoubtedly influenced Evangeline Booth's willingness to lead the forces of reform during a new crisis that rocked the international Salvation Army in 1929. Before his death in 1912 Gen. William Booth had named as his successor his oldest son and chief of staff, William Bramwell Booth (1856-1929), passing on to him the same absolute power that he himself had exercised. But a power that had seemed fitting in the prophetlike founder soon aroused resentment in the hands of his more arbitrary son. Like Ballington Booth before her, Evangeline found herself increasingly at odds with the Army's high command. In 1922, invoking a policy of rotation of duty, Bramwell Booth ordered his sister to relinquish her post. Again, as in 1896, public protest mounted, and Bramwell Booth, unlike his father, had to back down. Prominent Salvationists the world over now urged a change in the Army's constitution and looked to Evangeline Booth for leadership. At first privately, then in concert with other high officials (including Frederick Booth-Tucker), she sought to persuade her brother to give up his autocratic and dynastic powers. All efforts having failed, a "High Council" of top Salvation Army officers met in London in 1929, deposed the now ailing Bramwell, and established the principle of electing the general rather than having him appoint his own successor. Though Evangeline Booth did not escape charges of personal ambition, it seems clear that prin-

ciples were of greater importance than personalities. The climax of Evangeline Booth's career came in 1934 when she was herself elected to the generalship. With a "pang," she left the land of her adoption to return to London. For five busy years she directed the international work of the Salvation Army in more than eighty countries and colonies, traveling around the world to visit the various outposts. Her retirement, in 1939, marked the end of an era for the Salvation Army, a shift from dominant individual leadership to corporate solidity. She was the last of the Booths to head the Salvation Army, the last commander in the United States to become a personal symbol of the institution. For Evangeline Booth, the service of God was never joyless. The first Salvationist to ride a bicycle in the 1880's, she was also an accomplished horsewoman and enjoyed swimming and diving at her summer cottage on Lake George. Her temperament was such that she would drive herself unsparingly for weeks and then collapse for a period of absolute rest. Music was always a part of her life. Among the several instruments she played, her favorite was the harp. She composed a number of hymns, some of them still sung in Salvation Army meetings. A collection of her compositions was published in 1927 as Songs of the Evangel. Always an effective speaker, she drew large audiences at her public lectures in the United States. She used her own personal influence and that of the Salvation Army to support the movement for prohibition and later was in the vanguard of the forces opposing its repeal. A feminist by family heritage, she favored woman suffrage, though she took no part in the movement to obtain it. Unlike most of her brothers and sisters, she never married, though her dedicated resolve once wavered when, at twenty-nine, she was ardently courted by the idealistic Russian Prince Galitzin. Following her retirement as general, Evangeline Booth returned to the United States to spend her last years at her home in Hartsdale, N.Y. She died there in her eighty-fifth year of arteriosclerosis. After public services in the Salvation Army citadel in New York City, she was buried in the Army's plot in Kensico Cemetery, near White Plains, N.Y. Among the many honors that had come to her were degrees from Tufts College (1921) and Columbia University (1939). [A full, authorized biography by Philip Whitwell Wilson based on Miss Booth's papers, Gen. Evan-

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geline Booth of the Salvation Army, was published in 1948; Wilson's earlier biography (1935) is of little value. Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr., Soldiers without Swords: A Hist, of the Salvation Army in the U.S. ( 1955 ), contains much information about Miss Booth and a bibliography. Also useful are a Salvation Army publication by Agnes L. Palmer entitled 1904-1926, The Time Between (1926), and War Cry, Aug. 12, 1950. There are sketches in Current Biog., 1941, and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., vol. B, pp. 127-29; and an obituary in the Ν.Ύ. Times, July 18, 1950. Miss Booth's own writings include Love Is All (1908), a collection of essays; Toward a Better World (1928), a volume of sermons; and, in collaboration with Grace Livingston Hill, an account of Salvation Army service in the First World War, The War Romance of the Salvation Army (1919).] HERBERT A. WISBEY, JR.

BOOTH, Mary Louise (Apr. 19, 1831-Mar. 5, 1889), translator, author, and magazine editor, was bom in Millville (later Yaphank), Long Island, N.Y., the eldest of four children (two sons, two daughters) of Nancy (Monsell) and William Chatfield Booth. Her father was a descendant of John Booth, who in 1652 took title to Shelter Island, off Long Island; her mother, born in Moriches, Long Island, was the granddaughter of a French Revolutionary émigré. A bookish child, Mary attended local schools in Yaphank and in Williamsburgh (later part of Brooklyn), where her father, a schoolteacher, moved in 1844 to become principal of the Third District School. (He afterward managed a night-watchman service in New York City.) To a considerable extent, however, she was self-taught, particularly in languages, at which she had great skill. For a time (c. 1 8 4 5 - 4 6 ) she taught in her father's school, but though he felt this was the only proper occupation for a woman, Mary Booth was drawn to a literary career. To be nearer newspapers and libraries, she moved at about the age of eighteen to Manhattan, where for several years she worked as a vest maker, sewing in the daytime and studying and writing at night. Most of her early writing for educational and literary journals and for newspapers was without pay, but she was presently engaged by the New York Times as a piece-rate reporter on educational and women's topics. She may also have done further teaching, for in 1857 she was a delegate to the New York State Teachers' Association, where she supported a resolution introduced by SUSAN B. ANTHONY favoring equal educational opportunities for Negroes. Possibly through her friendship with Miss Anthony, Mary Booth joined the woman's rights movement, serving as one of the secretaries at conventions in Saratoga, N.Y., in 1855

and New York City in 1860. Despite a growing success in her literary work, she did not achieve a regular salary and full self-support until about 1860 when she became the "amanuensis," or secretary, of the New York physician J . Marion Sims. Having a facility for translating and finding few persons engaged in it, Miss Booth for a time made this her specialty. Beginning with a technical Marble-Workers' Manual in 1856, she eventually translated from the French nearly forty volumes, mostly literary and historical, ranging from the writings of Pascal to such contemporary works as Joseph Méry's André Chénier ( 1 8 5 7 ) and Victor Cousin's Secret History of the French Court under Richelieu and Mazarin ( 1 8 5 9 ) . Meanwhile, however, she had begun the most important of her own writing, her History of the City of New York ( 1 8 5 9 ) . Originally planned for use in schools but later, upon the request of the publisher, expanded into a work for the general public, this was the first comprehensive history of thè city to be published. She compiled her material with thoroughness and care, doing extensive research in libraries and archives and consulting antiquarians and specialists in the field. The 850-page History, which won the praise of the historian Benson J. Lossing for its "completeness" and "admirable manner," sold well and went through four editions, the last in 1880, although it had by that date been superseded by the two-volume work of Mrs. MARTHA J. L A M B .

A warm antislavery partisan, Miss Booth at the outbreak of the Civil War felt a strong urge to aid the Union cause, an opportunity she found through her translating ability. Receiving an advance copy of a French work, the Count Agénor de Gasparin's The Uprising of a Great People: The United States in 1861, and feeling that its sympathetic words could do much to hearten the embattled North, she persuaded the New York publisher Charles Scribner to issue an American edition. Scribner, fearing the war would end before the book could be published, consented only if copy could be ready in a week; Miss Booth worked twenty hours a day and met the deadline. Her translation, which according to her usual practice she "sought to make as conscientiously literal as due regard to idioms of language would permit" (preface, p. viii), evoked considerable praise. "It is worth a whole phalanx in the cause of human freedom," wrote Senator Charles Sumner. Carrying on a steady correspondence during the war with the Count de Gasparin and other European friends of the North, Miss Booth subsequently translated oth-

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er pro-Union French works, including Gaspa1887, became engaged to an admirer she had rin's America before Europe ( 1862 ), Augustin several times refused, the spell did not survive Cochin's The Results of Slavery (1863) and her departure from that "dream-city" (ibid., The Results of Emancipation (1863), and pp. 128-29). In good health save for an attack Edouard Laboulaye's Paris in America ( 1863 ). of rheumatic fever in her younger days, she Her wartime services as translator won her the died in New York in 1889, shortly before her thanks of many statesmen, including President fifty-eighth birthday, of fibroid phthisis and Lincoln. fatty degeneration of the heart. She was buried, after Episcopal services, in Cypress Hills After the war, combining her interests in hisCemetery, Brooklyn. tory and in Franco-American cultural relations, Miss Booth translated three volumes of Henri [The account of Miss Booth's early life above folMartin's History of France, for which she won lows the long obituary article in the Woman's Jour. the author's unqualified praise; she later was (Apr. 6, 1889, pp. 1 0 5 - 0 6 ) by her friend Dr. co-translator of a three-volume abridged verMARIE E. ZAKHZEWSKA, a more circumstantial and sion. Her main postwar energies, however, unromantic version than those commonly given. It went elsewhere. When in 1867 Harper & Broth- is borne out, in part, by contemporary references ers inaugurated Harper's Bazar, a sixteen-page in Ida H. Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, I ( 1 8 9 8 ) , 1 4 2 - 4 3 , 146, 155. Other bio"family" weekly aimed to appeal especially to graphical accounts, presumably more reliable on women, they chose Miss Booth as its editor, at her later literary career, include: Harriet Prescott an annual salary that eventually reached the Spofford in Our Famous Women ( 1 8 8 4 ) , pp. 1 1 7 then high figure of $4,000. For the next twen33; Mrs. Spofford's A Little Book of Friends ty-two years, until her death, she directed ev( 1 9 1 6 ) , chap, vi; and Sarah K. Bolton, Successful ery phase of the Bazar, working at her editoWomen ( 1 8 8 8 ) , chap. ii. See also Evert A. and rial desk from nine to four each day. The Ba- Ί George L. Duyckinck, Supplement to the Cyc. of zar printed fashion news and plates, serial fic- Am. Literature ( 1 8 6 5 ) , pp. 1 4 7 - 4 8 ; Appletons' Cyc. Am. Biog., I, 320; Phebe A. Hanaford, Daughtion by well-known British writers like Wilkie ters of America ( 1 8 8 3 ) , p. 666; and obituary in Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, short stoN.Y. Times, Mar. 6, 1889. Other details from ries (among them the early New England tales George Munson Booth, Booths in U.S.A. (blueprint, of MARY w i L K i N S FREEMAN), a column by 1914; copy in N.Y. Public Library); N.Y. Teacher, George William Curtis, and articles on houseSept. 1857, pp. 540, 543; Elizabeth C. Stanton et hold management and interior decoration; in al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, I ( 1 8 8 1 ) , 624, ten years it gained a circulation of 80,000. A 688n.; Max I. Baym, "Historians in a Tangle," working editor, Miss Booth approached SARA Bull, of the N.Y. Public Library, Apr. 1956, on her translation of the Martin history; Charles F . WinJOSEPHA HALE in practicality of method and gate, ed., Views and Interviews on Journalism Mrs. Frank Leslie (see MIRIAM FLORENCE FO( 1 8 7 5 ) ; J. Henry Harper, The House of Harper LINE LESLIE) in ability to gauge the public ( 1 9 1 2 ) , pp. 2 4 8 - 5 2 ; and Frank L. Mott, A Hist, taste. She was well endowed with the qualifiof Am. Magazines, III ( 1 9 3 8 ) , 3 8 8 - 9 0 . Informacations she herself assigned to a good editor: tion about Miss Booth's father from Williamsburgh "sagacity to discover what the public wants, city directories, 1 8 4 6 - 4 9 (courtesy of Long Island and knowledge [of] how to supply the deHist. Soc.); her mother's maiden name and birthmand"; "quick and sure perception, . . . the place from Town Clerk, Greenport, Long Island (her place of death); death record of Miss Booth habit of ready decision, correct taste, and a jufrom N.Y. City Dept. of Health. There are letters dicial mind" (Wingate, p. 253). by Miss Booth in the N.Y. Public Library ( 2 8 in A tall woman, "commanding" in person, with Miscellaneous Papers, 1—autobiographical—in the "soft brown eyes" and hair turned prematurely Duyckinck Collection) and in the N.-Y. Hist. Soc. gray, Mary Louise Booth embodied, in the (9 to Henry Dawson).] judgment of her friend HARRIET PRESCOTT MADELEINE B. STERN SPOFFORD, a "singular combination" of strength and tenderness. In the office she was "entirely the business woman, firm . . . and sagacious." BOOTH, Maud Ballington (Sept. 13, 1865At home she changed to "lovely gowns and Aug. 26, 1948), Salvation Army leader, prison laces," enjoyed the company of her pet cats reformer, and co-founder of the Volunteers of and birds, and was a gracious hostess ( Our Fa- America, was born at Limpsfield, Surrey, Engmous Women, p. 133; A Little Book of Friends, land, the youngest of three daughters of the pp. 123-24). At her house near Central Park, Rev. Samuel Beddome Charlesworth, descendwhere she lived with a close friend, Mrs. Anne ant of a line of Anglican clergymen that went W. Wright, she regularly received, on Satur- back to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and Maday evenings, a variety of literary and other ria (Beddome) Charlesworth, the daughter of notables. Though she once, while in Venice in Richard Beddome, a wealthy barrister. Her

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parents were first cousins. Christened Maud Elizabeth Charlesworth, she adopted both of her husband's names after her marriage to Ballington Booth. One of her sisters, Mrs. Florence Louisa Barclay, won distinction as the author of The Rosary and more than a dozen other novels, and an aunt, Maria Louisa Charlesworth, was the author of a popular Victorian novel, Ministering Children. When Maud was only three the family moved to London, where her father had chosen to serve a parish in Limehouse, one of the poorest sections of the city. The squalor of the neighborhood made an inevitable impression upon Maud, in spite of her sheltered upbringing as a Victorian gentlewoman. Her mother, active in parish work (a rudimentary form of social work), strongly influenced her; however, it was her sister Florence, two years her elder, whom Maud considered the "real molder of my child character" (Welty, p. 19). After being tutored at home, Maud was sent to Hill House, Mrs. Umphelby's school in Belstead, Suffolk. Florence's marriage in March 1881, during Maud's second year at the school, left the younger girl lonely and at loose ends; to divert her, Mrs. Charlesworth took her to a Salvation Army meeting, which was addressed by Ballington Booth, the handsome son of Gen. William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. Maud's positive response to the Army's appeal for religious commitment was strengthened by her mother's death the following November. The humanitarianism of the Salvation Army appealed to her as well, and a year later she joined Ballington's sister Catherine in inaugurating Salvation Army work in France and Switzerland. In spite of her father's strong opposition to her deepening involvement with the Army and to her engagement to Ballington Booth, she went to London to work with Emma Booth in the Training Home for women officers. There, in 1884, she helped initiate the work of the "slum sisters," who lived in the slums and pioneered in social service work. By the time of her marriage to Ballington Booth, on Sept. 16, 1886, she was a seasoned and respected member of the Salvation Army. The Ballington Booths' first major assignment was the supervision of Salvation Army work in the United States, where they took command on Apr. 21, 1887. An unusually attractive couple, for nine years they had a highly successful administration during which the Salvation Army made great progress in winning public esteem. Mrs. Booth's "drawing room meetings," held in the homes of prominent members of society, were especially effective in enlisting influential supporters. Be-

sides carrying on and expanding already established activities, Maud Booth began slum work in New York City, drawing on her experience with the London "slum sisters." In 1895 the Booths became American citizens. But in January 1896 they were suddenly ordered to leave for another post. Already estranged from Gen. William Booth because of disagreement with his policy of absolute and centralized control, and regarding their removal as both unwise and unjust, they resigned from the Salvation Army. Expressions of support from many prominent Americans and the general public led Maud and Ballington Booth to launch a new humanitarian and religious organization in March 1896. Named the Volunteers of America, it followed the military pattern of the Salvation Army, largely because many of its first members were former Salvationists, but differed from it in being exclusively American and by providing that its commander-in-chief be elected, rather than chosen by his predecessor. (The Salvation Army did not adopt the policy of electing its general until 1929.) The first commander-in-chief, reelected until his death, was Gen. Ballington Booth. Women in the Volunteers, as in the Salvation Army, ranked equally with men; Mrs. Booth herself was a strong believer in woman's rights and upon occasion wrote and spoke in favor of suffrage, although she did not actively become a part of the suffrage movement. Though never rivaling the Salvation Army in size or wealth, the Volunteers found a lasting place in American life. In 1953 they had 92 posts to the Army's 1,700. Leaving largely to her husband the administration of the Volunteers of America, Mrs. Booth put all her efforts into prison work, through a subsidiary and nearly autonomous organization, the Volunteer Prison League, or V.P.L. Though she had visited jails and prisons as early as 1889, she launched her new undertaking at Sing Sing Prison on May 24, 1896, motivated not only by her recognition of a social need but also by a desire to find a cause to replace the slum work she had given up in order to avoid competition with the Salvation Army. Her goal was the religious rehabilitation of individual prisoners. A tiny woman, only five feet tall, with hazel eyes and chestnut hair, she had even as a young woman a motherly quality that appealed to the prisoners, and she was an effective speaker. Her approach to prisoners was rehabilitory rather than castigating, and although the basis of her appeal was religious, her program, which soon spread to the country's leading penal institutions, included welfare work as well as evan-

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Booth gelism. V.P.L. members began their own rehabilitation in prison by following the League rules, encouraged by the knowledge that outside the walls Mrs. Booth was taking care of their families through the facilities of the Volunteers of America and working to secure employment for them on their release. "Hope Halls," homes for discharged prisoners seeking employment, were established around the tarn of the century in Flushing, N.Y. (on a ten-acre farm), and Chicago, and afterward in other cities. The Booths employed ex-convicts in their own home, hiring those for whom Mrs. Booth could not find jobs and, often, those with records she did not want to risk on other employers. Though sometimes criticized as oversentimental, she achieved through the V.P.L. an "almost unbelievably high" rate of successful rehabilitation (Welty, p. 180), to the amazement of many experienced prison officials, who eventually gave her work their hearty endorsement. In her later years, handicapped both by her husband's illness and by the limitations a heart condition imposed on her, Mrs. Booth made fewer prison visits, and without her personal contact many Leagues died out. Their work, too, was increasingly supplanted by the growth of official parole systems. Maud Ballington Booth's successful pioneering in this field was her most significant contribution to prison reform. Her work with the V.P.L. led to other activities. She became an active member of the American Prison Association, serving on many committees, and late in life she was made its only honorary vice-president. At the turn of the century, she was one of the most popular and effective of the Chautauqua lecturers, speaking of her prison work and experiences and emphasizing her belief that prison should be a place for rehabilitation and reform rather than for punishment. In her lectures and in her writings she advocated such reforms as prison educational programs, both vocational and academic; the parole system; and the indeterminate sentence. Though she also wrote several religious works and some children's stories, perhaps her best-known book was After Prison —What? (1903). Similar in theme were her Branded (1897) and Did the Pardon Come Too Late? (1897). In private life she was a loving mother to her two children. Her son, Charles Brandon Booth, the third general of the Volunteers of America, and her daughter, Theodora, felt that they had an unusually close family in spite of the active public life of both parents. Mrs. Booth loved nature and enjoyed swimming and boating, piloting her small craft alone even

when she was over seventy. When Ballington Booth died in 1940, his widow was elected to succeed him as general and commander-inchief of the Volunteers of America. At seventyfive she entered into the active leadership of the organization, traveling back and forth across the country, visiting the various posts, and speaking in its behalf. She was active until after her eighty-second year. She died at the home of her daughter in Great Neck, Long Island, and was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery, Hartsdale, New York. [Susan F. Welty, Look Up and Hope! (1961), is a full-scale biography, based on published and unpublished sources, including interviews with Mrs. Booth. Herbert A. Wisbey, Jr.'s unpublished "Hist, of the Volunteers of America" (1954), prepared for that organization, also contains considerable biographical information, as does a memorial issue of the Volunteers' Gazette, Oct. 1948. See also Wisbey, Soldiers without Swords: A Hist, of the Salvation Army in the U.S. (1955), pp. 93-95 and chap, xi; and obituary in N.Y. Times, Aug. 27, 1948. Mrs. Booth's papers are in the possession of her daughter, Miss Theodora Booth. Both Miss Booth and her brother, Charles Brandon Booth, contributed information.] HERBERT A. WISBEY,

BOOTH-TUCKER, Emma. See geline Cory.

BOOTH,

JR.

Evan-

BORDEN, Lizzie Andrew (July 19, 1860June 1, 1927), suspected double parricide, was born in Fall River, Mass., the daughter of Andrew Jackson Borden and Sarah Anthony (Morse) Borden. Of their three children, only Lizzie and Emma, who was nine years older, survived infancy. The Bordens were descended from seventeenth-century English emigrants, Richard Borden having settled near Fall River in 1638; Sarah Morse was a native of nearby Somerset. She died when Lizzie was two, and in 1865 Andrew Borden, at forty-two, married Abby Durfee Gray, a spinster of thirtyseven. Originally an undertaker, he gradually built up a banking and real estate fortune which reached an estimated half million dollars at his death. He was tightfisted, however, and as Lizzie grew up the family continued to live in a small and drab frame house. Her young womanhood was typical of the period. Graduation from the local public high school marked the end of her academic career. As marriage prospects faded, she became increasingly active in the Central Congregational Church, the Christian Endeavor Society, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the Fruit and Flower League, devoted to vis-

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Borden iting the sick and needy. While still in her twenties she was elected to the board of the Fall River Hospital. She was well liked by her friends, mostly single young women like herself. Within the family, however, her father's stern and dour manner set the tone, and his excessive frugality became a source of conflict. Lizzie, according to the testimony of a hostile relative in 1892, had "a repellent disposition, and after an unsuccessful passage with her father, would become sulky and refuse to speak to him for days at a time" (Radin, p. 79). Around 1887 a serious dispute arose when Borden transferred a property to his wife without informing his daughters; their sharp protestations forced him to give a comparable property to them. Little had occurred to alter the prosaic tenor of Lizzie Borden's life by 1892, when she was thirty-two years old. On Thursday, Aug. 4, of that year Mr. Borden set out at about 9:20 to conduct his morning's business, leaving at home his wife, an Irish maid, Bridget Sullivan, and Lizzie. (Emma, the older sister, was visiting friends in another city.) Upon his return, about 10:45, he spoke briefly with Lizzie and Bridget and lay down on a couch for a nap. Some thirty minutes later, as she subsequently claimed, Lizzie made the grim discovery that her father had been brutally murdered where he lay by repeated head blows from a sharp instrument. In an upstairs guest room lay his wife, the victim of a similar, though even more vicious, attack; subsequent tests established that her death had preceded her husband's by an hour or two. Suspicion soon turned to Lizzie Borden. Curiously, no one suspected Bridget Sullivan, who was allowed to leave the house for the night carrying an unexamined parcel. At the inquest Lizzie testified that after her father had begun his nap she had gone to the barn on the rear of the lot to look for lead sinkers (later assertions that she was a fishing enthusiast appear to have little foundation); she had discovered the body upon her return. As for her lack of curiosity about her stepmother's long morning's absence, Lizzie declared that Mrs. Borden had earlier told her that she had received a note from a sick friend whom she was going to visit. Bridget Sullivan testified that, having washed windows all morning, she had gone to her third-floor room to rest shortly after Mr. Borden's arrival, and had remained there until aroused by Lizzie's hue and cry. Further investigation raised serious questions about Lizzie's veracity: despite widespread publicity, no positive evidence was found that any note to Mrs. Borden had been

sent or received that morning; a thick coating of undisturbed dust was found to overlie the loft floor where Lizzie claimed to have been during her father's murder; a friend reported that the night before the murders Lizzie had expressed vague forebodings about her family's well-being; in a sworn deposition a neighborhood druggist declared that the day before the crime she had made an attempt to purchase prussic acid, a highly lethal poison. Despite the circumstantial nature of the case, Lizzie was arrested on Aug. 11 charged with double murder. As the citizens of Fall River vociferously took sides, deep conflicts were revealed. The city had become a leading textile manufacturing center only after a rapid growth which had left severe social problems in its wake. A small group of leading families descended from early Congregational settlers still held economic control over the more numerous immigrant Catholic millworkers. Andrew J. Borden had been a key member of this dominant minority; the arrest of his daughter seemed a threat to its superior status. Citing her unimpeachable reputation as clear evidence of innocence, the more substantial townspeople sprang to her defense. The local W.C.T.U. and Christian Endeavor passed warm resolutions of sympathy and support. Feminists, too, found the arrest a personal affront. In Boston, LUCY STONE'S Woman's Journal printed spirited editorials proclaiming Lizzie Borden's innocence; MARY A. L I V E R MORE, a noted temperance and woman suffrage figure, visited the prisoner and wrote articles on her behalf. In other quarters, however, her guilt was assumed. From the first, the Fall River Daily Globe, a tabloid widely read by the immigrant population, waged an unremitting campaign against her in which innuendo, rumor, and even falsehood played no small part. Indeed, the case was one of the first in which journalistic sensationalism played a major role. Reporters from the major cities of the Eastern seaboard swarmed into Fall River, and bits of gossip were magnified beyond all recognition, giving rise to many baseless legends: that Lizzie had had a lover to whom her father had objected; that she had bought an ax shortly before the crime; that she had feared her father was about to alter his will to her disadvantage (in fact he died intestate). From this pretrial period, too, dates the jingle which has preserved her name for posterity:

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Lizzie Borden took an ax And gave her mother forty whacks; And when she saw what she had done She gave her father forty-one.

Borden

Botta

The authorities, meanwhile, were in a quandary. They did not have an airtight case, and yet the public expected a trial. Reluctantly they proceeded, and on June 5, 1893, nearly a year after the arrest, the trial began in the Massachusetts Superior Court in New Bedford. Aiding the defense was George D. Robinson, a former governor of the state. As the trial proceeded, the battery of reporters scrutinized the short, plump prisoner and vainly searched her round, pleasant face for hints of guilt or innocence. Among the serious weaknesses in the prosecution's case was the absence of a confession, of witnesses to the crime, and of a positively identifiable murder weapon. (In the basement of the Borden house police found an ax which, they reported, had been freshly broken from its handle, washed, and dipped in ash, evidently to simulate dust. A Harvard chemist was unable to discover human blood traces on the ax, but did testify that the wounds in the skulls of the murder victims precisely matched the dimensions of the suspected instrument.) Much testimony was taken on the matter of a dress Lizzie had burned several days after the crime, but this matter, too, remained inconclusive. Lizzie did not take the stand in her own behalf. On June 20, after an hour's deliberation, the jury returned its verdict: Not Guilty. For Lizzie Borden, however, this proved a hollow victory. She stubbornly refused to seek a new life elsewhere and for thirty-four years lived on in Fall River in a large house which she and her sister purchased with their inheritance. A dignified, lonely figure, she performed small kindnesses for those with whom she came in contact, idolized her animal pets, and sought to ignore the rumors and gossip which never ceased to surround her name. For a time she maintained a close friendship with a Boston actress, Nance O'Neill, and entertained theatrical people, to local disapproval. In 1926 she underwent major surgery, and the following year she died of myocarditis at the age of sixty-six. At her own request, she was buried secretly at night in Oak Grove Cemetery, Fall River, beside her father, her mother, and her stepmother. Her sister, from whom she had been estranged for some years, died ten days later. By the terms of her will, Lizzie left over $100,000 to various charities, including $30,000 to the Animal Rescue League; the balance of her large estate went to relatives and friends. Unconvinced by the jury's verdict, American folklore has given Lizzie Borden a posthumous fame. From M A R Y WILKINS F R E E M A N on, authors have retold the story in novel and drama,

and amateur criminologists have continued to probe the case. Edmund Pearson, a crime writer considered for many years the best authority, believed Lizzie's guilt to be certain. Subsequent research has established that Pearson somewhat overstated his position and suppressed damaging countertestimony. One recent student of the case suggests that Lizzie did, indeed, consciously plan the murder of her stepmother by poison, but that the horrifying violence of her actual deeds was linked to an ambulatory seizure of temporary epilepsy. The evidence suggesting Lizzie's guilt is nearly overwhelming, but doubters remain. An ingenious circumstantial case has, for example, been made out against Bridget Sullivan, who died in 1948 at the age of eighty-two. Whatever the truth of the matter, the popular verdict seems unshaken: "Lizzie Borden took an ax . . . ." [Edwin H. Porter, The Fall River Tragedy ( 1893), is an early work by a newspaper reporter. Edmund Pearson's books on the case include Studies in Murder ( 1924 ) and Trial of Lizzie Borden ( 1937 ). Two recent works, each based on a fresh examination of the records of the case, reach opposite conclusions. Edward D. Radin, Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story ( 1 9 6 1 ) , challenges Pearson's conclusions and presents the case against Bridget Sullivan; Victoria Lincoln, A Private Disgrace: Lizzie Borden by Daylight ( 1 9 6 7 ) , reaffirms Lizzie's guilt and advances the epilepsy hypothesis. Imaginative treatments of the legend include Edward H. Bierstadt's Satan Was a Man ( 1 9 3 5 ) and such plays as Nine Pine Street ( 1 9 3 4 ) , by John Colton and Carlton Miles, and Goodbye, Miss Lizzie Borden ( 1 9 4 8 ) , by Lillian De La Torre. For the feminist reaction to the case, see Woman's Jour., Aug. 20 and Sept. 17, 1892, May 27 and June 24, 1893. Birth and death records from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics, Boston. The Fall River Hist. Soc. keeps a file relating to the case.] PAUL S. BOYER

BOTTA, Anne Charlotte Lynch (Nov. 11, 1815—Mar. 23, 1891), author, teacher, and literary hostess, was born in Bennington, Vt., the younger of two children and only daughter of Patrick Lynch, Her father, an ardent Irish patriot who had studied engineering at Dublin University, was captured during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and, after several years in prison, banished for refusing to swear allegiance to the British Crown. He sailed to America, and in 1812, while managing a dry goods store in Bennington, married Charlotte Gray, the daughter of Ebenezer Gray, who had served as a lieutenant colonel under General Washington during the Revolution. In 1819, while seeking Cuban lands which Spain had offered to Irish refugees, he died at sea. His widow

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Botta moved with her children from their home in Windham, Conn., to Hartford. Anne Charlotte Lynch entered the Albany (N.Y.) Female Academy at sixteen and graduated with highest honors in 1834. After teaching for two years at the academy, she went to Shelter Island, N.Y., as tutor to the three daughters of the Gardiner family. She next (1838) moved with her mother to Providence, R.I., where she instructed young women in her home, compiled The Rhode-Island Book (1841), an anthology of local prose and verse, and began the evening literary receptions for which she was later to become famous. After a brief period in Philadelphia in 1845, she settled with her mother in New York City. Her modest salon, located on Ninth Street after 1849, gained steadily in reputation, but she found time as well to write for periodicals and to teach English composition at a Brooklyn academy for girls. From 1850 to 1853, partly in connection with a successful petition to Congress for the unpaid portion of her grandfather's military pay, she spent the social season in Washington, where she moved as easily as in Manhattan, winning the friendship of Henry Clay and other government figures. She toured Europe in 1853, and while there studied art and gained some proficiency in sculpture. In 1855, once more in New York, she was married to Vincenzo Botta, three years her junior, who in 1858 became professor of Italian language and literature at the University of the City of New York (later New York University), a post he held for over three decades. Formerly a teacher of philosophy at Turin and a member, in 1849, of the Sardinian parliament, Botta had come to the United States in 1853 to study the educational system but had remained to become a citizen. They had no children, but Mrs. Botta upon the death of her brother assumed charge of a young nephew whom she thereafter treated as a son. Professor Botta's wideranging intellectual interests enhanced the hospitality she offered in their larger quarters on West 37th Street. A tall, slender woman with dark hair and deep blue eyes, Anne Lynch Botta combined a fine wit and graceful manners with warm selflessness and tact. Among her close friends were the authors JULIA WARD HOWE, Edmund C. Stedman, and Parke Godwin, but many others attended her receptions, including Poe, William Cullen Bryant, Emerson, George Bancroft, MARGARET F U L L E R , Horace Greeley, Trollope, Thackeray, and Matthew Arnold, as well as figures from the worlds of statesmanship and art. Unlike other nineteenth-century

ladies who aspired to lead salons, she did not lionize her celebrated visitors or use them as rungs on the social ladder. Her receptions were known for their pleasant atmosphere, free of petty gossip and backbiting. Distinguished writers and unknown beginners alike knew that at Mrs. Botta's they might meet others who shared their interests and, if they were so disposed, find in her a listener at once sympathetic and possessed of an acute critical sense. Although she is remembered primarily for her salon, Anne Lynch Botta was herself responsible for a modest literary output, consisting primarily of poetry, newspaper travel letters, and critical articles in the New York Mirror, N. P. Willis' Home Journal, and John L. O'Sullivan's Democratic Review. A volume of her Poems appeared in 1849. Her most ambitious effort, A Hand-Book of Universal Literature (1860), a philological and historical treatment of many national literatures, was widely used as a textbook. Her poetry, of which the sonnets are the best, won encomiums from Poe, but in its style and in the frequency of such elevated themes as "Aspirations" and "The Ideal" it is hardly today to be distinguished from the rest of the outpouring of nineteenth-century feminine verse. Her political sympathies did, however, occasionally draw her to less conventional subjects, as in her "Viva Italia" and "Liberty to Ireland." While generally in sympathy with liberal reforms, she did not favor woman suffrage. Education must come before the franchise, she believed, and to that end she became an early supporter of the movement for the founding of Barnard College. An admirer of William Ellery Channing's Unitarianism and Emerson's Transcendentalism, Mrs. Botta was eclectic in her choice of churches. "She was an evangelical moralist in conduct," her friend MARY ELIZABETH SHERWOOD recalled, "but would go to hear everybody preach—from archbishops of the Roman Church to Henry Ward Beecher. . . . She was interested in all the ultra views of the principal thinkers of her epoch. She liked to bring them all together" (Sherwood, p. 128). Anne Lynch Botta died in her New York home of pneumonia at the age of seventy-five, while engaged in the preparation of a "Handbook of Universal History." She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, New York. [Though highly laudatory, the most important source remains Vincenzo Botta, ed., Memoirs of Anne C. L. Botta Written by Her Friends with Selections from Her Correspondence and from Her Writings in Prose and Poetry ( 1 8 9 3 ) . See also Charles Hemstreet, Literary N.Y.: Its Landmarks

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Bowles and Associations ( 1903), pp. 197-204; Mary E. W. Sherwood, An Epistle to Posterity (1897), pp. 123-29; Mrs. Roger A. Pryor, My Day: Reminiscences of a Long Life (1909), pp. 403-11; James A. Harrison, ed., The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1902), XV, 116-18; Hervey Allen, lsrafel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (1926), II, 676-80; Frank L. Mott, A Hist, of Am. Magazines, vols. I and II ( 1930-38 ) ; and obituaries in N.Y. Times and Ν.Ύ. Tribune, Mar. 24, 1891. The sketch by R. H. Stoddard in the Independent, Feb. 1, 1894, is of value. Madeleine B. Stern, "The House of the Expanding Doors," N.Y. Hist., Jan. 1942, on Mrs. Botta's salon, includes additional references.] ROBERT F. MARLER,

JR.

B O W L E S , Eva del Vakia (Jan. 24, 1875-June 14, 1943), Young Women's Christian Association leader, was born in Albany, Athens County, Ohio, the eldest of three children of John Hawkes Bowles and Mary Jane (Porter) Bowles, both natives of Ohio. Eva was born into a relatively privileged family. Her father is said to have been the first Negro employed as a postal clerk, while her Baptist minister grandfather, John B. Bowles, served in the Civil War as chaplain of a Negro regiment, the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, and later became the first Negro teacher to receive a salary from the Ohio public school fund. In 1883 the Bowles family moved to Columbus, Ohio, where Eva attended the local public schools, a business college, and summer sessions at Ohio State University. Turning first to teaching, she was employed by the American Missionary Association as a teacher in Chandler Normal School, Lexington, Ky. She later taught in St. Augustine, Fla., and Raleigh, N.C., and in St. Paul's Normal and Industrial Institute, Lawrenceville, Va. It was perhaps in Virginia that she met A D D i E w. H U N T O N , wife of the secretary for colored work of the Young Men's Christian Association. In 1905, on Mrs. Hunton's recommendation, Miss Bowles was appointed secretary of the Harlem branch of the New York City Young Women's Christian Association, for many years the largest in the city and the largest for Negroes in the nation. After an interval ( 1 9 0 8 - 1 2 ) as a caseworker for the Associated Charities of Columbus, Ohio, she returned to New York in 1913 to join the staff of the National Board of the Y.W.C.A. as secretary of a newly formed subcommittee on colored work, which in 1917 became a fullfledged committee. Miss Bowles began her career with the Y.W.C.A. at a time when its Negro work, though dating from the 1890's, was still very limited and its status somewhat ambiguous.

Negro branches existed in a few cities, but control and administrative authority rested with the local white central associations. A modified pattern of segregation often prevailed at national Y.W.C.A. conferences. Miss Bowles, charged with maintaining liaison between the subordinate Negro branches and the national office, was placed in a delicate position. She proceeded cautiously, conceding that the Negro program "must necessarily grow more slowly" and even that Negro branches needed the "supervision" of white leaders. At the same time, she deplored any tendency toward the emergence of a permanent "colored department" within the Y.W.C.A. (Walters, pp. 57, 68). In 1917, with America's entry into the First World War, Eva Bowles was placed in charge of the Negro work of the Y.W.C.A.'s War Work Council. With an appropriation of $200,000, she worked to alleviate "the lack of facilities for amusement for the more than a million colored girls entering industry for the first time," establishing fifteen hostess houses in army camps and numerous clubs and recreational centers for Negro girls in industrial centers and in communities disrupted by military camps. "All the problems that face any girl in war times were ours," Miss Bowles wrote in her 1919 report, "together with the more serious problem of race relationship and understanding." The Y.W.C.A. hostess house at Camp Upton, Yaphank, N.Y., so impressed Theodore Roosevelt that he designated $4,000 of his Nobel Peace Prize award to be disbursed in consultation with Miss Bowles. Reflecting the heavy wartime emigration of Negroes to Northern cities, the 1920's brought a sharp increase in Y.W.C.A. work among urban Negro women, with a corresponding rise, at both the local and national levels, in the number of Negro staff members. In 1920 the committee on colored work became the Bureau of Colored Work, and in 1922 the Council on Colored Work. As "general coordinator" of this expanded program, Miss Bowles strove through regional conferences, personal diplomacy, frequent visits to local associations, and articles in Y.W.C.A. periodicals to encourage interracial progress and to win a larger share of recognition and responsibility for Negroes in the Y.W.C.A. While often critical of the slow rate of progress, she remained firmly committed to the Y.W.C.A., regarding it as a "pioneer in interracial experimentation" (New York World, June 8, 1930). She resisted a separatist movement which sprang up among younger Negro "Y" leaders in the early 1920's. Her service as secretary to the board of di-

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rectors of the New York Urban League similarly reflected her moderate and hopeful point of view. The discontinuance of the Council on Colored Work as a distinct administrative entity in 1931 represented a significant victory for Miss Bowles and those who shared her point of view, reflecting as it did the increasingly interracial character of the Young Women's Christian Association. Retiring from the national Y.W.C.A. in 1932, Eva Bowles briefly filled an executive position with the National Colored Merchants Association and then returned to Ohio, serving from January 1934 to June 1935 as acting secretary of the West End Branch of the Cincinnati Y.W.C.A. She died (of inanition fever caused by gastric neurosis) in Richmond, Va., where she had gone to visit a niece. Burial was in Columbus, Ohio, her residence during her final years. Her religious affiliation was Episcopalian. [Gladys Gilkey Calkins, "The Negro in the Young Women's Christian Assoc." ( unpublished M.A. thesis, George Washington Univ., 1960 ) ; Who's Who in Colored America, 1928, 1944; articles by Miss Bowles in the Y.W.C.A.'s Association Monthly, Dec. 1917, and Woman's Press, Feb., July, and Sept. 1929; Juliet O. Bell and Helen J. Wilkins, Interracial Practices in Community Y.W.C.A.'s (pamphlet, 1944); records in office of the Nat. Board of the Y.W.C.A., especially reports by Miss Bowles, her personnel file card, and "Hist, of Colored Work . . . 1907-1920," compiled by Jane Olcott Walters ( typescript, 1920 ) ; feature articles in the Woman's Press, July 1932, and N.Y. World, June 8, 1930; obituaries in Woman's Press, Sept. 1943, and Norfolk (Va.) Jour, and Guide, June 19, 1943; interviews with Mrs. Cecelia Cabiniss Saunders, Miss Bowles's successor as executive director of the Harlem Y.W.C.A.; death record from Va. Dept. of Health.] JEAN BLACKWELL

HUTSON

BOYD, Belle (May 9, 1844-June 11, 1 9 0 0 ) , Confederate spy, actress and lecturer, was born in or near Martinsburg, Va. (now W . V a . ) , where her father owned a general store and managed a tobacco plantation. Christened Isabelle, she was the eldest of eight children of Benjamin Reed Boyd and Mary Rebecca (Glenn) Boyd. Both parents were of Scottish ancestry and came of Virginia families of some social standing. At the age of twelve, in 1856, the headstrong Belle was sent to Mount Washington Female College in Baltimore for her formal education; four years later, after completing a course of French, classical literature, and music, she was introduced into Washington society. With the beginning of the Civil War, however, she returned to Martinsburg and her family.

Intensely loyal to the South, Belle at first helped raise funds to arm Confederate soldiers, and took pride in her father's enlisting, at the age of forty-four, in Stonewall Jackson's infantry. But she shortly grew dissatisfied with such passive participation in the cause. Federal occupation of Martinsburg on July 3, 1861, gave her the opportunity to indulge in freelance espionage, her fatal shooting of an abusive Union soldier who had invaded her home winning sympathy, rather than disfavor, from the Federal command. Seeking military information from admiring Union officers, the seventeen-year-old girl sent her gleanings to Confederate leaders via Negro and white messengers. Her inexperience in transmitting information led to Union discovery of her activity and a stem reprimand, but nothing more. For Belle, her amateur efforts were merely a beginning. By the autumn of 1861 she had received an appointment to the Confederate intelligence service as a courier for Generals Beauregard and Jackson, a role in which she was able to use her excellent horsemanship and knowledge of the Shenandoah Valley. She probably also engaged in inland blockade-running, smuggling needed supplies such as quinine across the Potomac. Early in 1862 she was arrested upon suspicion and taken to Baltimore, where she was released after a week of courteous imprisonment. She returned to Virginia, settling for the time being with an aunt in Front Royal, in the Shenandoah Valley south of Winchester. At Front Royal she performed her most notable service to the Confederacy. On May 23, 1862, General Jackson prepared to recapture the Union-held town as part of his drive against the Union forces of General Banks. Belle, through her journey from Baltimore to Virginia, her association with the Union officers occupying Front Royal, and a message received when she had recently made her way to Winchester, had learned much about the strength and location of the opposing armies. Additional information that Jackson could, by hastening his attack, save the bridges leading out of Front Royal, which the withdrawing Union forces planned to destroy, and thus speed his advance against Banks, triggered Belle's decision to reach the Confederates immediately. As Jackson's troops approached, so the story goes, she raced from Front Royal, conspicuous in her "dark blue dress and fancy white apron," crossed on foot the gap between the two armies in range of Union rifles and artillery, and breathlessly delivered her message to a staff officer, Henry Kyd Douglas. Whether her information determined the success of the Confederate attack is doubtful; in any case,

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the bridges were saved, and Jackson swept northward to Harpers Ferry, almost to Washington. In her own account of the events Belle states that shortly thereafter she received a note from Jackson thanking her for "the immense service that you have rendered your country today." The incident caught the attention of the press, and Belle Boyd, already famous throughout the South, became notorious throughout the North. Caught in Front Royal when Union troops reoccupied that town, she was placed under close surveillance. On July 29, 1862, she was arrested by order of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, taken in close custody to Washington, and confined in the Old Capitol Prison. A month later she was released in a general exchange of prisoners of war, without having any specific charge listed against her, and was sent south to Richmond. During the next few months Belle Boyd visited relatives and basked in the South's reception of her as a heroine. The following June she returned to Martinsburg to visit her family, fast on the heels of the Confederate drive that ended at Gettysburg. By July Union troops had returned to Martinsburg, and Belle, marked as a potential danger, once more was placed under arrest. The next month she was again taken to Washington and confined in the Old Capitol, her imprisonment this time being longer and marked by a severe case of typhoid fever. She was released in December 1863 and banished to the South for the duration of the war. After regaining her strength, Belle Boyd set out on what was to be her final mission for the Confederacy. In March 1864, not quite twenty, she left Richmond for Wilmington, N.C., where she was to take passage for England, ostensibly for her health but in reality to carry Confederate dispatches. The ship on which she traveled was captured by a Union blockading vessel, and Belle, once again a prisoner, was taken to Boston. Two noteworthy events followed her capture: she was banished to Canada, under pain of death if recaptured; and she became engaged to Samuel Wylde Hardinge, Jr., the Union naval officer who had taken command of the Anglo-rebel steamer. Belle sailed for England from Quebec; her report to the Confederacy's agent in London that she had destroyed the dispatches she was carrying when the blockade-runner was seized ended her service for the Confederate government. On Aug. 25, 1864, Belle and Hardinge were married in St. James's Church in Piccadilly, Hardinge having followed her to England after

his dismissal from the United States Navy for "neglect of duty" in allowing the captain of the rebel steamer to escape—an incident for which Belle took credit. Shortly after the wedding Hardinge returned to the United States and was arrested and imprisoned until February 1865. He returned in poor health to England and within a year was dead, leaving his wife with an infant daughter, Grace. Pressed for funds, Belle wrote and published her memoirs, Belle Boyd, in Camp and Prison (1865), with the help of George Sala, a leading English journalist who had reported the war for the London Daily Telegraph. The book's sales provided only temporary financial relief, however, and Belle, with Sala's help, turned to the stage as a means of supporting herself and her daughter. Although not especially pretty, she was graceful, well proportioned, and vivacious. She made her debut in mid-1866 at the Theatre Royal in Manchester as Pauline in The Lady of Lyons. At the end of the year she returned to the United States and in St. Louis commenced a tour of the South and Southwest. She made her New York debut on Jan. 9, 1868, in a single performance of The Honeymoon, a comedy. Thereafter her acting seems to have been confined to stock companies in Cincinnati, Houston, and New Orleans. Belle Boyd retired from the theatre shortly before her marriage, in New Orleans on Mar. 17, 1869, to John Swainston Hammond, a former Union officer of English birth and sales representative of a tea and coffee firm, who had gained an introduction after admiring her on the stage. Hammond's business entailed extensive traveling, and for the next fifteen years Belle enjoyed life in the major cities of the country as the wife of a fairly wealthy businessman. They had four children: Arthur, who died in infancy, Byrd Swainston (1874), Marie Isabelle Boyd (1878), and John Edmund Swainston (1881). They were divorced in Texas, Nov. 1, 1884. On Jan. 9, 1885, Belle married Nathaniel Rue High, Jr., a handsome twenty-four-year-old actor from Toledo, Ohio. Once again in financial straits, she turned back to public appearances, this time to give dramatic recitals of her war experiences, beginning in Toledo on Feb. 28, 1886. A popular lecturer, impersonated so often that she carried credentials identifying herself as the "genuine Belle Boyd," she continued these recitals successfully until the end of her life. She died in 1900 at the age of fifty-six, following a heart attack, at Kilbourn (later Wisconsin Dells), Wis., where she had gone to fill a speaking engagement. In her lectures she had stressed the union of North and South, winning a follow-

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ing among survivors of both the Blue and the Gray; four Union veterans lowered her coffin into the grave at Kilbourn Cemetery. [The most authoritative account is Louis A. Sigaud, Belle Boyd: Confederate Spy (1944), somewhat partisan in approach but based on careful research and written by an army officer with experience in Intelligence. See also Henry Kyd Douglas, I Rode with Stonewall ( 1940); D. A. Mahony, The Prisoner of State ( 1863 ) ; and Curtis Carroll Davis' new edition (1968) of Belle Boyd, in Camp and Prison.] THOMAS ROBSON HAY

BRACKETT, Anna Callender (May 21, 1836Mar. 18, 1911), educator, was born in Boston, Mass., the eldest of five children of Samuel Eaton Brackett and Caroline S. (Callender) Brackett. She was a descendant in the seventh generation of Richard Brackett who had come from England in 1630. Her father was a dry goods merchant. Three of the other children also followed educational careers, Anna's brother, George, conducting a private school in Brooklyn, N.Y., in the 1870's in association with her sisters Mary and Ellen. Anna was educated in public and private schools in the Boston area, including Abbott's Academy. She then attended the State Normal School at Framingham, graduating in February 1856. After teaching briefly at East Brookfield, Mass., she returned in October 1856 to the Framingham Normal School as assistant principal, remaining until July 1859. She next accepted a position as vice-principal of the Girls' High and Normal School of Charleston, S.C., but the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and the impending blockade of Southern ports forced her to leave that city, reportedly one of the last Northerners to do so. From January 1862 to January 1863 she taught as "female assistant" in the Cambridge (Mass.) High School. Already "a lady of superior abilities, and of wide and successful experience as a teacher in similar institutions," Miss Brackett then left Cambridge to become principal of the St. Louis (Mo.) Normal School (Annual Report of Board of Directors, St. Louis Public Schools, 1862-63, p. 60). During her nine years there she raised the academic level and helped set high standards for the education of teachers. She resigned her position abruptly, however, in April 1872. Though the circumstances are not clear, the official reports of the St. Louis school board suggest that her more demanding requirements for matriculation and graduation at the Normal School had not been wholly appreciated by local officials interested in producing the maximum number of teachers at the minimum cost.

Returning east, Miss Brackett opened a private school for girls in New York City in association with Ida M. Eliot, her former assistant in St. Louis. This she continued to conduct over the next twenty-three years. Far ahead of her time in her methods, she used no grading or written examinations and did not believe in punishments. She introduced the study of German and taught Latin, instead of English, grammar, even to the younger pupils. She was firm, even strict, in discipline, but always fair, frank, and sympathetic, E L I S A B E T H M I L L S REID, Carlotta Russell Lowell, daughter of J O S E P H I N E SHAW L O W E L L , and the daughters and granddaughters of Bayard Taylor, E. C. Stedman, and Brander Matthews were among her pupils. The high caliber of her work is suggested by the fact that many of her students were granted advanced standing upon entering Vassar and other colleges of the first rank. Interested in the theory as well as the practice of education, Miss Brackett was an early member of the "St. Louis Movement" which under the leadership of William T. Harris and Henry C. Brokmeyer sought to apply the principles of Hegelian philosophy to education, literature, and the arts. Continuing her association even after leaving St. Louis, she contributed to the movement's journals, the Western and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy; her translation of Karl Rosenkranz's The Philosophy of Education, first published serially in the latter periodical from 1872 to 1874, was issued in book form in 1886. Her own pedagogical views were set forth in her essay in The Education of American Girls (1874), a symposium which she edited. In discussing the threefold aspect of pupil development—body, intellect, and will—she took a position on sex education for girls that was well in advance of her time. Her concept of the teacher as primarily a moral preceptor, however, was wholly orthodox. "The proper function of any school," she believed, "is to train character, not to produce cleverness . . ." (quoted in Kendall, p. 8). Miss Brackett's articles, poems, and addresses appeared frequently in the Independent, Century, Harpers Monthly, and other magazines. The Technique of Rest, a collection of her essays, appeared in 1892. The title piece, with its call for greater repose and harmony to combat "the restlessness which . . . runs riot in every drop of our blood," doubtless struck a responsive chord in a harried decade. In Woman and the Higher Education (1893), a work she edited in connection with an exhibit prepared for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago, Miss Brackett again took issue with the accepted Victorian concept of

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femininity. "The American girl to be a teacher must be in contact with the life of the real world," she wrote; "she need not be shut in conventional ignorance to preserve her purity of thought." Her writing, clear-cut, pungent, and witty, was invariably marked by incisive thinking and perceptive understanding. Anna Brackett retired in 1895 after forty years of teaching, but she continued the adult classes in art, literature, history, philosophy, and the Bible which she had conducted for some time. In appearance, she had sharply etched features, a strong nose, and straight, tightly combed hair. She was an accomplished horsewoman and wrote entertainingly of this skill. As her health failed she spent most of her time at her country home in Stowe, Vt. She had adopted a child, and throughout her life she extended assistance to many persons who were in need. She died in a private sanatorium in Summit, N.J., of pneumonia at the age of seventy-four; services were held at the Rose Hill Crematory in Linden Park, N.J. Her students raised an endowment fund in her memory which became a graduate fellowship of the American Association of University Women. [For biographical accounts, see the rather sketchy pamphlet by Edith Kendall, Anna C. Brackett, In Memoriam ( 1915); Hist. Sketches of the Framingham State Normal School ( 1914), p. 49; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXI, 2 6 4 - 6 5 ; and obituary in Ν.Ύ. Times, Mar. 19, 1911. Information on particular aspects of her career from: records of Mass. State College, Framingham; Miss Brackett's article "Charleston, S.C. ( 1 8 6 1 ) , " Harper's Mag., May 1894; William F. Bradbury and Elbridge Smith, The Cambridge High School Hist, and Catalogue (1882), p. 47; St. Louis Public Schools, Board of Directors, Annual Reports, 1862-73, especially 1862-63, p. 60; 1870-71, p. 51; 1871-72, pp. 3 7 41; and 1872-73, p. 31; Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America, Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600-1900 ( 1 9 5 7 ) , pp. 259, 268. Ruth Sawyer's Roller Skates ( 1 9 3 6 ) , a story based on her own childhood, includes her impressions of Miss Brackett's school. For her father's occupation, see Boston city directories, 1836-68. The Health Dept., City of Boston, has birth records of Miss Brackett and her brothers and sisters; on her brother George's school, see Mary E. Dreier, Margaret Dreier Robins ( 1 9 5 0 ) , p. 6. Miss Brackett's published works also include two addresses to the Nat. Education Assoc. ( Proc., 1871 and 1873) and a collection of Poetry for Home and School, edited with Ida M. Eliot ( 1 8 7 6 ) . ] NORMA KIDD GREEN

BRADFORD, Cornelia Foster (Dec. 4, 1847Jan. 15, 1935), social worker, was born in northern New York, probably in Granby, the birthplace of her older brother. She was the

first daughter and second of three children of Mary Amory (Howe) and Benjamin Franklin Bradford. Her father, eighth in direct descent from Gov. William Bradford of Plymouth Colony, was a Methodist minister who later joined the Congregational Church; during her girlhood he held a succession of pastorates in the Finger Lakes region of western New York. A staunch abolitionist, he sheltered in his parsonage escaped slaves en route to Canada. From her father, who also espoused such causes as woman's rights and prohibition, Cornelia Bradford no doubt inherited her belief that "we are our brothers' keepers." Miss Bradford graduated from Houghton Seminary in Clinton, N.Y., in 1869 and probably spent some time at Olivet College in Michigan. She became interested in settlement work after visiting Toynbee Hall in England and lived for a while in Mansfield House, an East London settlement. She received additional training for her chosen work at J A N E ADDAMS' Hull House in Chicago. For the site of her own undertaking she picked New Jersey, where her father and a brother then lived. In December 1893 Miss Bradford took a room in the People's Palace, a working-class cultural center in Jersey City, and for the next four months she mingled with the poor of the city, listening to their "stories of sorrow and suffering." With the assistance of her brother, Amory Howe Bradford of Montclair, a prominent Congregational minister, she formally established Whittier House, the state's first social settlement, at Jersey City in May 1894. It was named for the Quaker poet, whom she greatly revered; as the motto of the house she adopted his lines: He serves Thee best who loveth most His brothers and Thy own.

The new settlement was situated in a gloomy, squalid neighborhood, with none of the picturesqueness and vitality that brightened New York's Lower East Side. The trolleys of Grand Street rattled past the building, which was located near Newark Bay and the sheds of the New Jersey Central Railway. Within a few years the Germans, Irish, and native Americans who had predominated in 1893 were displaced by an influx of Russians, Poles, and Italians. These inhabitants of the First Ward lived in tenements and converted onefamily dwellings which were often overcrowded and lacking the most primitive sanitary facilities. Most of the wage earners toiled as factory hands, longshoremen, and railway employees. Believing that workers and their children had aspirations which transcended the "hoe

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and pickaxe," Miss Bradford fought to improve their material circumstances and nurture their cultural growth. The settlement organized a full program of educational, recreational, and social activities for residents of the immediate neighborhood. These it supplemented with local and state reform efforts, particularly in health, housing, and child welfare. By 1900 the settlement had established Jersey City's first kindergarten, district nursing service, dental dispensary, and public playground. In 1900 Miss Bradford helped organize the New Jersey Consumers' League, which soon sponsored a Children's Protective League. After visiting the glass bottle factories in southern New Jersey, she became a leader in the struggle for child labor legislation. In 1912 she welcomed an appointment to the Jersey City Board of Education. Whittier House helped arouse interest in Jersey City's housing after Mary B. Sayles, one of its workers, completed an investigation in 1901. The settlement played a prominent role in the appointment of a state tenement-house commission, whose report led to the enactment of a statewide tenement code. Seeking to supplement its housing work with efforts to control tuberculosis, widely prevalent in the congested, dank, and sunless tenements, the settlement sponsored a meeting in 1906 which resulted in the establishment of the Hudson County Tuberculosis Association. Cornelia Bradford remained the first and only head worker of Whittier House until her retirement in the mid-1920's. She then moved to Montclair, N.J., where she resided until her death of heart failure. She was buried in Rosedale Cemetery, Montclair. Rutgers University had acknowledged her many services to the people of New Jersey by awarding her an honorary degree in 1923. Cornelia Bradford described her Jersey City settlement as Christian but nondenominational, and endeavored to unite college girl and factory girl, university man and workingman, in the "perfect sympathy of Christ." Indeed, she regarded the simple neighborliness of the settlement as a kind of reversion to a more primitive Christianity and social order. Like other settlement workers and social reformers of the early twentieth century, she abhorred the class divisions and social atomization of the new industrial age. One-half of the social organism, she argued, could not be bad "without suggesting contamination to the other half." Not only the poor but all of society needed protection against the corrupting influence of the slum, the factory, and economic deprivation. Her program was any measure of social legislation

designed to relieve poverty and reduce class differences. Her significance lay not in her originality but in her successful implementation in New Jersey's first social settlement of principles common to many reformers. [Biographical details concerning Cornelia F. Bradford are scarce, often contradictory and inaccurate; the author is greatly indebted to the Rev. Arthur H. Bradford, a nephew, for information. More useful than any of the existing obituaries is the account of Miss Bradford's work in John J. Scanneil, New Jerseys First Citizens (1917-18), I, 56-58. For Miss Bradford's interpretations of her work, the Annual Reports of Whittier House, beginning in 1894, are helpful, as are her two articles: "For Jersey City's Social Uplift: Life at Whittier House," the Commons, Feb. 1905, and "The Settlement Movement in N.J.," N.J. Rev. of Charities and Corrections, Apr. 1912. Her date of birth comes from Daniel W. Howe, Howe Genealogies (1929). The Diet. Am. Biog. has a brief article on Miss Bradford's brother.] ROY LUBOVE

B R A D F O R D , Cornelia Smith (d. August 1 7 5 5 ) , was among the American women who distinguished themselves as printers and journalists in the eighteenth century, when the newspaper publisher occupied a conspicuously important place in the community. Of the thirty-two women who published newspapers before 1820, only E L I Z A B E T H T I M O T H Y of the South Carolina Gazette preceded Mrs. Bradford, and she was the third of the eleven women known to have supported themselves as printers before the Revolution. Cornelia Smith was born in New York City of a well-to-do family and was related to the second wife of William Bradford, the pioneer printer of Philadelphia and New York. Neither the date of her birth nor any circumstances of her early life are known. She was married, probably in 1740 and in Trinity Church, New York, to Andrew Bradford of Philadelphia ( 1 6 8 6 P - 1 7 4 2 ) , son of William and also a printer. Whether Andrew Sowie Bradford, the only known child of Andrew, was the son of Cornelia or of Andrew's first wife, Dorcas Boels, is uncertain. Whatever his parentage, the boy appears to have died in childhood. Cornelia is said to have been "remarkable for beauty and talents, but not so much so for the amenities which give to female charms their crowning grace" (Jones, p. 2 7 ) . In fact, she seems to have been a self-centered, domineering woman who caused the breakup of her husband's partnership with his nephew William Bradford I I I (later known as "the patriot printer of 1 7 7 6 " ) . Cornelia wished the young man to marry her niece in order to keep the Bradford fortune in

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the family; when William refused, Cornelia made his life so unpleasant that he quit his uncle's firm. She further insisted that her husband revoke a will in favor of his nephew and make one in her own. Upon his death, on Nov. 24, 1742, Andrew Bradford left his wife, in addition to the printing press and its appurtenances, his share of the Durham Iron Works and a considerable amount of real estate. Thus it would seem that Mrs. Bradford, unlike most early women printers, was under no compulsion to carry on her husband's business in order to support herself. She nonetheless took over the management of his paper—the American Weekly Mercury, founded in 1719—his printing establishment, and his store. After a week's suspension the paper reappeared, heavily lined in mourning columns and with the notice: "all Persons who have any Printing Work to do, or have Occasion for Stationary Ware, shall be thankfully serv'd at the lowest Prices." On Mar. 1, 1742/43, Isaiah Warner became her assistant in the printing business and the newspaper, presumably to allow her time to keep shop. But from Oct. 18, 1744, to May 22, 1746 (the date of the last known issue of the Mercury), Mrs. Bradford was sole editor and printer. Her shop carried the varied stock common to colonial printing offices, from clothing and medicine to chaises and plowshares, including lampblack, commercial stationery, and especially books, chiefly imported from England. In the Pennsylvania Journal, Aug. 7, 1746, Mrs. Bradford advertised various goods for sale, adding that, since she intended "shortly to remove from this City to New-York, and there to settle," those indebted to Andrew Bradford's estate should pay their debts. She did not, however, move to New York, but continued to do bookbinding and miscellaneous printing, notably almanacs, at least as late as 1751. Her will (dated Jan. 11, 1755) shows that she owned landed property in New York City, Philadelphia, and Germantown, Pa., some of it inherited from her relatives or her husband, some purchased by herself. It provided generously for five nieces and nephews and freed her two Negro slaves. It was signed with an "x," presumably an indication that Mrs. Bradford was too ill to affix her signature, rather than that she was, like Dinah Nuthead, a Maryland printer of the 1690's, illiterate. Cornelia Bradford died in Philadelphia and, an Episcopalian like her husband, was buried in Christ Church graveyard on Aug. 21, 1755. [Isaiah Thomas, The Hist, of Printing in America (1810; 2nd ed., 1874), is indispensable to any investigation of early American journalism, but the

line between gossip or tradition and fact is often doubtful. Virtually all that is known of Mrs. Bradford may be found in A. J. DeArmond, Andrew Bradford, Colonial Journalist (1949). See also Horatio G. Jones, Andrew Bradford . . . An Address Delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Hist. Soc. of Pa. ( 1869 ) ; and, on Mrs. Bradford's colonial counterparts, Clarence S. Brigham, Journals and Journeymen (1950), and Ellen M. Oldham, "Early Women Printers of America," Boston Public Library Quart., Jan.-July 1958.] ANNA J A N N E Y DE ARMOND

BRADLEY, Amy Morris (Sept. 12, 1823-Jan. 15, 1904), educator, Civil War nurse and administrator, was born in East Vassalboro, Kennebec County, Maine, the fourth daughter and youngest of eight children of Abired Bradley, a shoemaker, and Jane (Baxter) Bradley. A frail child who suffered periodic bronchial attacks, she learned early to be self-reliant, for her mother died when she was six. After her older sisters married Amy lived with them until she was fifteen, when she embarked upon a teaching career, beginning in a small private institution. The following year she joined the public school system; for four years she taught in country schools during summer and winter months, working in the spring and fall in private homes to finance continued studies at the academy in East Vassalboro. At twenty-one she was appointed principal of a grammar school in Gardiner, Maine. Her career next took her to Massachusetts, at first to a grammar school in Charlestown and then to a higher-salaried position at the Putnam Grammar School in East Cambridge. A severe bronchial attack, however, forced her to resign and left her, despite several months with a brother's family in the gentler climate of Charleston, S.C., too weak for teaching. After two years of enforced idleness, she took her doctor's urgent advice to avoid New England winters and accepted, in the fall of 1853, an offer to go to Costa Rica to teach English to the daughters of a family whose sons were being tutored in Boston by one of her cousins. She soon moved on to the Costa Rican capital, San José, where she established an English school and for three years successfully taught children of various nationalities. Her father's illness and death called her home, and once more the New England climate forced her to live quietly. With the outbreak of the Civil War Miss Bradley felt impelled to make some personal contribution to the Union effort. Her offer to nurse the wounded was accepted by a surgeon with the Maine Volunteers, an old friend, and she left immediately for Alexandria, Va., where

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she was attached to the 5th Maine Regiment. When Gen. Henry W. Slocum observed the cleanliness and comfort of her regimental hospital tents, he turned over to her two large buildings as a brigade hospital and named her superintendent. The government had made no provision for nursing on a brigade basis, but Miss Bradley was undaunted; she found a family to do cooking and washing and called upon the United States Sanitary Commission for supplies. Her administrative duties did not lessen the personal interest she took in her patients, a number of them former pupils. When the Army of the Potomac moved to the Peninsula early in 1862, the brigade hospital was broken up, and Miss Bradley offered her services to the Sanitary Commission. She was appointed superintendent of the thousand-odd patients aboard the Ocean Queen; throughout the Peninsular Campaign she served on this and other hospital ships transporting the wounded from the battlefields. In September 1862 the Sanitary Commission appointed Miss Bradley matron of a new institution in Washington, D.C., a home for convalescent soldiers and for those awaiting orders. Her leisure time was spent visiting army hospitals in the vicinity of Washington, suggesting and instigating improvements. In December 1862 the Commission transferred her from her comfortable Washington post to what was popularly dubbed "Camp Misery"—an unsanitary and neglected convalescent camp of some 5,000 men near Alexandria, Va.—as a special relief agent. "The changes," she soon reported, "have been numerous and extensive. . . ." In addition to clean and comfortable conditions, Miss Bradley provided such personal services as writing letters for the soldiers and taking men to Washington to get their papers in order and their back pay claims recognized. Overwork in the winter of 1863— 64 led to a period of illness; upon her recovery she began editing a weekly Soldiers' Journal, which first appeared in February 1864 and continued for the remaining year and a half of "Camp Misery's" existence. Profits went to the orphans of soldiers who had been at the camp. Miss Bradley herself contributed much of the material, including both literary offerings and practical information on how to achieve settlement of claims without recourse to agents. Her work earned her a warm reputation as a friend to soldiers. After the war Miss Bradley turned her energies to the education of poor white children in the South. Under the auspices of the Soldiers' Memorial Society of Boston and the American Unitarian Association (she was herself an ar-

dent Unitarian), she went to Wilmington, N.C., to organize a school. The embittered residents regarded her at first with suspicion, and she in turn thought the poor white population "physically, mentally and morally degraded" as a result of slavery (Beedy, pp. 3 9 5 96). Nevertheless, she went to work, distributing supplies of soap and clothing among the poor, visiting homes, and urging children to attend school. In January 1867 she opened a class of three children in the poorest quarter of the city. By March she had organized a "Young Ladies' Union Benevolent Society," whose members assisted her in visiting homes; had expanded her class to a school of seventyfive pupils "thoroughly organized and classified"; and was teaching a sewing course and a Sunday school. Having already won the support of the city's mayor, Miss Bradley soon had leading townsmen making contributions, and newspaper hostility eventually gave way to unstinted praise. At the beginning of her third year in Wilmington Miss Bradley came to Boston to report to her backers in person. Here she won the enthusiastic cooperation of the philanthropist MARY PORTER TILESTON H E M E N W A Y , who provided funds for another school; later the trustees of the Peabody Fund also contributed. In 1869 North Carolina reestablished its educational system after the wartime hiatus, and soon thereafter Miss Bradley's flourishing, highly respected institutions became the nucleus of Wilmington's newly inaugurated public school system, of which she was appointed supervisor. Although grateful for the Northern teachers who had joined her, Amy Bradley increasingly realized the necessity of training local women. Again Mrs. Hemenway supplied funds, and in 1872 the Tileston Normal School was opened at Wilmington. In 1891 failing strength led Miss Bradley to resign her work to others, and she withdrew to live quietly in a cottage that Mrs. Hemenway had provided for her on the Tileston School grounds. She died there in 1904 at the age of eighty and was buried in Wilmington. Amy Morris Bradley combined administrative and business ability with an intense spirit of dedication. In appearance, her face was too long for attractiveness, but erect carriage gave dignity to her slight figure, while her manners were described as "easy, graceful, and winning," and her voice 'low and pleasantly modulated." Unobtrusively tenacious, she proceeded always with modesty and gentleness. "Though I have made many suggestions," she wrote during the war, "not one failed of being adopted; but I carried none of them by

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Bradstreet storm. . . . My peace method has been successful." [The first two volumes of the Bull, of the U.S. Sanitary Commission ( 1866 ) contain reports on Miss Bradley's army work. The Reports of the Soldiers' Memorial Soc. for 1867 and 1868 present her accounts of her earliest Wilmington work; the Wilmington (N.C. ) Morning Star, Nov. 30, Dec. 1, 1871, June 4, 1887, and Jan. 16-21, 1904, records her achievements in North Carolina, her death, and her funeral. For other accounts of her war career see Charles J. Stille, Hist, of the U.S. Sanitary Commission ( 1 8 6 6 ) ; L. P. Brockett and Mary C. Vaughan, Woman's Work in the Civil War ( 1867); and Frank Moore, Women of the War ( 1 8 6 6 ) , which contains extensive quotations from her wartime journal. Brief sketches of her entire career are contained in Julia Ward Howe, ed., Representative Women of New England ( 1 9 0 4 ) ; Helen Coffin Beedy, Mothers of Maine ( 1895 ) ; and Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1893). The names of her parents and other family data were supplied by Mrs. Abbie S. Davis, Town Clerk of Vassalboro, Maine.] M A R Y R.

DEAIÌING

BRADSTREET, Anne (1612-Sept. 16, 1672), poet, was the first daughter and second of the five children of Thomas Dudley of Northampton, England, and Dorothy (Yorke) Dudley, "a gentlewoman whose extraction and estate were considerable" (Cotton Mather, Magnolia Christi Americana, I, 1820, p. 121). Her birthplace was probably Northampton, and her childhood home from her seventh to her fifteenth year was Sempringham, Lincolnshire, where her father was steward in charge of the vast estates of Theophilus Clinton, the young Earl of Lincoln. Anne's early training was determined by her father's high position and wealth and by the Nonconformist doctrine and practice which governed his household. She had private tutors, the cultural surroundings of life in Tattershall Castle, and, most important for her, the intellectual stimulus of the Earl's library. She also grew up under strict religious discipline, read the Bible, and suffered for her "vanity and the follyes of youth." In 1628, at the age of sixteen, she was married to Simon Bradstreet, who as a boy had been taken into the family of the Earl, under care of her father, whom he succeeded as steward. He was nine years her senior, the son of a Nonconformist minister, and a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Two years later, together with her husband and her parents, Anne Bradstreet sailed for New England. On board the Arbella, flagship of John Winthrop's fleet, her father was named

deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company; Simon Bradstreet was already an assistant of the company. The official standing of her father and husband and their many public services gave her a place of dignity and honor in the New World. She filled it graciously, although at the first shock of difference from all that she had known, "my heart rose," as she said. "But after I was convinced it was the way of God, I submitted to it and joined to the church at Boston." The spirit of her life as a pioneer woman is in these words. After a brief residence at Cambridge, she moved to Ipswich, and after 1644 to North Andover, her home for the remainder of her life. Her poems, written for her own satisfaction and copied out for her father and other members of the family, were first published in London in 1650, without her consent or even her knowledge. Her brother-in-law, the Rev. John Woodbridge, who had secured a manuscript copy, caused them to be printed under the title, The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America. Or Severall Poems, compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of delight. . . . By a Gentlewoman in those parts. Eight prefatory tributes expressed admiration for this unusual achievement for a woman. All of the poems in this collection were written before her thirtieth year, and except for "A Dialogue between Old England and New," they contain almost no hint of her New England experiences. She was back in the world to which the Earl's library had introduced her, versifying panoramic views of world history according to Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World and other contemporary treatises, or, in her quaternions ("The Four Elements," "The Four Humours," "The Four Ages of Man," and "The Four Seasons"), imitating the French Calvinist poet Guillaume Du Bartas, whose encyclopedic catchalls she and other Puritans—including John Milton—read admiringly in Joshua Sylvester's translation, The Divine Weekes and Workes. She had not yet found her own individual mode of expression. Mrs. Bradstreet's later volume, published in Boston in 1678 six years after her death, omitted the Tenth Muse ascription and was entitled Several Poems Compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning. It contained her revisions of her earlier poems and the greater part of her mature work. These later poems show that she had not only learned to see nature and human life directly, but also to look into her own heart and write with the imaginative vision of a poet. The long poem

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"Contemplations" is more than external description. The New England landscape, which invites her meditation, has grown familiar enough to be quietly possessed. "The Flesh and the Spirit" is a Puritan counterpart of the medieval "Debate of the Body and the Soul" and as such has an authenticity that is arresting. She had lived it. Her personal poems, of her children, to her husband ("If ever two were one, then surely we. / If ever man were loved by wife, then thee"), as well as the record of her own "states of soul," throw light on the Puritan view of life, as it looked to one born to it. It is a view without harshness, the view of one strong in mind, devout of heart, one to whom the beauty of holiness is beauty indeed. In the slender sheaf of Anne Bradstreet's best work there is a quality which marks her as a poet for whom her sex and the date 1650 are only incidental. In the words of a present-day successor (Adrienne R i c h ) , "To have written these, the first good poems in America, while rearing eight children, lying frequently sick, keeping house at the edge of wilderness, was to have managed a poet's range and extension within confines as severe as any American poet has confronted." Anne Bradstreet's prose "Meditations Divine and Moral," written for her son Simon Bradstreet, were found after her death. It is likely that other unpublished work was destroyed in the burning of her North Andover home in 1666. She died at North Andover in the early fall of 1672. No portrait survives, and her burial place is not known. Of her eight children—Samuel, Dorothy, Sarah, Simon, Hannah, Mercy, Dudley, and J o h n all but the second were living at the time of her death. Numbered among her illustrious descendants are Richard Henry Dana, William Ellery Channing, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Wendell Phillips. [John H. Ellis, ed., The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse ( 1867 ), the best earlier edition, has now been supplanted by the John Harvard Library edition of The Works of Anne Bradstreet ( 1 9 6 7 ) , edited by Jeannine Hensley, with a foreword by Adrienne Rich. For biographical and critical material, see also: Helen Campbell, Anne Bradstreet and Her Time ( 1 8 9 1 ) ; Metta Bradstreet, "Anne Bradstreet. Her Life and Works," Topsfield (Mass.) Hist. Soc., Hist. Collections, I (1895), 3 - 7 ; Dean Dudley, Hist, of the Dudley Family (l'l parts, 1 8 8 6 - 9 4 ) ; Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony ( 1 9 3 0 ) , chap, xi, and The Puritan Pronaos ( 1 9 3 6 ) , pp. 2 1 3 - 1 8 ; essay by George F . Whicher in his Alas, All's Vanity ( 1 9 4 2 ) , drawn from Anne Bradstreet's Several Poems; Elizabeth Wade White, "The Tenth Muse—A Tercentenary Appraisal of Anne Bradstreet," William and

Mary Quart., July 1951; Josephine K. Piercy, Anne Bradstreet ( 1 9 6 5 ) . F o r a modern poet's response, see John Berryman, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956).] OLA E L I Z A B E T H

WINSLOW

B R A D W E L L , Myra Colby (Feb. 12, 1 8 3 1 Feb. 14, 1 8 9 4 ) , lawyer, was bom in Manchester, Bennington County, Vt., one of the youngest of the five children, a boy and four girls, of Eben and Abigail Hurd (Willey) Colby. Both parents were descended from early settlers of Boston. Myra's paternal grandfather was a Baptist minister in New Hampshire, and the family followed that faith. Shortly after Myra's birth, the Colbys moved to Portage, on the Genesee River in western New York state. Staunch abolitionists, they were close friends of the family of Elijah Lovejoy, murdered in Illinois by a proslavery mob in 1837. When Myra was twelve, in 1843, her family moved farther west, to Schaumberg township in Cook County, 111., near Elgin. She had part of her schooling in Kenosha, Wis., while living with a married sister there, and finished her education at the Ladies' Seminary in Elgin. She then taught for several years in district schools. The Colby family at first opposed her marriage, on May 18, 1852, to James Bolesworth Bradwell of Palatine, 111., the penniless son of English immigrants who had settled on the prairie during his childhood. Bradwell had worked his way partly through Knox College and had begun the study of law. The young couple settled in Memphis, Tenn., where they taught school and then opened and conducted a flourishing private school. Their first child, Myra, was born in 1854. Later that year they moved to Chicago. Bradwell had continued to read law, and in 1855, having been admitted to the Illinois bar, he went into partnership with his brother-in-law in the firm of Bradwell and Colby, which built up a large practice. In 1861 he was elected county judge of Cook County, a position then having jurisdiction in all probate cases. Meanwhile two other children were born to the Brad wells: Thomas ( 1 8 5 6 ) and Bessie ( 1 8 5 8 ) . Their daughter Myra died in 1861; a fourth child, James, born in 1862, died in 1864. During the Civil War, Mrs. Bradwell was active in the work of the Northwestern Sanitary Commission, and in 1865 she took a leading part in preparations for the great Sanitary Fair of that year. As secretary of the "Committee on Arms, Trophies and Curiosities" she won praise for mounting its "artis-

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Bradwell tic and beautiful exhibition" and for her "courtesy and kindness," which throughout the frenzied excitement of the fair "maintained an equable glow." The charitable organizations that grew out of the war effort became a permanent part of the Bradwells' lives, especially the Soldiers' Aid Society, of which Mrs. Bradwell was president, and the Soldiers' Home; the latter's facilities were later taken over by the Illinois Industrial School for Girls, on whose board Mrs. Bradwell served for many years. She was also active in the work of the Masonic order of the Eastern Star. Since the early years of their marriage Myra Bradwell had been studying law under her husband's tutelage, and in 1868 she undertook an ambitious project: the publication of a weekly legal newspaper called the Chicago Legal News. From the first issue on Oct. 3, she was in charge of the content, makeup, production, and financial operation of the paper. At the same time the Bradwells set up a printing, binding, and publishing firm known as the Chicago Legal News Company. James Bradwell's position and influence in the state enabled Mrs. Bradwell to secure a special charter under which she became president of both enterprises without the usual legal disabilities of a married woman. The legislature also passed special acts declaring the paper a valid medium for the publication of legal notices and making the laws, ordinances, notices, and court opinions printed in it evidence in the courts. A brilliant success from the start, the Chicago Legal News quickly became the most important legal publication west of the Alleghenies. Known for its broad and judicious coverage of the legal news of the entire country, it carried more advertising than any other paper in the state. The Chicago Legal News Company did a large business in printing stationery, legal forms (designed by Mrs. Bradwell), and briefs, besides the Legal News and other publications. Myra Bradwell's revised edition of the statutes of Illinois was regularly the first to appear after the close of each session of the state legislature; she herself took the printed copy to Springfield and compared it with the enrolled laws in the secretary of state's office before publication. In the Chicago Fire of 1871 the Bradwells lost their home and all their possessions. From the Legal News only the subscription book was saved, grabbed by Bessie Bradwell, aged thirteen, who became separated from her family and was missing for a night and part of a day. Once assured of her family's safety, Myra

Bradwell took the train for Milwaukee, where she had the Chicago Legal News printed and published on schedule three days later. In this issue she reported that every law library of consequence in Chicago had been destroyed (her husband's, the outstanding probate library in the West, was among them) and appealed to lawyers elsewhere for contributions of books. She also pointed out to publishers of legal books the advantages of prompt advertising in her paper. In the same issue she called for legislation covering proof of titles to real estate; a special session of the legislature followed her suggestions in passing the Burnt Records Act. Back issues of the Legal News in the possession of lawyers downstate proved of inestimable help in establishing legal facts of which other proof had vanished in the fire. A witty and forceful writer, Myra Bradwell through her editorial columns did much to mold opinion in the legal profession of the Midwest for twenty-five years. She discussed and evaluated opinions of lawyers and of the courts, as well as new legislation. She was one of the first to urge the passage of laws regulating railroads and other big corporations; and she gave the initial impetus to the first passage of zoning ordinances in Chicago. She called for clean courtrooms, improved court procedures, and additional courts. She kept a steady watch on standards in her profession, urging the formation of bar associations, the establishment of law schools, the specialization of lawyers in cities, and compulsory retirement of judges. The Legal News also gave space to other subjects which concerned its editor, such as temperance, prison reform, and woman's rights. When the call for the first suffrage convention held in Chicago was issued in February 1869, Myra Bradwell secured the endorsement of all the judges of Cook County courts and many leading members of the bar. "Mr. Bradwell and his pretty wife Myra," marked by E L I Z A B E T H CADY STANTON as "a woman of great force and executive ability," later that month went on to the state constitutional convention at Springfield to lobby for woman suffrage. That November they helped organize the American Woman Suffrage Association in Cleveland, Bradwell serving as temporary chairman of the convention and Mrs. Bradwell being chosen corresponding secretary. She was for many years a member of the executive committee of the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association, where she worked closely with her fellow Chicagoan CATHARINE VAN V A L K E N BURG W A I T E .

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Bradwell Myra Bradwell's central interest, however, was in the removal of women's legal disabilities. She drafted a bill giving married women the right to their own earnings which she and her husband, Mrs. Stanton, M A R Y L I V E R M O R E , Catharine Waite, Judge Charles Waite, and others lobbied through the Illinois legislature in 1869. She also secured passage of a law giving a widow an interest in her husband's estate in all cases. James Bradwell, while a member of the legislature, saw to the passage of a bill making women eligible to hold school offices in Illinois; an equal guardianship of children bill (1873); and, in 1875, a bill making women eligible for the office of notary public (from which Mrs. Bradwell had been barred on grounds of sex in 1868 and 1870). In 1869 Mrs. Bradwell applied for admission to the Illinois bar. She passed the necessary examination with credit but was denied admission by the state supreme court on the ground that she was a woman, despite the precedent of Mrs. A R A B E L L A M A N S F I E L D of Iowa, who earlier that year had become the first woman regularly admitted to the practice of law in the United States. Mrs. Bradwell then took the case to the Supreme Court of the United States under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court did not hand down a decision until 1873, when it upheld the judgment of the lower court (16 Wall 130). By thus declaring the question in effect a matter for state jurisdiction, the Court set a pattern for women's entrance into occupations that has since prevailed. Meanwhile, in 1872, the Illinois legislature had passed an act giving all persons, regardless of sex, freedom in selecting an occupation. Myra Bradwell, however, did not again apply for admission to the bar. In 1890, when she was fifty-nine, the Illinois supreme court, acting on her original motion of 1869, admitted her to the practice of law in that state; two years later she was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States. Long recognized as the nation's most eminent woman lawyer, she had been since 1872 an honorary member of the Illinois State Bar Association, which she served for four terms as vice-president. Mrs. Bradwell continued to manage the Chicago Legal News and the printing company until the end of her life. The financial rewards of the work were substantial, and the Bradwells acquired a mansion on Michigan Avenue and traveled several times to Europe. Their son and daughter became lawyers in their turn, Bessie Bradwell graduating in 1882 at the head of her class from the Union College of Law (later Northwestern University

Law School). Myra Bradwell served as treasurer of the Illinois Centennial Association, which represented the state at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876. She was an early advocate of Chicago as the site for a World's Columbian Exposition and lobbied in Congress for the appropriation which made this possible. In the fall of 1893, ill with cancer, she toured the fair in a wheelchair. She died in Chicago the following winter at sixty-two and was buried there in Rosehill Cemetery. The American Law Review in a long obituary tribute called her "one of the most remarkable women of her generation"; the Illinois State Bar Association declared that "No more powerful and convincing argument in favor of the admission of women to a participation in the administration of government was ever made, than can be found in her character, conduct, and achievements." The Chicago Legal News continued under the editorship and management of Mrs. Bradwell's husband and then of Bessie Bradwell Helmer until 1925; father and son carried on the printing company. Mrs. Helmer, as the pioneering chairman of the American Association of University Women's committee for graduate fellowships, also carried on her mother's concern for women's professional advancement. [Myra Bradwell's own Chicago Legal News is a basic source; see especially the obituary and memorial articles in the issues of Feb. 17, Feb. 24, and May 12, 1894. Also of value are the obituaries in the 111. State Bar Assoc., Proc., 1895, pp. 35255; Am. Law Rev., Mar.-Apr. 1894, pp. 278-83; and Woman's Jour., Mar. 17, 1894. For a recent review of her career see George W. Gale in Am. Bar Assoc. Jour., Dec. 1953. A fuller treatment will appear in the author's forthcoming study of "Women, the Bench and the Bar."] DOROTHY THOMAS

BRADY, Alice (Nov. 2, 1892-Oct. 28, 1939), stage and screen actress, was born in New York City, the only child of William A. Brady, the theatrical and moving-picture producer, and his first wife, Rose Marie Rene, a dancer, who died when the girl was only a few years old. Of Irish heritage on her father's side and French on her mother's, she was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith. After her formal education at the Convent of St. Elizabeth in Madison, N.J., she determined upon a theatrical career. She was gifted with a fine singing voice, and for three semesters (1910-11) studied grand opera under Theodora Irvine at the New England Conservatory of Music, but, impatient at the long years of preparation required, she decided to go into light opera instead.

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Brady She persuaded her father, in spite of his misgivings, to let her play one of the three little maids from school in his revival of The Mikado in May 1910 and appeared in several performances during the latter part of the engagement. The next year, shielding her identity under the name "Marie Rose," she made her formal New York debut in the musical The Balkan Princess. Later that season, apparently having convinced her father of a bona fide talent, she appeared as one of the principals in his production of H.M.S. Pinafore at the Casino Theatre. Continuing under Brady's management, she performed the following year in a series of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at the Lyric and Casino theatres. In 1912 she also began her work in straight drama as Meg in Little Women at Brady's Playhouse Theatre. She returned to light opera in 1914 to tour with DeWolf Hopper in Gilbert and Sullivan repertory. Her first film, As Ye Sow, in 1914, marked the beginning of a screen career which spanned twenty-five years. In 1915 she signed with the newly formed World Film Corporation, of which her father was director of productions; by 1917 she was listed among the World stars, although none of her roles at this time took full advantage of her talent. She returned to the New York stage in September 1918, after an absence of three years, to star in Owen Davis' popular romantic comedy Forever After, again under her father's management, but for several years she continued to combine film and stage work. The years from 1923 to 1933 Miss Brady devoted exclusively to the legitimate theatre, achieving a solid reputation as an actress of emotional power and fine technique. Except for her performance as the discontented wife of an alcoholic dentist in William Hurlburt's Freudian-tinged drama The Bride of the Lamb (1926), which she herself produced, her most distinguished work was with the Theatre Guild. Joining the Guild in 1928, she played Anna in Karl and Anna and Sophie de Courvoisier in The Game of Love and Death. She refused the part of Nina in the Guild's production of Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude in 1930, but in 1931, as Lavinia Mannon in O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, she gave what many considered her greatest stage performance. In his review of the play Brooks Atkinson wrote that she and ALLA NAZIMOVA, who played Christine, acted "with consummate artistry and passion," and that "Lavinia has recreated Miss Brady into a majestic actress" (New York Times, Oct. 27, 1931). She also appeared in DuBose Heyward's short-

lived drama of miscegenation, Brass Ankle, in 1931. Thereafter, for the remainder of her life, she returned to the screen, appearing primarily in frivolous comedy parts, as in My Man Godfrey (1936). Among her last films, however, were two in which she played serious roles: In Old Chicago (1937), in which her portrayal of Mrs. O'Leary won her an award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Short, black-haired, brown-eyed, and always chic, in 1926 Miss Brady was named the best-dressed woman on the American stage. She was also an accomplished linguist, conversing fluently in French, German, and Italian, and was an ardent lover of dogs. On May 20, 1919, she was married to the actor James Lyon Crane, son of the clergyman and popular newspaper essayist Dr. Frank Crane. Divorced in 1922, they had one son, Donald. Cancer cut short Alice Brady's career at the age of forty-six. She died at the LeRoy Sanitarium in New York City and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, N.Y. One of the most versatile actresses of the modern American stage and screen, Alice Brady was successful in light opera, in both silent and talking films, and on the stage in both serious drama and comedy. She was proudest of her comic acting, but it was the emotional intensity of her performances in The Bride of the Lamb and Mourning Becomes Electra which established her right to a place in the first rank of American actresses. [John Parker, ed., Who's Who in the Theatre ( 9th ed., 1939); obituaries in N.Y. Times and N.Y. Herald Tribune, Oct. 30, 1939; John Hutchens, "Greece to Broadway," Theatre Arts Monthly, Jan. 1932; Lawrence Langner, The Magic Curtain (1951); William A. Brady, Showman (1937), pp. 273-75; Burns Mantle and Garrison P. Sherwood, eds., The Best Plays of 1909-1919 (1943), and succeeding volumes in this series; clippings in Harvard Theatre Collection.] BARNARD

HEWITT

BRANCH, Anna Hempstead (Mar. 18, 1875Sept. 8, 1937), poet and social worker, was born in New London, Conn., in Hempstead House, the home of her maternal forebears for ten generations. The younger of two children and only daughter, she grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and New York City, where her father, John Locke Branch, who had moved east from his native Ohio, practiced law. Both sides of the family had included individuals active in politics, the judiciary, and literature; her mother, Mary Lydia (Bolles) Branch (1840-

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Branch 1922), won some contemporary renown as an author of poems and children's stories. In such an atmosphere Anna's own precocious literary bent understandably flourished. Although not wealthy, the Branches lived comfortably and were able to send her to Froebel and Adelphi academies in Brooklyn, and then to Smith College. Her brother, John Bolles Branch, died when she was thirteen, and his illness and subsequent death seem to have knit this close family even more tightly together. While at Smith, Anna served as editor-in-chief of the college literary monthly and did most of the work on a poem called "The Road 'Twixt Heaven and Hell" which, although derivative like most of the verse of the period, was good enough to win a prize competition sponsored by the Century Magazine. Following her graduation in 1897 she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, receiving a degree in dramaturgy in 1900. It was during this period of her life that she began her lifelong association with Christodora House, a social settlement on New York's Lower East Side. With other members of the literary set, Miss Branch occasionally appeared there to read her own and others' verse as entertainment. The readings were popular, and as the settlement house's activities gradually expanded to include young people as well as older women, she came more frequently. From this point on, her life was centered around the idea, perhaps an adaptation of some of Shelley's concepts, that poetry was a mystical, semidivine pursuit, intimately connected with world brotherhood and understanding. She therefore responded with a real sense of mission to the awakened poetic interest at Christodora House, organizing a youth club there and persuading her friend JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY, whom she had met during her college days, to come to New York at regular intervals and sponsor a similar group. Out of the clubs emerged the Poet's Guild, an autonomous organization at Christodora House set up so as to mesh its activities closely with those of the settlement. The charter members, who included Edwin Arlington Robinson, William Rose Benêt, and Margaret Widdemer, were soon joined by others, and the venture was astoundingly successful. The Guild lent an intellectual aura to the house, and its members taught various classes in literature, drama, and the visual and plastic arts. In addition to organizing and coordinating the various programs and classes of the Guild, Miss Branch wrote plays, prayers, semidevotional services, poems, and stories for house

activities. Eventually the settlement (with Miss Branch on its board of directors) expanded into a sixteen-story building, while the Poet's Guild added to its program night classes and the publication of an "International Unbound Anthology" and similar collections which could be purchased cheaply, a leaf at a time. While Anna Hempstead Branch's work at Christodora House demonstrated her vitalizing force and organizing abilities, her interesting and often bizarre writing revealed another side of her life and thought. Her early poetry was influenced by the English Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Christina Rossetti. She later composed a number of dramatic monologues and short psychological verse plays which show a superficial but unmistakable affinity to Browning's work, and her fascination with the sonnet form was probably the result of her admiration for Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her main interest in the Brownings, however, was mystical and pseudophilosophical rather than stylistic. She was obsessed, particularly in the latter years of her life, by Browning's The Ring and the Book and by the creative process through which the story of an ancient crime became a modern poem. Ascribing to this work a peculiar form of Ghostly or Divine inspiration, she adopted other philosophical tenets derived from Browning, together with a broad mysticism revolving around cabalistic signs and numerology, Great Pyramidology, and orthodox Christianity, all of which were joined to her previous concepts of a deified personification of Poetry which would bring about world brotherhood. Although she remained orthodoxly Episcopalian throughout her life, her mystical blend of ideas had for her a religious force and strength. This mysticism, her rather ascetic habits of living, and her constant concern for others moved many of her contemporaries to speak and write of her in terms of "saintliness." Perhaps the fullest expression of her ideas is contained in the poems which comprise Sonnets from a Lock Box (1929). These are her best work and show a real, if minor, talent, although her best-known single poem is an uncharacteristic, long, rather dull Miltonic epic called "Nimrod," centering around the legendary Babylonian king. Much of her poetry shows a concern with natural hieroglyphs and emblems which can best be compared with the seventeenth-century religious poetry of George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. At the same time, her later symbols retain a curious personalized quality: many of them, having been privately developed, are not intel-

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Brandegee

received an M.D. degree in 1878. Since materia medica was an important part of the curriculum at that time, she took up botanizing under the instruction of Dr. Hans Herman Behr. She always had broad interests in biology, and later called her choice of botany accidental. ( " I would have preferred the study of birds or more strongly still, the study of insects.") She definitely thought of herself as a physician, her practice being limited only because she was "not overrun with patients." Through Dr. Behr she got to know other members of the California Academy of Sciences, which she joined in 1879. By stages she began to work with the academy's herbarium, and in 1883 she became its curator, a position she held for two decades. The 1880's were a lively period in California botany, with a number of able and energetic people coming to the fore. Mrs. Curran collected extensively throughout the state, earning the respect of Edward Lee Greene, then emerging as the leading California botanist. Since the University of California herbarium was not established by Greene until late in the decade, the çurator at the academy had one of the most strategic botanical positions held by a woman anywhere in the country. Elections within the academy were warmly contested. With her forthright manner and sharply critical mind, Mrs. Curran actively campaigned for Harvey W. Harkness, a San Francisco physician who became president in 1887, in a battle hinging mainly on financial control of the academy and its property and on personality differences among members.

ligible without a knowledge of the background of her thought. Her plays are almost all deeply symbolic and, though written for actual production (often at Christodora House), are more truly poems than drama. Like her later poetry and thought, many of them tread a narrow path between genius and madness, lending a weird and singularly haunting strain to her work. Miss Branch lived with her mother in New London for several years after her father's death in 1909; she never married. After her mother died in 1922 she made Christodora House her usual residence. She died of cancer in New London at the age of sixty-two and was buried there in Cedar Grove Cemetery. [Miss Branch's volumes of poetry include Heart of the Road ( 1901 ), The Shoes That Danced (1905), Rose of the Wind, Nimrod, and Other Poems (1910), Sonnets from a Lock Box (1929), and a posthumous collection edited by Ridgely Torrence, Last Poems of Anna Hempstead Branch (1944). The best source of biographical information is the collection of her papers and notebooks at the Smith College Library. See also Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXI, 397-98 (on her mother), and Current Vol. C, p. 541; obituary in N.Y. Times, Sept. 9, 1937; John L. Foley in Scholastic, Mar. 17, 1941; Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, eds., Twentieth Century Authors (1942). Death record from Conn. State Dept. of Health.] JULIAN T . BAIRD, JR.

B R A N D E G E E , Mary Katharine Layne Curran (Oct. 28, 1844-Apr. 3, 1 9 2 0 ) , California botanist, was bom in western Tennessee to Marshall Boiling Layne, of English descent, and Mary (Morris) Layne. Kate was the second of ten children and the first girl. As she put it, "my father, an impractical genius, afflicted with Wanderlust, moved continually till stopped by the western ocean, which we reached before my ninth year." The family lived for several years in Gentry County, Mo., where Marshall Layne was a miller, and spent a winter in Salt Lake City before settling about 1853 on a farm near the town of Folsom, Calif. Kate's early schooling cannot have been extensive and was probably completed at a seminary in Folsom which managed to graduate only one class. Tradition has it that she taught school in the neighborhood. In August 1866 she was married to Hugh Curran, a native of Ireland and a constable in Folsom, but little about him or their life together is known. He died in 1874. As a widow, Mary K. Curran came to San Francisco in 1875, entered the Medical Department of the University of California, and

California botany in the 1880's was still dependent on Eastern institutions such as Harvard and Eastern authorities such as Asa Gray in somewhat the same way that Gray and his colleague John Torrey in the 1830's had been dependent on British and Continental authorities. The Californians, however, led by such men as Albert Kellogg and E. L. Greene, reacted by trying to free themselves both of the necessity of referring taxonomic questions to the East and of the intellectual patterns of the Easterners, especially adherence to evolutionary ideas. While Mrs. Curran, like so many active field collectors, held many Eastern classifications of California flora in contempt, she was not interested in Greene's separatist movement, and she was more in tune with Gray's evolutionary ideas than with Greene's vituperative anti-Darwinian stand and finely split species. With the financial and moral support of her second husband, Townshend Stith Brandegee, who had come into a small legacy shortly

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Brandegee before their marriage, Kate Brandegee was able to make an even greater imprint on California botany. Brandegee was a year older than she, a graduate of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale; while working as a civil engineer on various railroad surveys in Colorado and the Pacific Northwest he had made extensive plant collections. Brought together by their common interest, they were married in San Diego on May 29, 1889, and as a wedding trip walked the 500 miles to San Francisco, botanizing on the way. During the 1880's Kate Curran had established a series of Bulletins of the California Academy of Sciences, of which she was acting editor. Now she organized a "Botanical Club" (1891) and with the help of Dr. Harkness and her husband founded Zoe, a "medium for recording in accessible form the numerous, often unconnected observations, pertaining more particularly to the western part of North America, made by amateurs as well as working naturalists. . . Most of her total publication was contained in Zoe, which appeared at increasingly irregular intervals until 1908. Townshend Brandegee edited the magazine from its inception in 1890 until 1892, and his wife edited the last volume (1900-08). Many contemporaries testify to Mrs. Brandegee's lack of interest in dress and housekeeping. In 1894 she and her husband moved to San Diego, where they built up their own botanical library and herbarium and lived for more than a decade. (Mrs. Brandegee's successor as curator at the California Academy of Sciences was the noted botanist Alice Eastwood [1859-1953].) They returned to Berkeley in 1906 when T. S. Brandegee took a position as honorary curator at the herbarium of the University of California. Without salary, they spent the rest of their lives in the service of the herbarium, giving their library and joint collection of over 75,000 specimens to the university. Even after ill health had slowed them down, the couple continued to collect avidly in California and Nevada. In 1913 Mrs. Brandegee made an extensive tour of Eastern botanical centers to examine type specimens of Western plants, especially the lupines. She died in Berkeley in 1920, at seventy-five, of "senility" and nephritis, and was buried there in Sunset View Cemetery. Her husband died in 1925. Though famed for a sharp pen in critical reviews, Katharine Brandegee managed to make balanced scientific judgments on the work of her major contemporaries in California botany, notably on E. L. Greene. After the move to Berkeley in 1906 she published vir-

tually nothing, even though she made systematic studies, with careful attention to variation and stages of development, of many families of California flowering plants. She was at this time better equipped than any other botanist to prepare a flora of California. Although she did not do so, her contributions to the herbarium carry, by means of the labels and the specimens themselves, a record of her research from which later generations can profit. [The main and indispensable printed source is William A. Setchell's account, "Townshend and Mary Brandegee," in Univ. of Calif. Ptiblications in Botany, XIII ( 1 9 2 6 ) , 1 5 6 - 7 8 . Some other accounts exist, especially Edmund C. Jaeger, "Bold Kate Brandegee," Calico Print, Mar. 1953; and Joseph Ewan, "San Francisco as a Mecca for Nineteenth Century Naturalists," A Century of Progress in the Natural Sciences, 1853-1953 (Calif. Acad, of Sciences, 1 9 5 5 ) , and "A Bibliogeographical Guide to the Brandegee Botanical Collections," Am. Midland Naturalist, May 1942. Marcus E . Jones' articles in Contributions to Western Botany, no. IS ( 1 9 3 3 - 3 5 ) , pp. 1 2 - 1 9 , and Desert Plant Life, Aug. and Sept. 1932, are untrustworthy. Both the herbarium and library and the MSS. of Katharine and T. S. Brandegee are at the Univ. of Calif. Herbarium in Berkeley. Information on the Brandegees is found in other papers in the Bancroft Library at the Univ. of Calif., the Calif. Acad, of Sciences in San Francisco, and the Harvard Univ. Herbarium. Some information, not entirely accurate on Mrs. Brandegee's immediate family, may be obtained from Floyd B. Layne, Layne-Lain-Lane Genealogy ( 1 9 6 2 ) . Other information from Calif. census records for 1860; from death record; and from Mrs. Frank Cadenazzi, Mill Valley, Calif., and Mrs. Esther Nathan, Peacock Gap, Calif., her nieces.] HUNTER

DUPREE

MARIAN L.

CADE

BRANT, Mary (c. 1736-Apr. 16, 1796), better known as Molly Brant, Indian consort of Sir William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Colonies, was probably born in the Mohawk Valley in New York. Reportedly the daughter of a Mohawk sachem, she was a sister of Joseph Brant, later the most famous Indian warrior of the American Revolution. According to legend, she attracted the attention of Sir William—one of the wealthiest and most influential men in colonial America—at a militia muster when she displayed her spirit and agility by vaulting to the back of a galloping horse behind one of the officers. Her name first appears in Johnson's papers in 1759, the year in which his first wife, Catherine Weisenberg, died and the year in which Mary Brant bore Sir William the first of nine children. In his will he referred to them as his "natural" children by

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Brant his "housekeeper," terms implying no legal marriage, though there is a persistent rumor of an Indian ceremony. As Sir William's children by his first wife were grown and, when married, were given homes of their own, Molly Brant became the mistress of the ménage at Fort Johnson on the Mohawk River and, in 1763, of Johnson Hall, the new baronial mansion at Johnstown, N.Y., where Johnson lived a life of gentlemanly elegance in a frontier setting. Created a baronet for his successful military leadership in the French and Indian War, he handled Indian diplomacy for the Crown for the rest of his life, meanwhile becoming a large landowner. Molly Brant presided at Johnson Hall with dignity and charm, entertaining distinguished visitors and, by her influence with the Indian leaders, supplementing Sir William's diplomacy in pacifying the Indian nations. Her children received every advantage and were sent to school in Johnstown. Peter, the eldest, also went to Montreal and to Philadelphia to be educated and trained for business. The death of Sir William on July 11, 1774, worked a great change in Molly's life. Although she and her eight surviving children —Peter, Elizabeth, Magdalene, Margaret, George, Mary, Susanna, and Anne—received substantial bequests of land, Sir John Johnson (son of Sir William's first marriage) and his lady now occupied Johnson Hall, and Molly and her brood moved to a farm near Canajoharie, N.Y., where she engaged in trade. A visiting American officer (Tench Tilghman) described her in 1775 as having "an air of ease and politeness," and as "dressed after the Indian Manner, but her linen and other Cloathes the finest of their kind." During the Revolutionary War she and her relatives aided the British. Peter Johnson was credited with the capture of Ethan Allen during the fighting at Montreal. Joseph Brant led Iroquois forces against the Americans in the Mohawk Valley and elsewhere. Molly gave aid secretly. It was she who informed the British of the patriot movements before the battle of Oriskany, and Joseph later testified that "she sent ammunition to the Loyalists and fed and assisted such as had taken refuge in the woods" (Loyalist Claims, A. O. 12, Public Records Office). When Gen. Nicholas Herkimer, the American commander, forced her to leave her home, she sought refuge with relatives among the Six Nations farther west, where she used her great prestige as the relict of Sir William, "whose memory she never mentions without tears," to keep the

Cavugas and Senecas on the British side. Because she wielded an influence over the Indian tribes "far superior to that of all the Chiefs put together," Col. John Butler persuaded her to go to Niagara, the military base for Tory raids. Later she moved to Carleton Island in the St. Lawrence River, where she was given a house and garden by Sir Frederick Haldimand, commander-in-chief in Canada. With the coming of peace in 1783, Molly Brant went with other Loyalists to Cataraqui (Kingston, Ontario), where she lived the remainder of her life. Several of her daughters married Canadian officers and, like her, were respected members of the community. Compensation for their lands confiscated by the State of New York was granted by the Loyalist Claims Commission in London, and for her "zealous services" General Haldimand in 1783 secured her a yearly pension of £ . 1 0 0 (Haldimand to Sir John Johnson, May 27, 1783, New-York Historical Society). A devout Anglican, she died in Kingston, where she was buried in St. George's (now St. Paul's) Churchyard. Molly Brant had contributed in some measure to the great influence exerted by Sir William Johnson over the Indians of the Northern colonies; during the Revolution, the force of her personality buttressed by the dominant role of women in Iroquois society enabled her to move the Iroquois tribes toward the British. [James Sullivan et al., eds., The Papers of Sir William Johnson (12 vols., 1921-57); William L. Stone, The Life and Times of Sir William Johnson (2 vols., 1865); Milton W. Hamilton, "Sir William Johnson's Wives," N.Y. Hist., Jan. 1957; Memoir of Lieut. Col. Tench Tilghman (1876), pp. 86-87; H. Pearson Gundy, "Molly Brant, Loyalist," Ontario Hist., Summer 1953. Manuscript sources include: Claus Papers and Haldimand Papers, Canadian Archives; Draper MSS., Wis. State Hist. Soc.; collections of N.-Y. Hist. Soc. and N.Y. State Library.] MILTON W.

HAMILTON

BRASLAU, Sophie (Aug. 16, 1888-Dec. 22, 1 9 3 5 ) , concert and opera contralto, was born in New York City, the only child of Russian Jewish parents, Abel Braslau, a physician, and Lascha (Goodelman) Braslau. She was educated in New York public schools. Her musical education reportedly began at the age of six, and from 1905 to 1908 she attended the newly opened Institute of Musical Art in New York City as a candidate for the diploma in voice and piano, though because of illness she did not complete the course. For some years she studied piano with Alexander Lambert. After hearing a recital by A L M A G L U C K , how-

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Braslau ever, she decided to become a singer. Her principal instructor in voice was Arturo BuzziPeccia, a prominent New York singing teacher and family friend, who, it is said, had first recognized her vocal possibilities when he heard her humming while practicing the piano. In an interview in 1915 she paid high tribute to her father's early faith in her voice and his continued musicianly criticism and impersonal judgment. After three years with Buzzi-Peccia, Sophie Braslau sang at an evening gathering in his studio before a group of operatic notables including the conductor Arturo Toscanini, who advised her to try out for the Metropolitan Opera. Her audition, in April 1913, brought an immediate three-year contract, and she made her debut that Nov. 27 in the role of A Voice in Parsifal and, next day, as Feodor in Boris Godunov. During the next few years she sang mainly in secondary leads and minor roles, but she created the title role in Charles Wakefield Cadman's Shanewis on Mar. 23, 1918. The quality of Sophie Braslau's voice and her ability as a singer and musical interpreter soon brought her into the concert field. She was first heard in Cleveland and Baltimore in 1914, and she made her Midwestern debut at Evanston, 111., in June 1915. In November of that year she substituted for M A R C E L L A SEMBRICH as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. She gave her first New York recital at Aeolian Hall on Jan. 13, 1916. Becoming definitely established as a concert artist, she decided to devote herself to concert work exclusively and bade farewell to the Metropolitan on Apr. 3, 1920, when she sang Marina in Boris Godunov. During the next fourteen years Sophie Braslau sang throughout the United States and also in Europe, making a tour of England, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries in 1931. In addition to giving many joint and solo recitals, she was much in demand as a soloist with most of the principal orchestras of the United States and at various music festivals, including those at Ann Arbor, Cincinnati, and Evanston. Her recital repertory gained steadily in scope and variety, including songs and arias of differing types and styles in five or six languages. Illness ended her career while she was still at the height of her powers. Her last public appearance was in New York at Lewisohn Stadium on July 18, 1934, when she sang the vocal solo from Manuel de Falla's El Amor Brujo and two songs by Rachmaninoff. Confined to her bed after June 1935, she died of

cancer that December in New York City at the age of forty-seven. She was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery near Brooklyn. Miss Braslau was short in stature, darkhaired, and attractive. Her voice was remarkable for its range (three octaves) and its volume and quality, and she was able to suit its color and timbre to whatever music she sang. In the contralto solo from El Amor Brujo, for instance, she contrived to give it a certain primitive quality, avoiding a refinement which here would have been out of character. Besides the roles already mentioned, her Metropolitan repertory included parts in Tosca, Hänsel und Gretel, L'Amore dei Tre Re, Madame Sans-Gêne, L'Oracolo, Carmen, and other operas. Though she never sang the title role of Carmen at the Metropolitan, she played it in the summer season of 1918 at Ravinia Park, near Chicago. She was a soloist in the Metropolitan's Good Friday performance of Verdi's Requiem on Mar. 29, 1918. [Extracts from newspapers, Musical America, the Musical Courier, and other magazines in the Sophie Braslau Collection, Music Division, N.Y. Public Library at Lincoln Center; obituaries in N.Y. Times and N.Y. Herald Tribune, Dec. 23, 1935; William H. Seltsam, Metropolitan Opera Annals (1947); enrollment records of the Institute of Musical Art (courtesy of the registrar, Juilliard School of Music); personal recollections. See also Universal Jewish Encyc., II, 504. Birth date and names of parents from death certificate, N.Y. City Dept. of Health.] FRANCIS

D.

PERKINS

BRECKINRIDGE, Madeline McDowell (May 20, 1872-Nov. 25, 1920), social reformer, was born at Woodlake, near Frankfort, Ky., the third daughter and sixth of seven children of Henry Clay McDowell and his wife, Anne Clay. Both Clays and McDowells had been leading citizens of Kentucky since its earliest days. Henry McDowell, a veteran of the Union Army, was a lawyer, and Madeline in early girlhood was his close companion. In 1882 the family moved into Ashland, the famous Lexington home of Henry Clay—Madeline's great-grandfather—where she grew up loving outdoor sports. Christened Magdalen, she later adopted the French form of the name, and this, in turn, was usually shortened to Madge. She attended Mrs. Higgin's School in Lexington and Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn. (1889-90); and intermittently from 1890 to 1894 she took courses at the State College of Kentucky (now the University of Kentucky) in Lexington. In the mid-1890's intellectual as well as social interests led her into a Lexington study group, the Fortnightly Club.

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Breckinridge At about this time she contracted tuberculosis, an illness which curtailed her activities for the rest of her life and forced her to take periodic rest cures in the Southwest and at the Trudeau Sanatorium in Saranac Lake, N.Y.

On Nov. 17, 1898, she was married to Desha Breckinridge (1867-1935)-brother of SOPHONISBA PRESTON BRECKINRIDGE, then on the threshold of her career in Chicago social work. A young lawyer turned newspaper editor, Breckinridge came of a family as distinguished in Kentucky history as her own. His influential Lexington Herald and his interest in her social concerns were essential to his wife's career as a reformer. The marriage was childless, and Mrs. Breckinridge soon turned her attention to civic issues. Her first undertaking grew out of a horseback trip into the Kentucky mountains in 1899. Sensing the possibility of a social settlement among the mountain people, she encouraged the Gleaners, a young women's society of the Lexington Episcopal church to which her family belonged, to establish a neighborhood house in connection with an Episcopal mission near the mountain town of Proctor. Similar to the work of K A T H E R I N E P E T T I T , this was an early adaptation of the urban settlement idea to a rural area. In 1900 Mrs. Breckinridge was one of a group of citizens who founded the Lexington Civic League, and for many years she was its moving spirit. One of the league's first undertakings was the development of a playground for slum children in the area of Lexington known as Irishtown. From this grew, in 1912, a combined school and social settlement, the Abraham Lincoln School and Social Center, administered jointly by the Civic League and the school board. Seeking to make this a model of its kind, Madeline Breckinridge brought to it the most advanced thinking of John Dewey in education and of J A N E ADDAMS in social work. On the practical side, she raised $35,000 to supplement a public appropriation for the school's construction, planned its design, and supervised its staffing. While spending the winter of 1903-04 in a sanatorium in Denver, Mrs. Breckinridge observed the work of Judge Ben B. Lindsey's juvenile court and also learned more of the woman suffrage campaign, the public health movement, and other reforms of the day. Back in Lexington, she and the Civic League took the lead in securing state legislation in 1906 establishing a juvenile court system and restricting child labor. She was also instrumental in introducing manual training into the Lexington schools, in the establishment of

a free public health clinic, in town beautification and park construction, and in securing better care for women offenders. As a founder in 1900 of the Lexington Associated Charities and as a director from 1907 to her death, she worked for higher standards in the care of the needy. Her multipurpose approach to civic responsibility is illustrated by a letter written Aug. 1, 1914, to her friend Mrs. W. W. Anderson, laying plans for opening a new wading pool at the playground, suggesting a boatbuilding contest for the children, and concluding: "Also, if you're here next week, don't you want to do a little suffrage work at the fair?" Such endeavors soon won national recognition, and Mrs. Breckinridge was invited to address the Conference for Education in the South in 1911 and 1912 and the National Conference of Charities and Correction in 1914. In 1910 she had been elected to a two-year term on the board of directors of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Perhaps her most deeply felt crusade was that against tuberculosis, rooted not only in her personal experience but in her admiration for her grandfather William Adair McDowell, a Kentucky physician whose pioneering work, A Demonstration of the Curability of Pulmonary Consumption, had appeared in 1843. As early as 1905 she had voiced her concern before the Civic League, and from then until her death she worked through such organizations as the Kentucky Anti-Tuberculosis Society, the Kentucky Association for the Prevention and Relief of Tuberculosis, and the Fayette County Tuberculosis Association to spread knowledge about the malady, to establish a free diagnostic dispensary in Lexington, and to win legislative and public support for a state sanatorium. A monument to her efforts is Lexington's Blue Grass Sanatorium, constructed in 1916 with public funds and the $50,000 she raised through her "genius at publicity and organization" (Breckinridge, p. 140). From 1912 to 1916 she served with distinction on the state Tuberculosis Commission which she had helped to bring into being. An uncharacteristic sentence from one of her letters to a governor on the subject—the last of a series that had begun sixteen years before —suggests the uphill struggle she had waged. "The tuberculosis fight in Kentucky," she wrote, "from the start to finish has been work, persuade, fight, until when you get anything you are so weary you can hardly rejoice in it" (Breckinridge, p. 155). Believing that the average woman needed "some stimulus to broader interests than she now has," Mrs. Breckinridge in 1905 began a

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Breckinridge weekly woman's page in her husband's newspaper. To prove her contention that "women are thinking seriously and to some purpose on a number of subjects not usually considered feminine," she played down fashion news and recipes and treated the important political and social issues of the day. Through the pages of the Herald, and as head of the legislative division of the State Federation of Women's Clubs (1908-12), she fought for a variety of legislative reforms, including woman suffrage in school elections, granted in 1912. She was long the central figure in the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, serving as its president from 1912 to 1915, and again from 1919 until her death. During her first term as president membership rose from 1,700 to 10,000. As a vice-president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association ( 191315) she traveled widely, speaking for suffrage in Missouri, Oregon, Virginia, West Virginia, and the Carolinas. Unlike her fellow Kentuckian L A U R A C L A Y , she favored suffrage agitation on the federal as well as the state level and welcomed the Nineteenth Amendment, working tirelessly in Kentucky for its ratification. Of her gift for oratory, one who heard her speak at a Fourth of July gathering in a Kentucky mountain town in 1919 later wrote: "It seemed as if the mantle of 'Harry of the West' [Henry Clay] had fallen on her shoulders, and as she closed, our eyes were filled with tears and I shook hands enthusiastically with a grim-faced mountaineer who said 'By God, that's the best I ever heard, man or woman, and I'm for her'" (Breckinridge, p. 235). Largely through such efforts, the Kentucky legislature ratified the suffrage amendment on Jan. 6, 1920, the first day of its legislative session. Mrs. Breckinridge was not a pacifist, and she refused to join the Woman's Peace Party before World War I. She had high hopes for the League of Nations, however, and in October 1920 undertook an extended speaking tour on behalf of the Democratic party and the League. On Nov. 23 she suffered a stroke at her Lexington home. She died two days later, at forty-eight, without regaining consciousness. Madeline Breckinridge was one of those to whom nothing human is alien. Her rare combination of intelligence, humor, sensitivity, and administrative ability made her an effective reformer and one of Kentucky's leading citizens. [Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, Madeline McDowell Breckinridge ( 1921 ), a loving memorial by her sister-in-law, written with a scholar's regard for ac-

curacy, is the chief printed source. A feeling for her extraordinary personality and capacity for work is best gained from her personal papers, which are a part of the voluminous Breckinridge collection in the Library of Congress. The Woman Citizen, Feb. 19, 1921, contains a moving memorial article by Alice Stone Blackwell. See also Ida H. Harper, ed., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, vols. V and VI ( 1922 ) ; and Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXIX, 4 4 ^ 5 . ] ANNE FIROR

SCOTT

BRECKINRIDGE, Sophonisba Preston (Apr. 1, 1866-July 30, 1948), social worker, was born in Lexington, Ky., the daughter of William Campbell Preston Breckinridge, lawyer, journalist, Congressman, and Confederate colonel, and his second wife, Issa Desha. The second daughter and second of seven children (of whom two died in infancy), she was a great-granddaughter of John Breckinridge, Kentucky Senator and Attorney General under Jefferson, and a distant cousin of John C. Breckinridge, Lincoln's opponent in 1860. Her father, to whom Sophonisba was devoted, was a Southern liberal of the school of Wade Hampton (his relative by marriage) and a firm believer in the education of women. Repeatedly he urged his daughter to uphold the family reputation "for good thinking and courageous utterance." "The name has been connected with good intellectual work for some generations—for over a century;—you must preserve this connection for the next generation," he once wrote her (Nov. 16, 1902). Sophonisba did not shrink from such a role, but after her graduation from Wellesley in 1888 there followed a period of uncertainty and confusion. For a time, while her father was in Congress, she taught high school mathematics in Washington, D.C.; after his defeat in 1894, she returned to Lexington to study in his law office and keep house for the family, her mother having died in 1892. This was a time of family crisis, for her father had been sued for breach of promise by a woman with whom, it was disclosed in 1894, he had been having an affair for nine years—a moral lapse for which he was denounced in feminist circles as "the notorious Breckinridge of Kentucky" (Woman's Journal, Oct. 10, 1896, p. 321). Breckinridge, furthermore, did not altogether sympathize with his daughter's decision to pursue a legal career. Indeed, it was only "her own tears" that finally overcame her father's and brothers' objections (May Estelle Cook in Social Service Review, March 1949, p. 94). She successfully passed Kentucky's bar examination—the first woman to do so— but her law practice did not prosper. By 1895

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Breckinridge she was so baffled and discouraged that her family feared for her welfare. Is was at this point that May Estelle Cook, a Wellesley classmate, persuaded her to come to live with her in Oak Park, 111., and to become secretary to MARIÓN TALBOT, dean of women at the University of Chicago. Through Miss Talbot's influence Miss Breckinridge secured a fellowship in political science and began studies leading to the Ph.D., which she was awarded in 1901, the first woman to receive that degree in her field. She then entered the university's law school, graduating J.D. in 1904. That year she became an instructor, and in 1909 an assistant professor, in Miss Talbot's new department of household administration. Here she taught courses on the economic and legal aspects of family life and in 1912 collaborated with Miss Talbot on a book, The Modern Household. She was still not satisfied with the course of her career, but like so many of the women social workers and reformers of the period, she was a long time discovering her true field of interest. In 1906, at forty, she published two articles in the Journal of Political Economy on legal aspects of the employment of women in industry. These evidently came to the attention of MARGARET DREIER ROBINS, who in 1907 introduced her to the newly formed Women's Trade Union League, which immediately caught her interest. Now drawn into the circle of Chicago reformers, she became a resident of Hull House, where she continued until 1920 to spend part of each year. It was in 1907, too, that in addition to her duties in the University of Chicago she began to teach in the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, founded by Graham Taylor four years earlier to train social workers. She soon became dean of the school and, in 1908, head of its research department, succeeding JULIA LATHROP. Edith Abbott (1876-1957), a friend from graduateschool days, became her assistant. It was not long before her work began to reflect her new surroundings and interests. Abandoning the rather dry researches of her early career—her doctoral thesis had been a history of legal tender—she plunged into the kind of intensive firsthand observation and analysis that JANE ADDAMS and her friends had used in their Hull-House Maps and Papers (1895). Out of their own and their students' observations of the teeming, squalid life of Chicago's West Side, Miss Breckinridge and Miss Abbott wrote The Delinquent Child and the Home (1912) and Truancy and Ν on-Attendance in the Chicago Schools (1917), describing the breakdown of family life under the impact of

urban conditions. Another study, New Homes for Old ( 1921 ), grew out of the same experience and dealt with the same problem. She viewed these books not as sociological research —she was quite emphatic in wishing to maintain the independence of social work from sociology—but as an effort to put into the hands of social workers the raw materials of their discipline. Soon she was deeply involved not only with the study of social conditions but with actual welfare administration and social reform movements. Her life became a hectic round of meetings, conferences, interviews, campaigns, and causes. She shunned vacations and social diversions. "I would rather have a good fight any afternoon, even if I get beaten, than to go to a party any time!" she declared (New York Times, Dec. 22, 1933). Her correspondence, reflecting the frantic pace of the social worker's life, consists largely of memoranda scribbled hastily to fellow workers dealing with some specific point of information: "Do you know this person?" "Can you do anything about this?" Indeed, every facet of her work shows this absorption in concrete detail, this passion for facts. Her books are staggering compilations of information, the text almost submerged in charts, graphs, maps, and tables. Miss Breckinridge's varied activities in these years exemplify the close relation between social research, philanthropy, and reform in the Progressive period. She investigated tenement conditions as a city health inspector, prepared a report on the first ten years of Chicago's pioneering juvenile court movement, served on the executive committee of the state Consumers' League, acted as an informal adviser to Julia Lathrop (and later GRACE ABBOTT) of the Children's Bureau, campaigned for a federal child labor law, and in 1908 helped organize, and became the first secretary of, Chicago's Immigrants' Protective League. As an early and active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she also championed the rights of Negroes, as had her father before her. The rights of women understandably appeared to Miss Breckinridge a matter of special importance. She was elected a vicepresident of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1911, but she insisted on the importance of economic equality for women as well. She consistently supported women's trade unions, and as a lawyer she helped draft bills regulating the wages and hours of women's employment. With Jane

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Breckinridge Addams, she was partly responsible for the Progressive party's endorsement of these issues in 1912, and she campaigned enthusiastically for the Progressive ticket. As an early president of the Woman's City Club of Chicago and as a national officer of the American Association of University Women she was one of those through whose influence the woman's club movement ceased to be merely social and became increasingly activist and reformist. Though not strictly speaking a pacifist, Miss Breckinridge was also drawn into the peace movement, perhaps because of her close association with Jane Addams, perhaps because of her view that the work of social welfare had to be attacked, in the last analysis, on the international level. She helped organize the Woman's Peace Party in 1915 and served as its secretary. In the same year she and other Hull House residents went as delegates to the International Congress of Women at The Hague, out of which grew the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. It was, however, as a teacher of social work that Miss Breckinridge exercised her greatest influence, and it was to this, increasingly, that she devoted her energies. In 1920, largely through Miss Breckinridge's efforts (and over the objections of founder Graham Taylor), the struggling Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy was absorbed by the University of Chicago and became its Graduate School of Social Service Administration. Miss Breckinridge considered this accomplishment one of her most important. She now became associate professor of social economy, both in the new school and in Marion Talbot's department of household administration, continuing also as assistant dean of women, a post she had held since 1902. She advanced to professor of social economy in 1925 and Samuel Deutsch Professor of Public Welfare Administration in 1929. Working in close collaboration with Edith Abbott, who became dean of the School of Social Service Administration in 1924, Miss Breckinridge shaped it to her own clear vision of what such an institution should be. Social workers, she thought, should not be narrow technicians, but men and women with fully professional training. Accordingly, rigorous course work was emphasized to a degree hitherto unheard-of in schools of social work. As she had done in her own career, she wished the school to reconcile knowing and doing—social research and social welfare administration—and to bridge the gap between the university and the community, to the enrichment of both. Another cardinal principle with Miss

Breckinridge was that the state must be the key element in any extensive program of social welfare. She stressed this view in her courses, in such books as Family Welfare Work in a Metropolitan Community (1924), Public Welfare Administration (1927), and The Family and the State (1934)—essentially collections of documents for course use—and in the Social Service Review, the distinguished professional journal which she helped found in 1927 and of which she was an editor until her death. This emphasis on the role of government was not popular in the 1920's, but it gained favor in the New Deal period, and by 1935 registration at the Chicago School of Social Service Administration had soared to over 1,300 and Miss Breckinridge's former students were finding places in burgeoning public welfare programs across the country. Her stature in the profession was recognized in 1933 when she was named by President Roosevelt a delegate to the Pan-American Congress in Montevideo, the first woman to be so honored, and in 1934 when she was elected president of the American Association of Schools of Social Work. Not the least of Sophonisba Breckinridge's assets as a social work leader was her personal charm. Her students attest to her warmth, enthusiasm, and brilliance in the classroom. The combination of toughness and sensitivity she urged on students and colleagues was her own most distinguishing characteristic, manifested alike in her deceptively delicate ninetypound frame, in her pale, thin face and sharply etched features surmounted by a mass of dark hair, and in her graceful but commanding treble voice tinged with the Southern accent she never wholly lost. "Nisba" to her friends, she was noted also for her humor, a quality not always associated with the work of reforming society. A Presbyterian and an independent Democrat, she never married. Although she retired from her professorship in 1942, she worked a full and heavy schedule until a few months before her death, which occurred in Chicago in 1948, when she was eighty-two. The cause was a perforated ulcer and long-standing arteriosclerosis. After funeral services in her home, her cremated remains were interred in her native Lexington. [Miss Breckinridge herself deposited her father's papers and her own in the Library of Congress. Her consciousness of carrying on the family tradition, of living under the shadow of history, is suggested by the care with which she preserved her own correspondence, down to the minutest item. Biographical articles and tributes appeared in the

Social Service Rev. for Dec, 1948, Mar. 1949, and

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Breese Sept. 1949. See also N.Y. Times, July 31, 1948; Edith Abbott in the World Today, Apr. 1911; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXXVII, 65; Louise C. Wade, Graham Taylor ( 1 9 6 4 ) , chap, vi; and Helen R. Wright, "Three against Time," Social Service Rev., Mar. 1954. Information about her academic posts from Univ. of Chicago Library and the Univ.'s Annual Register. Death certificate from 111. Dept. of Public Health. Miss Breckinridge's own works include, besides those mentioned above, Madeline McDowell Breckinridge ( 1 9 2 1 ) , a biography of her sister-in-law; Women in the Twentieth Century (1931); Marriage and the Civic Rights of Women (1931); and The III. Poor Law and Its Administration ( 1 9 3 9 ) . ] CHRISTOPHER

B R E E S E , Zona Gale. See

GALE,

LASCH

Zona.

BRENT, Margaret (c. 1601-c. 1671), colonial landowner and business agent, executor for the governor of Maryland at a time of crisis in the colony's affairs, was one of thirteen children, five of them sons, of Richard and Elizabeth (Reed) Brent. Her father was Lord of Admington and Lark Stoke in the county of Gloucester, England; her mother's line descended from Edward III. Nothing is known of Margaret Brent's early life except that she was reared a Roman Catholic, but she evidently received some education. On Nov. 22, 1638-four years after the colony's founding—she arrived in Maryland with her sister Mary, her brothers Giles and Fulke (Fulke returned the following March), and a group of servants. They came armed with a letter from Cecilius Calvert (Lord Baltimore), the proprietor of the colony, recommending that they be granted land on the same terms as had been allowed the first "adventurers" or settlers. Margaret and Mary together took up 70/2 acres—called "Sisters Freehold"—in St. Mary's City, the capital of the young colony, and in 1642 Margaret acquired from her brother Giles a thousand acres on Kent Island in payment of debts he owed her and members of the Reed family. We know this property included a mill and a house and that she raised much livestock there. She evidently lent from her capital, for the Provincial Court records disclose that she filed frequent suits to collect debts. Although only fragmentary evidence is available about the Brents, it is clear that the family was influential during the early years of Maryland settlement. It has been often stated, although never confirmed, that Leonard Calvert, brother of Lord Baltimore and the colony's governor, married Anne Brent,

another sister of Margaret; if true this might explain their favored position. Whatever the reason, Giles Brent was at various times a member of the council, acting governor, and commander of Kent Island. Margaret occasionally appeared before the Provincial Court to plead for herself and sometimes for others. With Governor Calvert she shared guardianship of Mary Kitomaquund, the daughter of the chief of the Piscataway Indians who had been sent to be educated among the whites. She so won the confidence of the Governor that, as he lay dying in May 1647, he declared her, in an oral will, his executor. This was a time of crisis in the colony's affairs. Governor Calvert had just regained control of Maryland after the two-year Ingle's Rebellion, a revolt of Protestants against the Catholic government of the colony. To put down this revolt Calvert had brought soldiers from Virginia, and he had pledged his own estate and, if necessary, that of his brother the Proprietor as security for their pay. Whether he would have made Margaret his executor had Giles Brent been available we cannot know; Ingle had taken Giles prisoner to England, and Giles did not arrive back in Maryland until a few days after Calvert's death. Calvert, in his deathbed testament, named Thomas Green as governor, but in giving Margaret Brent charge of his estate he told her to "Take all, pay all," thus entrusting to her the important power to avert mutiny and other disorders. Margaret Brent proved a wise choice. She may possibly have been guided by her brother, but his own career exhibited no outstanding leadership to explain her success. Diplomacy and patience as well as courage were necessary to keep the soldiers quiet until they could be paid. A severe corn shortage forced her to import corn from Virginia to feed them, and Leonard Calvert's personal estate proved inadequate to cover the costs of their food and pay. She finally acquired, as executor for Governor Calvert, the power of attorney he had held to act for the Lord Proprietor; she then drew on the Proprietor's cattle, and sold enough to raise the balance of the needed funds. The soldiers, once paid, evidently dispersed—some became settlers—and meantime Governor Green and the council had gained the time they needed to reestablish government and order. A by-product of these events was the action for which Margaret Brent is today best known, but which presumably had no special significance at the time. On Jan. 21, 1647/8, she demanded two votes in the assembly, one for

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Brent herself as a freeholder—to which she would have been entitled had she been a man—and the other for herself as the Proprietor's attorney. The cryptic record, which gives no hint of her motivation in making this demand, tells that "The Gouï denyed that the si Mrs Brent should have any uote in the howse. And the s? Mrs Brent protested agst all proceedings in this pñt Assembly, unlesse shee may be pñt. and have vote as afores?" (Archives of Maryland, I, 215). Lord Baltimore, in England, angrily protested the sale of his property, but the assembly defended Mistress Brent in terms that reveal how important her steady hand had been during a serious crisis. "As for M rs Brents undertaking and medling with your Lordships Estate here . . . it was better for the Collonys safety at that time in her hands then in any mans else in the whole Province after your Brothers death for the Soldiers would never have treated any others with that Civility and respect . . . she rather desrved favour and thanks from your Honour for her so much Concurring to the publick safety then to be justly liable to all those bitter invectives you have been pleased to Express against her" (ibid., 238-39). Baltimore's concern undoubtedly rested on more than pique. The triumph of a Protestant Parliament in England placed his charter in danger, and he could not afford the appearance of favoring Roman Catholics. Giles Brent may not have helped Margaret's case: he was a partisan of the Jesuits, who had contributed heavily in settlers and capital to the establishment of the colony, but whose presence there was now a threat; and he had married the Indian princess Mary Kitomaquund and may have hoped through her to gain land and independent power. Lord Baltimore clearly suspected the Brents of bad faith in dealing with his estate, for his instruction to the governor confirming the sale of his cattle to pay the soldiers explicitly exempted any property of his acquired by any of the Brents. Not long thereafter the Brents left Maryland, whether voluntarily or not the record does not make clear. By 1650 Giles had moved to Virginia and by 1651 Margaret and Mary had followed him. Here they took up lands in the Northern Neck, imported large numbers of settlers, and contributed substantially to the development of this part of Virginia. Margaret Brent named her Virginia plantation "Peace," and so far as we know her years in Virginia lived up to the name. The date of her death is not known, but her will was probated in May 1671. In her lifetime and by will she

gave away her extensive rights to land in Maryland. In the twentieth century much has been made of Margaret Brent as an early woman "lawyer" and feminist. It should be remembered, however, that many well-educated Englishmen of the seventeenth century knew enough law to conduct affairs of business without being considered members of the legal profession, and the early Maryland courts did not set professional standards or swear attorneys as officers of the court. In Margaret Brent's day most Maryland litigants appeared in propria persona. Whether she or anyone who appeared for others was considered to be more than an attorney-in-fact is uncertain. Equally uncertain are her motives for demanding double voice in the assembly. Probably foremost was not concern for the rights of her sex but a desire to push action and to protect Lord Baltimore's interests. On the other hand, had she done nothing beyond coming to a wilderness as an independent househqlder (not a member of any man's establishment), able to stand alone, manage her affairs, and appear for herself in court, Margaret Brent would be an unusual woman. Events placed her suddenly in a position where her firm action and right judgment were critical to the fortunes of the Maryland colony. Her brief public career has more importance in the history of Maryland than in the history of women; nevertheless, the men who served with her evidently felt that it was not only her strength but also her womanliness that inspired "Civility and respect" and saved the day. [.Archives of Md. ( 6 0 vols., 1 8 8 3 - 1 9 6 4 ) , vols. I, IV, and X; Provincial Court Deeds BB, 20θ-11, and S, f. 460 (MSS., Hall of Records, Annapolis); Nell Marion Nugent, Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Va. Land Patents and Grants, 1623-1800 (1934), vol. I; Julia Cherry Spruill, "Mistress Margaret Brent, Spinster," Md. Hist. Mag., Dec. 1934, and Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies ( 1 9 3 8 ) ; W. B. Chilton, comp., "The Brent Family," Va. Mag. of Hist, and Biog., Apr. 1905, Jan., Apr., July 1908; Edwin Warfield Beitzell, The Jesuit Missions of St. Mary's County, Md. ( 1959 ) ; Anton-Hermann Chroust, The Rise of the Legal Profession in America, I ( 1 9 6 5 ) , 244-45.] LOIS G R E E N

CARR

BRIDGES, Fidelia (May 19, 1834-May 14, 1923), painter, was born in Salem, Mass., the youngest daughter and third of four surviving children of Henry Gardner Bridges and Eliza (Chadwick) Bridges. Her father, a descendant of Edmund Bridges who had come to Lynn,

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Mass., from England in 1635, was a shipmaster in the China trade who died at Canton in 1849. Fidelia's mother died three months later, leaving the oldest daughter, Eliza, a Salem schoolteacher, to support the younger children. In the autumn of 1854 Eliza moved the family to Brooklyn, N.Y., where there were family friends, and started her own school there. Fidelia found employment as a mother's helper and teacher in the family of William Augustus Brown, a Quaker and a former Salem shipowner, now a prosperous produce dealer. After Eliza's death, in 1856, Fidelia and her next oldest sister, Elizabeth, took over the school. Fidelia, however, soon abandoned teaching in order to concentrate on her drawing lessons, and in 1860 she enrolled in the Philadelphia studio of William Trost Richards, a leading disciple of the English Pre-Raphaelite school. By 1862 she had her own studio in downtown Philadelphia, but she continued her friendship with Richards and his family, accompanying them on sketching trips in the Lehigh Valley and at Lake George, in New York state. Through his influence she was soon exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; he also introduced her to his wealthy patrons, several of whom became buyers of her work. In 1865 she returned to Brooklyn and to the Browns, establishing her studio on the top floor of their home. Her painting during these years, primarily done in oil, shows the influence of Richards' teaching, with its Pre-Raphaelite emphasis on exact, botanically correct copying of nature in loving detail. A year of painting and study in Rome, where she shared living quarters with the sculptor ANNE WHITNEY and her companion Adeline Manning, did not change her style; following her return to New York in the fall of 1868 she exhibited at the National Academy of Design. By 1871 her medium had switched from oil to watercolor, and her subject matter had narrowed to the depiction of the tiniest details of nature. In June 1871 Miss Bridges discovered at Stratford, Conn., a congenial combination of meadows, flats, and wild flowers; she delighted also in the bird life along the Housatonic River and in green salt grass lining its banks. For the next seven years she summered in Stratford, as did Oliver I. Lay, a Brooklyn friend and artist who, with his wife and children, came to take the place in her life that Richards had occupied. Her work during these years is her best, taking as its subjects the flowers and birds of the Connecticut countryside. "Daisies and Clover," a watercolor of 1871, illustrates the individuality and charm of her

mature style—the concentration of microscopic detail in the frontal plane of the picture and the use of vivid yet delicate color to bring detail to life. "Thrush in Wild Flowers" (1874) introduced a new subtlety of design, the branches of the plant forming a geometric pattern into which the single bird was deftly placed; and her use of vivid purples and whites was heightened by the discarding of a traditionally composed background for the bare paper. By 1875 she had come to concentrate on birds, sometimes in flight, with a mood of reverie, of gentle melancholy. Now gaining recognition in American art circles, Miss Bridges in 1873 was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design; in 1874 she joined the American Water-Color Society, and in 1876 she was invited to exhibit at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Her illustrations appeared in Scribner's Monthly (August 1876), for an article by John Burroughs, and in Si. Nicholas, accompanying a poem by LUCY LARCOM. Beginning as early as 1876 she also did work for the Boston lithographer Louis Prang, particularly Christmas and other greeting cards. She illustrated several books about birds, including Favorite Birds and What the Poets Sing of Them (1888), an anthology of poems compiled by Josephine Pollard. In 1879-80 she spent a year in England visiting her brother, Henry, who had returned from China after service as a tea taster for a British firm. During this stay she exhibited at the Royal Academy. Her work now showed increasing evidence of an Oriental influence, a heightening of her feeling for asymmetrical designs and blank backgrounds. She returned from England to the Brown mansion in Brooklyn, which had remained her headquarters throughout these years. In 1883 she accepted the offer of one of her patrons, Mark Twain, to serve for a year as governess of his three little girls. Fidelia Bridges moved in 1892 to the village of Canaan, Conn., where she rented a small house on a hillside overlooking a millstream. She soon became a familiar village figure, tall, elegant, beautiful even in her sixties, her hair swept back, her attire always formal, even when sketching in the fields or riding her bicycle through town. Her life was quiet and unostentatious, her friends unmarried ladies of refinement and of literary and artistic taste whom she joined for woodland picnics and afternoon teas. After the turn of the century her artistic productivity steadily decreased, though she continued to travel to England to visit her brother and to New York to keep in touch with the artistic world. She died at Canaan of a

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Bridgman paralytic stroke five days before her eightyninth birthday, and was buried there. The career of Fidelia Bridges was remarkable for its devotion to a limited area of artistic matter and manner within which she achieved distinction and individuality. Her art combines the temper of romanticism with the technique of a scientist; and she successfully joined the spirit of the Middle Ages, as revived and interpreted by the Pre-Raphaelites, with the spirit of the Orient. [Manuscript sources include the Northey Family Papers, Essex Inst., Salem, Mass.; Anne Whitney Papers, Wellesley College Library; Oliver I. Lay Papers, in the possession of Mrs. Charles D. Lay, Stratford, Conn.; Mark Twain Papers, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley; and papers at Mark Twain Memorial, Hartford, Conn. Other material from personal reminiscences of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Eddy, Canaan, Conn., and Mrs. Charles D. Lay (who also have paintings and watercolors by Miss Bridges ) and from biographical material assembled by Mrs. J. B. Hoptner, N.Y. City. There are brief and not always accurate accounts of Fidelia Bridges in the standard art dictionaries and elsewhere. See also Alice Sawtelle Randall, "Conn. Artists and Their Work," Conn. Mag., Feb.-Mar. 1902; Harrison S. Morris, Masterpieces of the Sea: William T. Richards ( 1912 ) ; and, for the Pre-Raphaelite background, David H. Dickasoii, The Daring Young Men ( 1 9 5 3 ) . For the Bridges genealogy see Essex Antiquarian, Jan. 1908. The published Salem Vital Records verify her birth year.] F R E D E R I C A.

SHARF

BRIDGMAN, Eliza Jane Gillet (May 6, 1805Nov. 10, 1871), early missionary educator in China, was born at Derby, Conn., the youngest of the nine children of Canfield and Hannah Gillet. Her father, of French Huguenot descent, was a merchant. He died when Eliza was ten years old, after which she and her mother removed to New Haven. There Eliza received her education in a boarding school, graduating at sixteen and then staying on as an assistant teacher. She had been baptized in St. James's Episcopal Church in Derby as an infant, and was confirmed in 1821 in Trinity Church, New Haven, following a profound personal experience in a religious revival there. Two years later Miss Gillet, with her mother, moved to New York City, where one of her sisters was living. The young woman continued her teaching career and, at the age of twenty-two, became principal of a boarding school for girls, continuing in that post for seventeen years. A member of St. George's Episcopal Church, where she taught a Bible class in the church school for many years, she was like a daughter to its influential rector, Dr. James Milnor.

Miss Gillet first came to a sense of her missionary vocation through reading Christian Researches in Asia (1811) by Claudius Buchanan, and this sense was further stimulated by other reading and by participating in the farewell party for the second group of missionaries going to the Hawaiian Islands. Her interest steadily increased through her association with Dr. Milnor, a leading member of the Foreign Committee of the Board of Missions of the Protestant Episcopal Church and its first secretary. American mission boards, however, were reluctant to commission unmarried women. At length the Episcopal Church decided upon the full organization of its China mission (begun in 1836), consecrated the Rev. William J. Boone as missionary bishop, and recruited a staff of new missionaries, including three single women teachers, of whom Miss Gillet was one. She was appointed Nov. 14, 1843, and sailed with the Bishop's party on Dec. 14, 1844, from New York in the ship Horatio. When this company arrived in Hong Kong, Boone lodged Miss Gillet and a married couple in the home of Elijah Coleman Bridgman (1801-1861), the first American missionary to China, who had been serving there under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions since 1830. Dr. Bridgman, having given up his intention of remaining celibate, was relying upon God to send him a wife; believing that Miss Gillet was the answer to his prayer, he proposed and was accepted before the Episcopal missionaries could take ship to Shanghai. They were married on June 28, 1845, in the Colonial Chapel with the entire missionary community in attendance. Having transferred to the jurisdiction of her husband's American Board and to the Congregational Church, Mrs. Bridgman began her missionary work in Canton. While studying the Cantonese dialect, she secured two young girls as pupils and wards. These she took with her to form the nucleus of a school when her husband's work called them to Shanghai in 1847. In April 1850, after recruiting additional pupils by house-to-house visits, Mrs. Bridgman opened the first Protestant day school for girls in Shanghai with a teaching staff of native Chinese. Boarding students were added that fall, and the school, located in the Shanghai suburb of Wongka Moda, soon reached its full complement of fifty pupils. The curriculum included reading and writing, singing, domestic crafts, and religious instruction. A number of girls became Christians, thus providing suitable wives for Christian young men. In 1852-53 Bridgman's ill health forced them to go to the United States on furlough; on the homeward

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Bridgman voyage Mrs. Bridgman compiled from her diary a book entitled Daughters of China ( 1853). Back again in Shanghai, she resumed direction of her school and continued it after Bridgman's death in 1861, but her own health was so poor that she was persuaded to leave for the United States in 1862; her school was then transferred to the Presbyterian mission. During this furlough she wrote a biography of her husband, The Life and Labors of Elijah Coleman Bridgman (1864). A nearly fatal injury from a runaway horse delayed Mrs. Bridgman's return to the field, but in 1864 she reached her new station, the American Board's North China Mission at Peking. This location required the learning of a new type of Chinese, Kuo-yii or Mandarin. The residents of Peking were more suspicious of foreigners than the people of Shanghai had been, and there was general opposition to the education of girls. Once again Mrs. Bridgman gathered pupils, opened a school, and through her pupils made contacts with their mothers and friends. Possessing independent means, she not only provided the funds for the land, buildings, and operation of the school but also contributed about $12,500 to the establishment of the Peking Station of the American Board. But her personal efforts exceeded her strength, and after four years of ceaseless endeavor and the successful launching of her school, she was forced to go once again to Shanghai, in October 1868, in the hope of improvement. There she participated in the development of a newly opened school for girls, teaching and investing her own funds to the extent of $5,000 in its buildings and grounds. This final effort exhausted her, and she died in Shanghai in 1871, at the age of sixty-six. She was buried beside her husband in the Shanghai cemetery. Her Peking school, Bridgman Academy, later evolved, under the direction of L U E L L A M I N E R , into the Woman's College of Yenching University. Colleagues in China judged Mrs. Bridgman to have been an exceptionally successful missionary and teacher. They attributed her achievement to her tireless zeal, her choice of a field of labor suited to her talents and open to a favorable response, her rare perseverance in overcoming obstacles, an unusual power to concentrate her efforts upon the one thing immediately before her, and her faithfulness in prayer. Reporting her death to the Board, the North China Mission's spokesman stated: "Mrs. Bridgman won, in a high degree, the respect of the Chinese. Her truthfulness and justice in her dealings with them, her earnest labors on their behalf and her abounding charity to the

poor, made a deep impression upon hearts."

their

[In addition to her books, see obituaries in Chinese Recorder, Mar., Apr. 1872, and Missionary Herald, Apr. 1872. See also Harold S. Matthews, SeventyFive Years of the North China Mission (Peking, 1942), pp. 40-41. Information on Mrs. Bridgman's mother from Conn. State Library, Hartford. On her husband, see Diet. Am. Biog. and Ε. M. Bliss, ed., Encyc. of Missions, I (1891), 193-94.] R. PIERCE BEAVER

BRIDGMAN, Laura Dewey (Dec. 21, 1 8 2 9 May 24, 1889), the first blind deaf-mute to be educated, was born in Etna near Hanover, N.H., of old New England stock, the third daughter and third of eight children of Daniel and Harmony (Downer) Bridgman. Her father, a farmer in comfortable circumstances, served in later years as a member of the state legislature. Laura was apparently normal at birth, although somewhat delicate. At about the age of two, however, she was stricken with scarlet fever during an epidemic in which her two older sisters died. Her sight and hearing were destroyed, and her senses of smell and taste were severely impaired. Her recovery was slow. Not until she was four could she sit up all day; another year passed before she could be considered healthy. She was now like a little animal, dependent on natural gestures to express her desires. She followed her mother about all day, and by imitating her motions learned to sew, knit, and braid. Her only toy was an old boot which she fondled like a doll. She needed much more attention than she could be given. Fortunately, a kindly old handyman named Asa Tenny, with an addled brain but gentle ways, took her under his wing and became her constant companion, communicating with her by a system of signs. In offering the child the companionship and affection that no one else could, he rescued her from abysmal, subhuman loneliness. A newspaper account of Laura by a Dartmouth professor in the spring of 1837 attracted the attention of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, director of the Perkins Institution, a school for the blind in Boston. Howe was eager to try the experiment of teaching a deaf-blind pupil, despite the fact that contemporary theory indicated that this could not be done. The experience of the American Asylum, a school for the deaf at Hartford, Conn., seemed to bear out the theory, since it had had practically no success over the years in attempting to teach a deaf-blind inmate, Julia Brace. Howe journeyed to Hanover to see Laura for himself, and with her parents' consent he

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brought her to the Perkins Institution. She arrived on Oct. 4, 1837, not yet eight years old. A young teacher was assigned to be with her constantly, and while Laura adjusted herself to her new surroundings, Howe considered the method he would follow. He decided to teach her the alphabet and to have her express her wants by spelling out words, instead of having her rely on signs as Julia Brace did; this, he felt, would broaden her range of communication and comprehension. He labeled common objects with raised lettering. Laura felt an object and the letters. Then she matched separate labels with their appropriate piecesknives, forks, spoons, and cups. She did this for several weeks without much comprehension. Then the moment of insight came. Her teachers watched, Howe wrote in his report, as her "countenance lighted up with a human expression: it was no longer a dog, or parrotit was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits! I could almost fix upon the moment when this truth dawned upon her mind, and spread its light to her countenance; I saw the great obstacle was overcome, and that henceforward nothing but patient and persevering, plain and straightforward efforts were to be used." Letter by letter she learned the alphabet, its printed form as a raised letter, and the manual alphabet for tapping into the hands of others for instantaneous communication. The process was slow and tedious, but successful. Laura learned to read, and to write by using specially grooved paper, along with other subjects of the common school curriculum. Howe's reports of his successful experiment aroused wide interest in America and Europe, and Laura Bridgman became a wonder of the day. No trip to Boston was complete without a visit to see her; on exhibition days people flocked to Perkins to stand behind a barrier and watch her at work. Charles Dickens marveled at her in 1842; his account in American Notes, published in 1843, added to her fame. Laura's formal education ceased at twenty. Thereafter, without special assistance, she made little progress. She had visited her family every year during school vacations, and at twenty-three she returned to her home, planning to live there permanently since there was nothing more the Perkins Institution could do for her. But after so many years away she found herself unable to adjust to life at home, and she went back to Perkins to stay for the rest of her life, save for summers with her family. She spent her time performing simple duties—knitting, crocheting, sewing, cleaning, and making beds. Occasionally she assisted in

teaching sewing; she was said to be very strict. Her correspondence, always extensive, occupied much of her time. Bequests, including a trust fund left at his death by Dr. Howe, gave her a modest income, and she earned small sums through the sale of her handiwork to tourists. Howe had avoided formally instructing her in religion, since he did not consider it his proper function to indoctrinate her with any theological dogmas. He did teach Laura the basic beliefs common to all Christians, and she ultimately joined the Baptist Church of her parents. Baptized by immersion in July 1862 at Hanover, she remained a devout believer for the rest of her life. She died of pneumonia and erysipelas in her sixtieth year at the Perkins Institution in Boston and was buried in Hanover. Laura Bridgman was one of the most widely studied individuals of the nineteenth century. Dr. Howe once sent electric charges through her to see if any of the destroyed senses could be activated. Francis Lieber wrote a learned paper on her vocal sounds. The eminent psychologist G. Stanley Hall observed her in 1878. After her death Dr. Henry H. Donaldson made a detailed anatomical study of her brain that is a landmark in the literature of neurology. But her significance was more than scientific. Through her the world became aware of a class of people critically in need of assistance. Her education paved the way for that of her most famous successor, the gifted Helen Keller, whose teacher, ANNE SULLIVAN MACY, had studied at the Perkins school. To Laura Bridgman's own age she was a symbol of progress, a token of the general belief in the perfectibility of human affairs. [The Laura Bridgman Papers, at the Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown, Mass., include her journals and letters, scrapbooks of news items about her, and journals kept by her teachers. The Howe family papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard Univ., also contain much valuable information. Edward C. Sanford edited a selection of her writings for the Overland Monthly, Oct. and Dec. 1886, reprinted as The Writings of Laura Bridgman (1887). Howe's annual reports as director of the Perkins Institution contain a running account of her education until her twentieth year; the 43rd report ( 1875 ) is also valuable. Among secondary works, the most useful are Mary Swift Lamson, Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman (1878), written by one of her teachers; and Maud Howe Elliott and Florence Howe Hall, Laura Bridgman: Dr. Howe's Famous Pupil and What He Taught Her ( 1 9 0 3 ) , by two of Howe's articulate daughters, who also knew Laura. Harold Schwartz, Samuel Gridley Howe ( 1 9 5 6 ) , gives a detailed description of her education. The Letters and Journals

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of Samuel Gridley Howe (2 vols., 1906-09), compiled by his daughter Laura E. Richards, contains a chapter on Laura Bridgman. Death record from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics.] HAROLD

SCHWARTZ

BRIGGS, Emily Pomona Edson (Sept. 14, 1830—July 3, 1910), journalist, known by the pseudonym "Olivia," was born at Burton, Ohio, one of four daughters of Robert Edson and his wife Mary (Polly) Umberfield (originally Umberville). Emily's father, a blacksmith, had come to Ohio from his native Vermont in 1816; her mother was the daughter of pioneer Connecticut settlers in Burton. In 1840 Edson moved his family to a farm north of Chicago, 111., and in 1854 to the city itself, where he prospered in real estate. Emily attended local schools and taught for a time at Painesville, Ohio. She was married about 1854 to John R. Briggs, Jr., who had recently (1853) served in the Wisconsin legislature. They had two children: John Edson, who became a real estate operator and survived his mother, and Arthur, who died in infancy. Emily Briggs moved with her husband to Keokuk, Iowa, where in August 1854 he became part owner of the Daily Whig, next year renamed the Gate City. She thus acquired her first taste of journalism. An active worker for the Iowa Republican Party, John Briggs was on friendly terms with Abraham Lincoln and reported the Lincoln-Douglas debates. These political contacts led to his appointment in 1861 as assistant clerk of the United States House of Representatives by Col. John W. Forney, clerk of the House and owner of the Washington Chronicle and Philadelphia Press. Taking up residence in Washington just as war broke out, Emily Briggs became dismayed by the press attacks on the women who were then finding employment as government clerks, and wrote an article for the Chronicle refuting the charges that they were inefficient. Its spirited style impressed Forney, who was intrigued to find that the author was the wife of one of his clerks. He engaged her to write a daily column for the Philadelphia Press and chose her pen name, "Olivia." Mrs. Briggs began with book reviews and descriptions of wartime Washington. The first woman to go regularly to the White House for news, she often accompanied her husband when he reported to President Lincoln on political trends in the border states. She was a favorite of the Lincolns and wrote sympathetically of Mrs. Lincoln during her most troubled days. When peace came she broadened her scope and soon acquired a national reputation

for her pointed and newsy comment on political and social affairs. Her columns, later collected in book form as The Olivia Letters (1906), appeared regularly for over twenty years in Washington and Philadelphia. Mrs. Briggs was one of the first women correspondents to use the telegraph for spot news, a change of pace from the leisurely feuilleton characteristic of the woman journalist up to that time. She was the first president of the Woman's National Press Association, organized in 1882, and was among the first women admitted to the Congressional press gallery. Her style lacked the bite and malice common to many of the correspondents of the era, but she could be sharp and witty on occasion. "Instead of cultivating their minds," she wrote in 1881, "the 'society women' at Washington are expending the last show of vitality in the adorning of their bodies. Flitting from one 'palatial mansion' to another . . . these human butterflies make no more impression on the world at large than the moths which they so much resemble" (Olivia Letters, pp. 412-13). An admirer of Mrs. Briggs found none of the Washington journalists "more industrious, more pains-taking, than she, not one who gets hold of better news, and not one who equals her in independence and originality" (Lurton D. Ingersoll, The Life of Horace Greeley, 1873, p. 180). A knowledgeable reporter of manners, fashions, and social news, she eventually became one of the better-known capital hostesses in her own right. Of medium height, with light brown hair, sharply arched eyebrows, and slanting blue eyes, Mrs. Briggs had gracious manners and was always fashionably dressed. In 1872 she and her husband purchased and moved into The Maples, a mansion on Capitol Hill dating from 1795. Here, six months later, Briggs died of tuberculosis. Surviving him by almost forty years, Mrs. Briggs continued to entertain many noted figures at The Maples until her own death there, of a cerebral hemorrhage, at age seventy-nine. She had, in her later years, become a member of the Baptist Church. She was buried beside her husband in Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago. [Obituary notices in Washington Evening Star, July 4, 1910, and Washington Post, July 5, 1910; interviews with Mrs. Briggs in Washington Times, Nov. 1, 1903, and Post, July 10, 1904; information from family records supplied by Edson W. Briggs, Bethesda, Md., a grandson, and Mrs. Flora Briggs Hoover, a granddaughter; Ishbel Ross, Ladies of the Press (1936). Death record from D.C. Dept. of Health. On Mrs. Briggs' parents, see Hist. Soc. of Geauga County, Ohio, Pioneer and General Hist.

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of Geauga County (1880), pp. 422, 425-27, 57071. On John R. Briggs, Jr., see The Hist, of Lee County, Iowa (1879), p. 535; Cong. Directory, 1861-72; and obituary notice in Washington Evening Star, Dec. 4, 1872. Briggs apparently had an older son by an earlier marriage; see Roy P. Basier, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), VIII, 366n.] ISHBEL ROSS

BRIGHT Flesche.

EYES.

See

TIBBLES,

Susette

La

BRITTON, Elizabeth Gertrude Knight (Jan. 9, 1858—Feb. 25, 1934), botanist, was bom in New York City, one of the five daughters of James and Sophie Anne (Compton) Knight. Her father and grandfather, of Scottish and Welsh extraction, operated a furniture factory and a sugar plantation near Matanzas, Cuba, where, with her family, she spent a considerable part of her childhood. There she attended private elementary schools and gained an interest in natural history. Between 1869 and 1873, when she lived for most of each year with her Grandmother Compton in New York City, she was a pupil at Dr. Benedict's private school. She then attended Normal (later Hunter) College in New York. After graduating in 1875, she was, although only seventeen, appointed to its staff, serving first as critic teacher in the model school ( 1 8 7 5 - 8 3 ) and then as assistant in natural science ( 1 8 8 3 - 8 5 ) . Because of an early interest in plants, she chose botany as her profession, becoming in December 1879 a member of the Torrey Botanical Club. She brought out her first scientific paper—on albinism in plants—in March 1883, and the following September, her first on mosses, the result of her discovery of the fruit of Eustichium norvegicum. This marked the beginning of a long series of bryological papers that were to make her name familiar to students of mosses everywhere. On Aug. 27, 1885, Miss Knight was married to Nathaniel Lord Britton, an assistant in geology at Columbia College whose growing interest in botany led to his appointment the following year as an instructor in that field, in which he later achieved international renown. Mrs. Britton, who had no children, accompanied her husband on nearly all his botanical expeditions to various West Indies islands, her field observations and her collections adding greatly to the knowledge of mosses in that area. Because of her interest in bryology, it was only natural for her to take unofficial charge of the small moss collection at Columbia College and to increase it by exchange, purchase, and personal field work. A notable addition was the

great herbarium of mosses assembled by the Swiss bryologist August Jaeger, which was purchased in 1893 with the aid of generous donors. Mrs. Britton is credited with the first suggestion, prompted by a visit with her husband to the famous Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England, that New York should also have a great botanical garden. She and her husband, more than any other two individuals, were responsible, along with the Torrey Botanical Club and interested citizen groups, for the establishment and development of the New York Botanical Garden, on a 250-acre tract (later expanded) in the Bronx. It was incorporated in 1891, and Professor Britton became the first director-in-chief in 1896. During his tenure of more than thirty-three years, Mrs. Britton was his constant supporter. When the Botanical Garden collections, including the herbarium of Columbia College, were transferred to the Museum Building in 1899, she continued to devote her full-time volunteer services to the study and arrangement of the moss herbarium. In 1912 she was appointed honorary curator of mosses, a post she held for the rest of her life. Through her influence many other collections were acquired; the incorporation of the most important, that of the English bryologist William Mitten, purchased in 1906, occupied her spare time for years. To the dismay of some of her bryological colleagues, Mrs. Britton in later life devoted most of her energies not to further research but to wild-flower conservation. She was one of the prime movers in the founding of the Wild Flower Preservation Society of America in April 1902, and as secretary and treasurer became its motivating force. By published papers, lectures, and correspondence she helped arouse and guide the public sentiment that resulted in legislation to protect disappearing native plants in many states, in the establishment of branch societies to preserve wild flowers, and in the fostering of conservation activities in thousands of schools and garden clubs. In 1925, as chairman of the conservation committee of the Federated Garden Clubs of New York State, she was successful in urging a national boycott against the large-scale use of wild American holly for Christmas decorations and in advocating the practice, since followed, of cultivating holly from seed for commercial purposes. Mrs. Britton was a woman of great physical and mental energy and the possessor of a keen intellect. She was also a complex person, and recollections of her are not always easy to reconcile. Certainly in her later years she was a

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Brooks

strong-minded, outspoken, formidable woman who was easily moved to indignation, who took up causes, as with the crusade to save native plants. She was both impulsively generous and impulsively critical. Her impatience, touched with wrath, over what she considered to be careless or incompetent work is visible in her numerous signed reviews, as well as in her voluminous correspondence. Her students, however, to whom she devoted much time, characterized her as charming, vivacious, and helpful. As unofficial curator of Columbia University's moss collections, she was several times called upon to act as "major professor" to doctoral students in this field, among them Abel Joel Grout, who was to become in his turn the leading American bryologist. Although she wrote no books, her production of scientific papers, between 1 8 8 1 and 1930, numbered 3 4 6 titles. Moreover, while editor of the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club ( 1 8 8 6 - 8 8 ) , she undoubtedly published many editorial and book notices anonymously. Besides membership in several other botanical organizations, she was the principal founder, in 1898, and president from 1916 to 1919, of the Sullivant Moss Society—after 1949, the American Bryological Society. Mrs. Britton died at her home in the Bronx at the age of seventy-six following an apoplectic stroke; her husband survived her by four months. Although she was nominally an Episcopalian, she was buried in the Moravian Cemetery on Staten Island, on which her husband's forebears had been original settlers. Fifteen species of plants and the moss genus Bryobrittonia were named in her honor. In 1935, following her death and that of her husband, a double peak in the Luquillo National Park of easternmost Puerto Rico was given the name of Mount Britton. [The Library, Herbarium, and archives of the N.Y. Botanical Garden contain extensive correspondence, MSS., and other memorabilia of Mrs. Britton. A volume of MS. letters by her and her husband to William G. Farlow is in the Farlow Botanical Library, Harvard Univ. Of published sources, the fullest account is the article by Marshall A. Howe in Jour, of the N.Y. Botanical Garden, May 1934. See also A. J. Grout in Bryologist, Jan.-Feb. 1935; John H. Barnhart, "The Published Work of Elizabeth Gertrude Britton," Bull of the Torrey Botanical Club, Jan. 1935; C. Stuart Gager, "Elizabeth G. Britton and the Movement for the Preservation of Native Am. Wild Flowers," Jour, of the N.Y. Botanical Garden, June 1940; E. D. Merrill's memoir of Nathaniel Lord Britton in Nat. Acad, of Sciences, Biog. Memoirs, vol. XIX ( 1938), which has many references to Mrs. Britton; and entries on her in Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XXV, 89;

Am. Men of Science, 1st through 5th editions; and Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1 9 4 2 ) . Other information from: Jour, of the N.Y. Botanical Garden, Sept. 1934, pp. 210-11; Jan. 1935, pp. 16-17; and June 1940, pp. 142-^3; from files of the N.Y. Botanical Garden; and from Mr. Henry de la Montagne and other friends of Mrs. Britton.] WILLIAM CAMPBELL

B R O A D F O O T , Eleanor. See eonora Broadfoot.

STEERE

D E CISNEROS,

El-

B R O O K S , Maria Gowen (c. 1 7 9 4 - N o v . 11, 1 8 4 5 ) , poet, was born at Medford, Mass., to Eleanor (Cutter) Gowen and William Gowen, a prosperous goldsmith of Welsh descent. Though baptized Abigail Gowen, after her marriage she was rebaptized, with legal permission, as Mary Abigail Brooks. T h e Mary eventually became Maria, a name she preferred after her sojourns in Cuba, and she at times was presented to the literary world as "Maria del Occidente." She had at least two older brothers and three older sisters, one of whom, Lucretia, married John Brooks, a Boston merchant. In an atmosphere of prosperity, Maria early developed cultural skills and tastes, having attained by the age of twelve some proficiency in both music and painting, as well as a workable knowledge of several modern languages. In 1809, however, her father died a bankrupt, and she was placed under the protection of her brother-in-law John Brooks, now a widower of almost fifty and the father of two sons, apparently with the agreement that Maria was to marry Brooks when her education was completed. T h e marriage took place on Aug. 26, 1810, when the bride was scarcely sixteen years of age. F o r a short time Maria continued to live in affluence and to enjoy the social and cultural advantages of Boston. But, in 1812, on the loss of the major portion of his fortune, which had been invested in unsuccessful privateering vessels, Brooks removed his family to Portland, Maine, where his wife was subjected to the loneliness and boredom of a settlement that offered scant rewards to those in straitened circumstances. Meanwhile Maria bore her husband two children, Edgar (Nov. 25, 1 8 1 1 ) and Horace (Aug. 12, 1 8 1 3 ) , though she continued to lavish her affection equally upon both her sons and her stepsons. Her marital relations, however, were unsatisfactory, for she had married more out of gratitude and filial respect than for love. Furthermore she had suddenly experienced an intense passion for a young Canadian army officer, whose name remains a

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Brooks mystery. Forbidden both by convention and conscience to encourage such a passion, Maria, at least partially to relieve her frustration, turned to writing. At the age of nineteen she had composed a metrical romance in seven cantos, though it was never made public; in 1820 she published in Boston a small collection of verse entitled Judith, Esther, and Other Poems, by "A Lover of the Fine Arts." John Brooks died in 1823, and Maria sailed that October for Cuba to live with her brother William on the coffee plantation of an uncle near Matanzas. Here she declined an opportunity to wed a neighboring planter and shortly afterward proceeded to Canada, where she became engaged to the young army officer for whom she felt her heart had been destined. Eventually, however, the engagement was dissolved, and Maria underwent a violent emotional upset, twice attempting suicide by means of opium. Nursed back to health by a friend, she returned to Cuba, where she had fallen heir to the uncle's coffee plantation, a source of financial support for the rest of her life. She now began the composition of Ζôphiël; or, the Bride of Seven, an Oriental romance (based on several chapters of the apocryphal Book of Tobit) which dealt with the popular theme of the love of a fallen angel for a mortal maiden, who in this instance had been frustrated in a succession of marriages. The first canto of the poem she published in Boston in 1825, identifying herself with it merely as "Mrs. Brooks"; after completing all six cantos in 1829 she left Cuba for Hanover, N.H., to be with her younger son while he prepared for entrance into West Point. When Horace's appointment was delayed, she joined her brother Hammond on a trip to Europe, where through the influence of Washington Irving she obtained the assistance of Lafayette in hastening her son's appointment. From 1826 she had carried on a correspondence with the English poet Robert Southey, and in 1831, while in England, she called upon him. She now was a mature woman with an exquisitely fair complexion, azure blue eyes, a mass of golden hair, and a spellbinding talent for conversation in several languages. Moved by her personal and intellectual charms, Southey invited her to spend a few weeks as his guest, encouraged her to write a fictional account of her star-crossed life, and undertook to supervise the publication of her Ζ ôphiël, which appeared both in London and Boston in 1833 under the pseudonym Maria del Occidente. The following year Maria published a limited edition of the poem in Boston for the benefit of Polish refugees; but when the sale

proved embarrassingly small, she withdrew the issue. For several years, while her son Horace was a student (graduating in 1835) and assistant professor of mathematics (1836-39) at the United States Military Academy, Mrs. Brooks resided in the vicinity of West Point. Meanwhile she began work on a romantic autobiography which was to bear the curious title of Idomen: or, the Vale of Yumuri and which exposed many intimate details of her life, including her love for the young Canadian. Idomen was published serially in 1838 by the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette, but when the literary anthologist Rufus Griswold attempted to find someone who would issue it along with a complete edition of her works, he was forced to inform Maria that publishers regarded her writings as "of too elevated a nature to sell." Indignant, she herself thereupon financed a limited edition of Idomen which appeared in New York in 1843 under her pseudonym. Meanwhile from Cuba there had come news of the death of a stepson and of her son Edgar, and in December 1843 Maria returned to that island to mourn the dead and resume her writing. Two years later both she and her remaining stepson succumbed to tropical fever at Matanzas and were buried alongside their relatives at nearby Limonai. She had left uncompleted another epic of passion, "Beatriz, the Beloved of Columbus," and her lyrical fame was in consequence forced to rest primarily upon Ζ ôphiël, much of the interest of which lay in its copious and learned footnotes on ancient cultures as well as on tropical Cuban flora. Maria Brooks occasionally reached poetic heights, and she received praise from reputable critics, though some felt her efforts were too lofty for American tastes and ill adapted to the English taste, "which had been surfeited with 'Don Juan' and Tom Moore." Griswold placed her at the pinnacle of American poetesses and, at some risk, acclaimed her the "only American poet of her sex whose mind was thoroughly educated." Southey praised her highly, and after lightly deriding the popular theory of soul mates revealed in Ζ ôphiël, called her "the most empassioned and most imaginative of all poetesses" ( T h e Doctor, II, 178). A good likeness of her is to be found in Rufus Griswold's Female Poets of America, but the most popular and enduring image is a word picture left by her son Horace, who died in 1894 after a distinguished career in the American army. Here she is seated in a labyrinth of tropical flora in a little Greek temple on a cof-

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fee plantation in Cuba, dressed in white, her hair adorned with a passion flower, and, suspended from her neck, the small golden cross that she wore always in memory of her one great love. It was in this setting that she had meditated and composed Ζôphiël. Her romantic and lyrical sufferings touched the hearts of some of her contemporaries as profoundly as did those of the English authors Caroline Norton and Felicia Hemans. [The best biographical sources are: Ruth S. Granniss, An Am. Friend of Southey (1913); Caroline E. Swift, "Maria del Occidente," Medford Hist. Register, Oct. 1899; Zadel Β. Gustafson's introduction to the 1879 edition of Mrs. Brooks' Zôphiël; and Thomas O. Mabbott, "Maria del Occidente," Am. Collector, Aug. 1926. Her own Idomen, while fictionalized, echoes in exact detail known facts of her life. See also Robert Southey, The Doctor (1834), vol. II, chap, liv; the fulsome sketch in Southern Literary Messenger, Aug. 1839, pp. 54148; Rufus W. Griswold, The Female Poets of America ( 1848 ) ; Evert A. and George L. Duyckinck, Cyc. of Am. Literature (1855), II, 198201; Appletons' Cyc. Am. Biog., I, 388. On Horace Brooks, see G. W. Cullum, Biog. Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, vols. I (rev. ed., 1879) and IV (1901). The Vital Records of Medford, Mass., to the Year 1850 (1907), p. 65, lists seven older children of William and Eleanor Gowen but none born after 1786. A somewhat different list, without dates, is given in Benjamin Cutter, comp., A Hist, of the Cutter Family of New England ( 1871 ), p. 261.] J.

G.

VARNER

BROOMALL, Anna Elizabeth (Mar. 4, 1 8 4 7 Apr. 4, 1931), obstetrician and medical educator, was born in Upper Chichester Township, Delaware County, Pa., where her father had turned temporarily from the law to farming. She was the younger of two children and only daughter of John Martin Broomall and Elizabeth (Booth) Broomall. Her father, who soon resumed the practice of law in Chester, Pa., and later served in Congress, was a descendant of John Broomall, who had come to Pennsylvania from England in 1681. Like her ancestors on both sides, Anna Broomall belonged to the Society of Friends. Her mother having died when she was a year old, she was brought up in Chester, until her father's remarriage in 1853, by an uncle and aunt—the uncle her mother's brother and the aunt her father's twin sister. Educated in Pennsylvania, she first attended a private school in Chester, then Kennett Academy in Kennett Square, and finally the Bristol Boarding School in Bristol, graduating in 1866. Her early interest was in the law, but when this proved impractical as a choice of career, she decided, with the ap-

proval of her father (a supporter of woman suffrage), to study medicine. She entered the Woman's Medical College in Philadelphia at the age of nineteen, choosing to repeat the two-year course before receiving her degree. In 1869 she was one of the first women medical students admitted to clinics at the Pennsylvania Hospital, an occasion that brought riotous protests from the male students. After taking her M.D. in 1871, she worked for a year at the Woman's Hospital in Philadelphia and then traveled to Vienna to study diseases of the skin, nose, and throat. When, however, she learned of the illness of E M E L I N E HORTON CLEVELAND, professor of obstetrics at the Woman's Medical College, and of Professor Cleveland's hope that she would succeed her, she began work in obstetrics under Carl and Gustav Braun. From Vienna she went to Paris to gain further experience under the noted French obstetricians of the day. On her return to America, in 1875, Dr. Broomall began an eight-year period as chief resident physician at the Woman's Hospital in Philadelphia, a position of full administrative authority that allowed her to use her talents for organization. Among other contributions, she was responsible for greatly improved nurses' training. She began at the same time a long teaching career at the Woman's Medical College. Appointed instructor in obstetrics in 1875, she thereafter carried much of the teaching burden of the department, although she refused the chair of obstetrics until 1879, after Dr. Cleveland's death. A slender woman who dressed in the simple black of the Quaker, Dr. Broomall was a brisk, dramatic lecturer, equally effective in the delivery room and at the lectern. Seeking to inculcate her own earnest sense of the obstetrician's responsibility, she could be "alarming," if never unkind, in her impatience with a confused student. As professor of obstetrics from 1880 to 1903 she made several improvements in the training offered at the college. In 1888 she established an out-practice department or clinic in a congested region of South Philadelphia where students were assigned to actual patient care, including prenatal attention, home confinement, and postnatal visits. As other medical colleges in the city opened similar institutions, growing numbers of students performed deliveries, and the poor of Philadelphia found increasingly easy access to high-quality obstetrical care. In 1896 these original out-practice facilities (relocated at 335 Washington Avenue) were expanded to provide in-patient care for difficult cases at the Maternity Hospital of the Woman's Medical College.

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Dr. Broomall brought to Philadelphia the standards of the great teaching centers of Europe. She insisted on scrupulous attention to the details of antisepsis and, by her reading of French, German, and Italian medical literature, kept her students abreast of the best available knowledge in her field. Especially noted for her emphasis on thorough prenatal care, including pelvimetry, she also advocated such obstetrical measures as episiotomy to prevent ruptures of the birth canal, Caesarean section, and symphysiotomy. The low mortality rate at the Maternity Hospital of the Woman's Medical College, less than one-tenth of a per cent among more than 2,000 mothers, has been attributed to her adoption and careful supervision of proven obstetrical advances. At a time when women physicians were still on trial, her work and that of her pupils demonstrated their ability to practice the highest type of obstetrics. After leaving her residency at Woman's Hospital, Dr. Broomall established her home and a private office on Walnut Street. In 1883 she was appointed gynecologist to the Friends' Asylum for the Insane in Frankford, Philadelphia, and she secured many similar positions of usefulness for former students, notably the charge of women patients in the Norristown Asylum and Philadelphia County Prison (Moyamensing). Although her name was proposed for membership in the Philadelphia Obstetrical Society as early as 1878, barriers against women delayed her admission until 1892. In the interim two of her papers were read before that group by a male colleague and received for publication in their Transactions. In 1890 she undertook an extensive inspection and lecture tour, visiting former students on medical missionary duty in the Orient and in India. In 1903, having decided that the time had come to retire from medical practice, Dr. Broomall resigned the chair of obstetrics and, the next year, moved to Chester, Pa. Developing a new interest in these years of retirement, she devoted herself to such historical work as the restoration of the Chester Courthouse and the collection of manuscripts, photographs, and drawings for the Delaware County Historical Society, serving as curator of its museum and library from 1923 until her death. A woman of widely varied interests, she was also a member of the Delaware County Institute of Science and the Delaware County Botanical Society. After more than a year's illness with septic bladder, she died in Chester at the age of eighty-four. Her body was cremated and the ashes placed in the Broomall plot in the Media (Pa.) Cemetery. She left a record both as a

dedicated teacher and as an expert surgeon and obstetrician. [Among the most important of Dr. Broomall's publications are two which appeared in the Am. Jour, of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children (N.Y. ) : "The Operation of Episiotomy as a Prevention of Perineal Ruptures during Labor," XI (1878), 517-27, also published in Phila. Obstetrical Soc., Transactions, 1878; and "Three Cases of Symphysiotomy, with One Death from Sepsis," XXVIII (1893), 305-12. Articles by Dr. Broomall used in the preparation of the above biography are: "Report of the Maternity Hospital of the Woman's Medical College of Pa.," Alumnae Assoc. of the Woman's Medical College of Pa., Report of Proc., 1896, pp. 37-38; "The Maternity of the Woman's Hospital of Phila." and "The Maternity Hospital of the Woman's Medical College of Pa.,"' Alumnae Assoc., Transactions, 1900, pp. 107-10. Other information from biographical sketch by Mary McKibbin-Harper in Medical Rev. of Revs., Mar. 1933; Woman's Medical College of Pa., Bull., Apr. 1931, pp. 10-11; Medical Women's Nat. Assoc., Bull, Apr. 1931, pp. 16-17; Medical Woman's Jour., July 1931; Alumnae Assoc. of the Woman's Medical College of Pa., Transactions, 1931, pp. 17-19; catalogues of the Woman's Medical College; and death certificate. Family data from Delaware County Hist. Soc., Chester. See also Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, Medical Women of America (1933); Clara Marshall, The Woman's Medical College of Pa. (1897); Gulielma Fell Alsop, Hist, of the Woman's Medical College (1950).] PATRICIA

SPAIN

WARD

BROWN, Abbie Farwell (Aug. 21, 1871-Mar. 5, 1927), poet and author of children's books, was bom in Boston, Mass., the first of two children, both girls, of Benjamin F. and Clara (Neal) Brown, natives respectively of Fitchburg, Mass., and Hampton, N.H. Her father, a member of a family firm dealing in whale oil and candles, was descended from Isaac Allerton, a Mayflower settler who had served as assistant governor of the Plymouth Colony. Her mother came from a family of New Hampshire pioneers who had settled and named the town of Exeter; for ten generations not one of Abbie's ancestors had lived outside New England. Abbie herself spent her entire life, except for European travel and country vacations, with her mother and sister in the family home on Beacon Hill where she was born. Abbie's early education was shaped largely by her mother, a clever, artistic woman and occasional contributor to the Youth's Companion, who to encourage her daughters' self-expression conducted an illustrated, handwritten family magazine, "The Catkin." Her formal education began at the Bowdoin School, where she graduated as valedictorian in 1886, and

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continued at the Boston Girls' Latin School, where she organized and edited the school paper, the Jabberwock. Here, spurred on by her friendship with JOSEPHINE PBESTON PEABODY, she began writing in earnest, sending contributions to St. Nicholas magazine, many of them illustrated by her sister, who as "Ann Underhill" was to become an illustrator and author. Abbie graduated in 1891 and spent the years 1891-92 and 1893-94 at Radcliffe College; she took an active part in campus dramatics and literary affairs, while her verses and short stories continued to appear in magazines. In 1898 and 1899, using the pseudonym "Jean Neal," she wrote humorous articles for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat on such subjects as "The Brotherless Girl" and "Engagements of One's Friends, Being the Reflections of a Bachelor Maid Who Considers Herself an Immune." In 1899 she went abroad for the first time. Her first volume, The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts (1900)-published, like all her books, by Houghton Mifflin Company—was inspired by the carved choir stalls in Chester Cathedral depicting the life of St. Werburg. A skillful retelling for children of old Christian legends, backed by meticulous research, it was perhaps her most successful book. From then on she published a book nearly every year until her death. Most of them were juveniles, which she described as books written to "please children while trying to be in themselves good literature." In the Days of the Giants (1902) was a vivid adaptation of Norse mythology for very young readers that treated the gods and goddesses as real people. In a more whimsical vein she wrote The Lonesomest Doll (1901), the story of a friendship between a sheltered princess and a gatekeeper's daughter. Her literary output for children also included several volumes of poetry, notably A Pocketful of Posies (1901) and Fresh Posies (1908); plays, many of them with a historical background; and frequent magazine contributions of verses and stories. She had a special gift for writing poetry appropriate to a musical setting, and for years was commissioned by Silver, Burdett & Company to contribute lyrics for songs in their Progressive Music Series. Collaborating with the composer Mabel W. Daniels, she won a Girl Scout competition for O n the Trail," which was adopted as the official song of the Girl Scouts. In 1902 Miss Brown served as an editor of the Young Folks' Library, a twenty-volume series issued by the Boston publisher Hall and Locke. As her reputation spread, she performed an increasing number of services in the field of children's literature, stressing in public

lectures the importance of a "good style with a vocabulary not consciously diluted for the childish mind." She gave readings from her published works for audiences of young children, traveling on occasion as far west as Ohio and as far south as Florida. As a serious poet Miss Brown, despite high aspirations, was less successful, although two of her volumes, Heart of New England ( 1920) and The Silver Stair (1926), met with some critical acclaim. Her war poem, "Peace with a Sword," was set to music by Miss Daniels and performed by Boston's Handel and Haydn Society in 1917, when it was hailed as "stirring" and "noble." Perhaps her principal contribution to poetry lay in the energetic leadership she gave to the literary community of New England. A member of the Boston Authors' Club, the Boston Drama League, the American Folklore Society, and the Poetry Society of America, she was also a charter member of the New England Poetry Club, offering her home for its first meeting in 1915 and serving as its president at the time of her death in 1927. described in her youth as "golden-haired, petite and piquant-faced," Miss Brown remained disarmingly youthful in spirit and in appearance throughout her life, despite grave concern in her later years for her ailing mother. Vigorous, cordial, and perpetually busy, she always worked according to an established routine and found ample time for tennis and snowshoeing, as well as active membership in the Episcopal Church and in literary circles, where she was a social favorite. Especially important to her were her friendships with A M Y L O W E L L , Caroline Ticknor, and Josephine Preston Peabody, all members of the New England Poetry Club. She died in Boston of cancer in 1927 at age fifty-five. Burial was at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Caroline Ticknor, in a memorial tribute, recalled her as a "poet and a friend of poets, loving them and their art, and in turn being widely beloved by them." Abbie Farwell Brown wrote during the golden age of children's literature, working in the tradition established by authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Howard Pyle, who had earlier made mythology and legendary material available to children. Discarding the trite and the sentimental, she offered a rich fare, and her works have lasted. Her book on Norse mythology, for example, was still a standard on children's library shelves two generations after its publication. [Papers of Abbie Farwell Brown and her family are in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College. Covering the years 1858-1927, they include corre-

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spondence, photographs, MSS., and newspaper clippings; biographical material is sketchy. A collection of clippings, sheet music, etc., may also be found in the Radcliffe College Archives, which also has "Memorial Biogs. of Former Students" ( typescript, compiled by the Radcliffe Alumnae Assoc. ), containing, in vol. I, a brief biography of Abbie Farwell Brown by her sister Ethel. Other sources include: "Five Clever Radcliffe Girls W h o Have Written Clever Things," Boston Sunday Post, Dec. 14, 1902; memoir of Josephine Preston Peabody by Abbie Farwell Brown in Boston Transcript, Nov. 21, 1925; obituaries of Miss Brown in ibid., Mar. 5, 1927, and Ν.Ύ. Times, Mar. 6, 1927; memorial tribute by Caroline Ticknor in Boston Transcript, Mar. 23, 1 9 2 7 ; Boston Authors' Club, Abbie Farwell Brown: A Tribute to Her Life and Work ( 1 9 2 9 ) ; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1 9 1 4 15; Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1 9 4 2 ) . See also: "Abbie Farwell Brown and Josephine Preston Peabody: The Intimate Letters of Youth," with an introduction by Sybil Collar Holbrook, Poetry Rev., Mar.-Apr. 1931; and Miss Brown's The New England Poetry Club: An Outline of Its Hist., 19151923 ( 1 9 2 3 ) . Birth and death records from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics.] JO ANN ABRAHAM REISS

BROWN, Alice (Dec. 5, 1856-June 21, 1948), author, was born in Hampton Falls, N.H., the younger of two children and only daughter of Levi and Elizabeth Lucas (Robinson) Brown. She spent her early life on her father's farm, "about six miles inland from the sea, near enough to get a tang of salt." After attending the district school, she entered Robinson Seminary in Exeter, N.H., at fourteen, walking from her home four miles each way except in the winter months, when she stayed in Exeter. After graduation in 1876 she taught school in several towns in New Hampshire, including Chester, and in Boston, Mass. Meanwhile, "hating" teaching "more and more every minute" (autobiographical letter in Overton, pp. 1112), she had begun to write. Her short stories submitted to various national magazines brought enough recognition to encourage her to leave New Hampshire for the artistic atmosphere of Boston. Here she worked for a time on the Christian Register. A first novel, Stratford-by-the-Sea, appeared in 1884. The following year she joined the staff of the Youth's Companion, "where, for years, I ground out stuff from the latest books and magazines" (Overton, p. 12). In 1886 Miss Brown took the first of many trips to England. A collection of her stories, Meadow-Grass, appeared in 1895. That summer she and her friend LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY spent ten happy weeks walking through the countryside of Shropshire and Devon; on their return they founded the Women's Rest Tour

Association, "to encourage other women to take their vacations as they had, with pack and stick, in foreign lands." From these visits came a book of English impressions, By Oak and Thorn (1896). Miss Guiney was to remain a fast friend and confidante; the two women collaborated on a short study of Robert Louis Stevenson in 1895, and Alice Brown published a biography of Miss Guiney after the latter's death in 1920. Miss Brown's first real critical acclaim came from her dialect stories of New Hampshire neighborhoods and people, collected in Meadow-Grass and then in Tiverton Tales (1899). As the vogue for New England local color faded, she turned to different settings and characters but apparently never succeeded in finding another distinctive personal vein. A professional writer who strove for excellence ("She writes much and prints a third," Miss Guiney said), Alice Brown published, on the average, a book a year until 1935, including plays, biographical studies, essays, and poetry, as well as novels and short stories. In 1914 she made literary headlines when her play Children of Earth won a $10,000 prize offered by theatrical producer Winthrop Ames. Chosen from the 1,600 manuscripts submitted, the play, dealing with a New England spinster's frustrated desire for love, was well reviewed but a failure at the box office. Alice Brown reached her widest audience in the first two decades of the twentieth century; thereafter her themes and style fell from favor. Writing of her book The Marriage Feast, a Fantasy (1931), William Rose Benêt remarked on an "almost constant use of expressions which in this day and generation seem to have worn away their significance." She grew discouraged about her writing and said, "I have a genius for writing what nobody wants." With the passage of time even her local-color stories, once highly praised, came to seem sketchy and sentimental, clearly inferior in power to the work o f SAHAH ORNE J E W E T T a n d M A R Y E .

WILKINS

in the same genre. In her later life she began to search for spiritual security. Her association with Miss Guiney had brought her into close contact with the Catholic Church, and she struck up a correspondence with the Rev. Michael Earls of Holy Cross College, and later with the Rev. Joseph Mary Lelen of Falmouth, Ky., who contributed poetry to several Catholic magazines. To Father Lelen, whom she never met, she poured out the frustrations of her later life. Despite the attraction which Roman Catholicism held for her, she seems to have retained the religious viewpoint which a friend once FREEMAN

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called her "amorphous Unitarianism" (Sweeney, p. 5 4 7 ) . In her last years Miss Brown withdrew to the solitude of her home at 11 Pinckney Street, Boston. Just before World W a r II she sold the farm at Hill, N.H., where she had long spent her summers, and during the war she disposed of her house and much-loved garden in Newburyport. Having lived into her ninety-first year, deaf but with her health and other faculties unimpaired, she died at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston in 1 9 4 8 of a cerebral hemorrhage or thrombosis. She was buried in Hampton Falls, N.H. [Published material about Miss Brown is relatively scarce. Because she ordered her personal effects destroyed after her death, there is also a dearth of manuscript material; the only collections of importance are at Yale Univ. and Holy Cross College, and these contain primarily letters written to friends. For additional material see: William L. Lucey, "The Record of an Am. Priest: Michael Earls, S.J., 1873-1937," Part IV, in Am. Ecclesiastical Rev., Dec. 1957; "Miss Guiney and Miss Brown," Critic, Dec. 5, 1896; Grant Overton, The Women Who Make Our Novels ( 1 9 1 8 ) ; Current Opinion, July 1914, pp. 28-29; Literary Digest, June 13, 1914, p. 1435; "Portrait of Alice Brown," The Seminarian (published by Robinson Seminary), 1915; Francis Sweeney, "A Friend of Lou Guiney's," America, Feb. 19, 1949; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XV, 283; obituary notices in Boston Herald, Boston Globe, and N.Y. Times of June 22, 1948. For varying assessments of her work see: Jessie Belle Rittenhouse, The Younger Am. Poets (1904); Charles Miner Thompson, "The Short Stories of Alice Brown," Atlantic Monthly, July 1906; Fred L. Pattee, The Development of the Am. Short Story (1923), pp. 328-29; Blanche C. Williams, Our Short Story Writers ( 1 9 2 0 ) ; Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (1940); and Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, Twentieth Century Authors (1942). Birth record from Town Clerk, Hampton Falls, N.H.; death record from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics. The Rev. Roland D. Sawyer, Kensington, N.H., supplied family data.] JOHN

T.

DAHLQUIST

B R O W N , Alice Van Vechten (June 7, 1 8 6 2 Oct. 16, 1 9 4 9 ) , art educator, was born in Hanover, N.H., where her grandfather, Francis Brown, had been president of Dartmouth College. Her father, Samuel Gilman Brown, an ordained Congregational minister, was for twenty-seven years a member of the Dartmouth faculty. His wife, Sarah Van Vechten, was a native of Schenectady, N.Y.; Alice was their fourth daughter and the sixth of their seven children. In 1 8 6 8 Samuel Brown moved to Clinton, N.Y., to become president of Hamilton College. Alice was educated in the schools

of Clinton and Utica and by private tutors. It was a departure from the primarily intellectual and theological orientation of her family when she spent the years 1 8 8 1 - 8 5 at the Art Students' League in New York City, studying painting with William M. Chase, Abbott Thayer, and others. Prolonged illness in her family caused an interruption of this study which became decisive for her career. Abandoning her earlier aim of becoming a creative artist, she turned instead to teaching and to the history of art. In 1891 she was appointed assistant director and in 1894 director of the Norwich (Conn.) Art School. Her teaching attracted much attention for its vitality combined with sound discipline. Of particular interest was her method of teaching art history, which included drawing and modeling from photographs or casts of the works of art being studied, as a means of developing and sharpening observation, thus serving a purpose analogous to that of laboratory experimentation in science. In 1897 Miss Brown was called to Wellesley College to reorganize its art teaching program, which at that time offered little in art history besides looking at photographs and reading in historical textbooks. To her surprise, the college accepted her stipulation that "laboratory work" (as she shrewdly designated it) be introduced and counted for credit as a vital part of the study of the history of art. Enrollments soared under the new regime, and the program was promptly broadened; by 1 9 0 0 Wellesley was the only college in the country where it was possible to major in the history of art. Able and dynamic instructors joined the staff, wholeheartedly supporting Miss Brown's basic ideas. F o r students who wished to explore their own creative abilities, several studio courses, taught by established artists, were added. As director also of the college's Farnsworth Museum, Miss Brown began by banishing a large number of accumulated art objects not of museum quality; then, by careful acquisitions, she slowly laid the foundations of a sound teaching collection, meanwhile inaugurating, as early as 1 8 9 9 - 1 9 0 0 , a policy of loan exhibitions. Among her other innovations was a course in museum training, introduced in 1911, and the first college course to be given anywhere in the United States on modern art (by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., 1927). During Miss Brown's thirty-three years as head of the art department, her "laboratory method" evolved with many variations, for she always welcomed experimentation. Originally regarded with skepticism by art historians and artists alike, it soon helped to gain for Welles-

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Brown ley art majors a reputation for unusually keen observation. Perhaps because it requires close rapport between art historian and laboratory instructor, the system was not adopted in the same form by other institutions, but it had a distinct influence outside the college. As late as 1 9 5 5 a committee studying the reorganization of art teaching at Harvard referred to Alice Brown's work and recommended the "Wellesley method." It was typical of her thoroughness that, in preparing to write A Short History of Italian Painting (with William Rankin, 1 9 1 4 ) , she spent part of her first leave ( 1 9 0 5 - 0 7 ) acquiring a direct knowledge of the methods and materials of the masters about whom she wrote, working in Siena with Federico Joni, a highly skilled practitioner of these arts. Actively interested in the early development of the College Art Association of America, she served on its board of directors, as well as on several of its important committees. She also served on the Committee on Medieval and Renaissance Studies of the Archaeological Institute of America. An ardent Episcopalian, Miss Brown dedicated much time and thought to the cause of church unity, in which her older brother Francis (president of Union Theological Seminary, 1 9 0 8 - 1 6 ) was also active. She was a devoted and influential member of the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross (at South Byfield, Mass.) and took a keen interest in the Anglo-Orthodox Fellowship in England, where she often visited her brother Robert, a distinguished engineer. She belonged to the Church League for Industrial Democracy and was a firm supporter of the League of Nations. Slight of build and distinguished in appearance, Miss Brown moved with a measured tread. She could be graciousness itself. She could b e imperious. At other times a certain remoteness could make her seem rather formidable, but her fundamental kindliness and thoughtfulness, together with a sense of humor revealed through an unexpected turn of phrase, would soon become apparent. Her love of animals was especially manifest in her devotion to the Newfoundland dog which became the companion of her retirement. Both contemplative and astutely practical, Miss Brown combined artistic sensitivity with a fine capacity for administration. In her teaching, in which she maintained rigorous standards, she was able to evoke a mood singularly receptive to the special qualities of the artist or period under discussion. This subtle capacity was perhaps the key to her impact as a teacher—long remembered by many students. Wellesley College awarded her an honorary Master of Arts

degree in 1930, the year of her retirement, and Hamilton College a Doctorate of Humane Letters in 1941. She spent her last years in Middletown, N.J., at the home of cousins and died there of chronic myocarditis at the age of eighty-seven. [The most important account of Miss Brown is the article by her successor, Myrtilla Avery, in Wellesley Alumnae Mag., June 1930; see also Miss Avery's characterization in Wellesley College, The Art Museum (Wellesley College Bull., June 1937). The obituary article by Vida D. Scudder in Wellesley Alumnae Mag., Apr. 1950, is of a more personal nature. Florence Converse's The Story of Wellesley ( 1 9 1 5 ) and Wellesley College: A Chronicle of the Years ( 1 9 3 9 ) contain interesting references to Miss Brown. On her ideas and her department, see Sirarpie Der Nersessian, "The Direct Approach in the Study of Art Hist.," College Art Jour., Mar. 1942 (reprinted as Appendix D in Report of the Committee on the Visual Arts at Harvard Univ., 1956); and Agnes A. Abbot, "The Dept. of Art at Wellesley College," Art Jour., Summer 1962. Also valuable are letters and clippings in the records of the Art Dept. and President's Office, Wellesley College Archives, and the Annual Reports of the President. For family information see Memorial of Samuel Gilman Brown ( 1 8 8 6 ) ; Dr. Gilman D. Frost's "Hanover Genealogy" (Baker Library, Dartmouth College); and Peter Van Vechten, Jr., The Genealogical Records of the Van Vechten's ( 1896). The Annual Reports of the Soc. of the Companions of the Holy Cross, 1918—44, contain papers given by Miss Brown and a memorial of her (1950). Other information from close professional association, and from correspondence with relatives, colleagues, and friends of Miss Brown. Death record from N.J. State Dept. of Health.] AGNES A.

B R O W N , Antoinette. See toinette Louisa Brown.

BLACKWELL,

ABBOT

An-

B R O W N , Charlotte Amanda Blake ( D e c . 22, 1846—Apr. 19, 1 9 0 4 ) , physician and surgeon, founder of the San Francisco Children's Hospital, was born in Philadelphia, Pa., the eldest daughter and second of five children of Charles Morris Blake and Charlotte A. (Farrington) Blake, both natives of Brewer, Maine. Her father, a graduate of Bowdoin College, was a teacher and later a Presbyterian minister. In 1849 he set out for California, where he edited the Pacific Netcs in San Francisco for a year, bringing his family to join him in 1851, and then founded and headed a short-lived "collegiate institute" for boys in Benicia. After a sojourn ( 1 8 5 4 - 5 7 ) in Chile, where Blake was a missionary to Scottish miners, the family went back to Pennsylvania. Living with relatives in Maine, Charlotte attended the Bangor high

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school. In 1862 she entered Elmira College, Elmira, N.Y. Graduating in 1866, she then went to Arizona, where her father was now chaplain to an army regiment. There, in 1867, she was married to Henry Adams Brown of Riverside, Maine. In 1869, after her father had suffered a temporary mental breakdown, she and her husband moved west with her parents, settling at Napa, Calif. Three children, Adelaide (born 1868), Philip King (1869), and Harriet L., occupied her early married years. But there was a medical tradition in her family—her father had studied medicine in Philadelphia in the 1840's and received an M.D. degree from the University of California in 1876—and with the encouragement of her husband Mrs. Brown began reading anatomy with the family doctor. In 1872, after the birth of her third child, she left for Philadelphia to attend the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, and two years later she received her M.D. degree. The family now moved to San Francisco, where Henry Brown became a clerk in the Wells, Fargo & Company Bank and his wife commenced her medical practice. In 1875 Dr. Brown joined with several other women, notably Dr. Martha E. Bucknell, in soliciting support from prominent San Franciscans for a dispensary for women and children. Its purpose was to provide women with medical care by members of their own sex while giving women physicians and interns needed professional experience. Despite a disappointing initial response, the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children opened its doors later that year, with Drs. Brown and Bucknell as the first two attending physicians. A third, Dr. Sara E. Brown, was soon added. In the early years service was free, with a nominal charge for medicine. The dispensary was reorganized as a hospital in 1878, and two years later a nurses' training program, the first west of the Rockies, was inaugurated. Gradually, the care of children came to predominate, and in 1885 the institution was incorporated as the San Francisco Hospital for Children and Training School for Nurses. Although Charlotte Brown's older brother Charles E. Blake was a respected local surgeon, her first application for admittance to the San Francisco Medical Society had to be withdrawn because of opposition. In 1876 she applied to the California Medical Society. Despite a ruling that no doctor who did not belong to a local medical society could be accepted, she was not only admitted, along with four other women, but was appointed to a special committee on diseases of women and chil-

dren. Two years later, after performing the first ovariotomy by a woman on the Pacific Coast, she was finally admitted to the San Francisco Medical Society. Dr. Brown was remarkably open to medical innovation: in 1887 she suggested the establishment of a "tumor registry"; two years later she introduced a milk sterilizing apparatus of her own design; and in 1893 she reported to her colleagues on the pioneering use in Paris of incubators for premature babies. Naturally curious and a keen observer of detail, she published some eighteen articles in various medical journals, many of them describing unusual gynecological cases that had come to her attention. Her "Obstetric Practice among the Chinese in San Francisco" (Pacific Medical and Surgical Journal, XXVI, 1883-84, pp. 1 5 21) was an outgrowth of the two years ( 1 8 8 3 85) she spent conducting a branch dispensary at a Methodist Episcopal mission in San Francisco's Chinatown. "The Health of Our Girls" (California State Medical Society, Transactions, XXVI, 1896, pp. 193-202) described her extensive study of local schoolgirls undertaken to demonstrate that many gynecological difficulties stemmed from adolescent health habits. That physicians had a special social responsibility was an article of faith with Dr. Brown, and she frequently criticized the lethargy of the medical profession in this respect. She urged physicians to instruct the public on the importance of sterilizing milk, and in later years recommended that children suffering from contagious diseases be treated at public expense. In an 1881 article she took up the question of city sewer gases as a cause of diseases in women and children, and suggested that state and city boards of health inspect all buildings, new and old, and impose penalties on owners who disregarded public health laws or did not adopt all known sanitary improvements. "The first steps in such a revolution," she insisted characteristically, "must come from the medical profession." Charlotte Brown was also a vigorous advocate of improved training for nurses and doctors. By 1890, as a member of the standing committee on training schools for nurses of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, she was urging the establishment of postgraduate schools. In 1893 she advocated an obstetric clinic for California where recent medical graduates could obtain supervised experience in this specialized branch of medicine. Resigning from the staff of the Children's Hospital in 1895, after almost twenty years of

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Brown a Scottish plantation owner of Frederick County, Md., by her common-law husband, a slave whom she had made her overseer. His son Thomas purchased his freedom in 1834 at the age of twenty-five. Frances Scroggins, born in Winchester County, Va., had been freed by her grandfather, her white owner. At the time of Hallie's birth her father was a steward and express agent on riverboats traveling from Pittsburgh to New Orleans; he also owned considerable real estate in Pittsburgh before the Civil War. In 1864 he moved his family to Chatham, Ontario, and engaged in farming. The children attended the local school until about 1870, when the family settled at Wilberforce, Ohio, so that Hallie and her younger brother could attend Wilberforce University, a college primarily for Negroes. Graduating in a class of six, Hallie received the B.S. degree from Wilberforce in 1873.

active work, Dr. Brown opened a small private hospital with her children Adelaide and Philip, both physicians. The California branch of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, which she had helped organize, held her active interest throughout these years. She died of intestinal paralysis in 1904, at the age of fifty-seven, at Alder Sanatorium in San Francisco and was buried at Cypress Lawn Cemetery, Colma, Calif. The San Francisco Children's Hospital, rebuilt and enlarged after the great earthquake and fire of 1906, continues her work. [Adelaide Brown, "The Hist, of the Development of Women in Medicine in Calif.," Calif, and Western Medicine, May 1925, includes a biographical sketch of Dr. Charlotte Brown. On her father and early life, see Alonzo Phelps, Contemporary Biog· of Calif's Representative Men ( 1 8 8 2 ) , II, 4 1 4 - 1 7 , and Nehemiah Cleaveland, Hist, of Bowdoin College, with Biog. Sketches of Its Graduates ( 1 8 8 2 ) , p. 565. On the origin and early years of the Children's Hospital, see First Report of the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children, 1876, and subsequent reports; H. E . Thelander, "Children's Hospital of San Francisco," Medical Woman's Jour., July 1934; and Lois Brock, " T h e Hospital for Children and Training School for Nurses, 1 8 7 5 - 1 9 4 9 , " Jour, of the Am. Medical Women's Assoc., Jan. 1950. J. Marion Read and Mary E . Mathes, Hist, of the San Francisco Medical S oc., vol. I, 1 8 5 0 - 1 9 0 0 ( 1 9 5 8 ) , contains information on her relations with that group. Other data from death notice in San Francisco Call, Apr. 20, 1904; from Elmira College Alumnae Assoc.; and from Napa and San Francisco city directories; death certificate from San Francisco Dept. of Public Health. Of Dr. Brown's published articles, see also, for her medical and social ideas: "A Bureau of Information: The Need of a Post-Graduate School for Nurses," Nat. Conference of Charities and Correction, Proc., 1890, pp. 1 4 7 - 5 4 ; "Practical Points in Obstetrics," Occidental Medical Times, X I V ( 1 9 0 0 ) , 1 2 - 1 6 ; "Report on Obstetrics," Calif. State Medical Soc., Transactions, 1893, pp. 1 2 9 - 3 9 ; "Report on Diseases of Women and Children," ibid., 1881, pp. 2 5 2 - 6 0 . F o r the careers of her two medical children, see Woman's Who's Who of America, 1 9 1 4 - 1 5 , on Adelaide Brown, and Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1 9 4 2 ) , on Philip King Brown. All of Charlotte Brown's papers were destroyed in the 1906 fire, as were the records of the Calif. Medical Assoc.] JOAN M .

JENSEN

B R O W N , Hallie Quinn (Mar. 10, 1850-Sept. 16, 1 9 4 9 ) , Negro teacher, elocutionist, and women's leader, was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., the fourth daughter and fifth of six children of Thomas Arthur Brown and Frances Jane (Scroggins) Brown. Both were former slaves. Brown was one of the children of Ann Brown,

That fall, drawn by the need for teachers in the South during the Reconstruction period, she went to Mississippi to teach at the Sonora Plantation. The following year she taught second grade in a public school in Yazoo, Miss., but declined reappointment at the request of her mother, who was concerned about the racial turmoil in the state. She later taught in South Carolina, first at a plantation school and then in the public schools of Columbia, and served for two years ( 1 8 8 5 - 8 7 ) as dean of Allen University in Columbia. She returned to public school teaching in Dayton, Ohio, from 1887 to 1891, during which time she also established a night school for adult migrants from the South. In 1 8 9 2 - 9 3 she served as lady principal at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and then accepted an appointment as professor of elocution at Wilberforce University. Miss Brown had graduated in 1886 from the Chautauqua Lecture School, where she had undertaken summer studies. She had already given some public readings, and after her return to Ohio in 1887 she traveled extensively as a lecturer and elocutionist, sometimes in conjunction with the Wilberforce (later Stewart) Concert Company. This work took her to Europe from 1894 to 1899, where she spent considerable time in England; her lectures abroad were concerned primarily with Negro life in America, and her program also included Negro songs and folklore. In 1895 she helped form the first British Chautauqua at North Wales. A strong supporter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union at home, Miss Brown lectured throughout England and Scotland for the British Women's Temperance Association; in 1895 she was a speaker at the convention of the World's W.C.T.U. held in

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Brown London. She was also a representative of the United States at the International Congress of Women held in London in 1899. Twice she appeared before Queen Victoria. She continued her career as an elocutionist after her return to the United States, visiting every state except Maine and Vermont; her readings of the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar won special praise. Although she was again appointed professor of elocution at Wilberforce (1900-03), she apparently did little teaching after this time. She was active in the work of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and was in 1900 the first woman to campaign—though unsuccessfully—for an office at its General Conference. As a representative of the Women's Parent Missionary Society of the A.M.E. Church she made a second trip abroad to attend the World Conference on Missions in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the summer of 1910. While in England she also recruited funds for Wilberforce University; during her second trip she secured the interest of Miss E. Julia Emery, a wealthy London philanthropist, who in 1912 endowed a new dormitory for the college to be named for her mother, Keziah Emery. Hallie Q. Brown was one of the first to become interested in the formation of women's clubs for members of her race. She founded the Neighborhood Club in Wilberforce and was president of the Ohio State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs from 1905 to 1912. In 1893 her attempt to stimulate the organization of Negro women at the national level brought into being the Colored Woman's League of Washington, D.C., a forerunner of the National Association of Colored Women; Miss Brown served as president of the National Association from 1920 to 1924. During her presidency two major programs were initiated: the preservation of the Washington home of Frederick Douglass, the noted Negro abolitionist, and a scholarship fund to be used for the higher education of qualified Negro girls. In her club work she supported the cause of woman suffrage, which she had first espoused while a student at Wilberforce after hearing a speech by S U S A N Β . A N T H O N Y . During the 1920's she was vice-president of the Ohio Council of Republican Women and took part in the Harding presidential campaign; in 1924 she spoke at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and afterward was director of Colored Women's Activities at the national campaign headquarters in Chicago. Hallie Q. Brown was the author of several books, including Bits and Odds: A Choice Selection of Recitations (1880), First Lessons in Public Speaking (1920), and Homespun Hero-

ines and Other Women of Distinction (1926), a collection of biographies of Negro women. She died in her one hundredth year of a coronary thrombosis at her home in Wilberforce and was buried in the family plot in Massie's Creek Cemetery nearby. A community house in St. Paul, Minn., and the Hallie Q. Brown Memorial Library of Central State University at Wilberforce perpetuate her name. [The Hallie Q. Brown Papers at Central State Univ., Wilberforce, Ohio, which include letters and unpublished autobiographical material; AfroAmerican Encyc. (1895); A. Augustus Wright, ed., Who's Who in the Lyceum ( 1906 ) ; Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, Lifting as They Climb (1933), a history of the Nat. Assoc. of Colored Women; Alice S. Onque, Hist, of the Hallie Q. Brown Community House (Univ. of Minn. School of Social Work, 1959); Ruth Neely, ed., Women of Ohio, I (1939), 237-38.] CHARLES

H.

WESLEY

BROWN, Martha McClellan (Apr. 16, 1838Aug. 31, 1916), temperance reformer and lecturer, was born in Baltimore, Md., the younger of two daughters of David and Jane Manypenny (Haight) McClellan. The family, of Scottish and English ancestry, moved in 1840 to Cambridge, Ohio, the father being a mill architect. Orphaned by the time she was eight, Mattie, as she was commonly known, was reared with her sister in the family of a neighbor. Nothing is known of her early education, but after her marriage, on Nov. 16, 1858, to William Kennedy Brown, a Methodist minister, she attended the Pittsburgh (Pa.) Female College, graduating in 1862. Her early married life reflected the migratory nature of the Methodist Episcopal ministry of that time, as her husband filled a succession of appointments in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. The first of their six children, Orvon Graff, was born in 1863; there followed Westanna O'Neil, Charme, Richard McClellan, Marie, and, in 1886, Kleon Thaw. Mrs. Brown began her temperance career in 1861, soon after her marriage, when she joined the Independent Order of Good Templars, a fraternal organization modeled on the Masons and dedicated to the cause of total abstinence and state prohibition. In 1864 she won a certain local reputation for her patriotic lectures, and in the postwar period she turned her platform talents to the cause of temperance. In the course of her career she appeared in some twenty states and a number of foreign countries. Tall and attractive, she struck one of her listeners as "a woman of fine presence, pleasing manners and a well trained voice that can fill

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Brown any hall" (History of Woman

226).

Brown Suffrage,

III,

Elected to the executive committee of the Ohio Good Templars in 1867, she won increasing prominence in the movement, which was then at the height of its popularity, with some 580 lodges and 27,000 members in the state (Peirce, p. 500). So fervent had the antialcohol enthusiasm of both Martha Brown and her husband become by 1868, when he moved to a pastorate in Alliance, Ohio, that his appointment was not renewed in 1869. The Browns remained in Alliance, however, William serving as minister to several nearby country churches and, after 1870, as publisher of a weekly newspaper, the Alliance Monitor. Martha Brown, having edited the paper for its former owner since 1868, continued in this capacity until 1876. She also edited the Temple Visitor, a Good Templar magazine published in Alliance; wrote many antialcohol pamphlets; launched a movement to have temperance lessons included in the International Sunday School Series; and organized a statewide temperance lecture series which drew to Ohio such noted leaders as Neal Dow of Maine and John Russell of Michigan. In 1872 she was chosen Grand Chief Templar of Ohio, a post she held for two years. A delegate to the gathering of the International Lodge in London in 1873, she lectured to large audiences in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Her Ohio efforts bore fruit in the winter of 1873-74 when a highly emotional antisaloon prayer crusade swept the women of the state. Recognizing that many of the new temperance recruits were unwilling to join the Good Templars, Mrs. Brown envisioned a wholly new woman's temperance organization. At a statewide rally convened in Columbus in February 1874 by the Boston temperance hero Dio Lewis, Mrs. Brown was both a popular speaker and a behind-the-scenes participant in the formation of what is believed to have been the first woman's state temperance association in the country. On Aug. 14, 1874, while attending a summer Sunday school assembly at Chautauqua Lake in western New York, Mrs. Brown, in conversation with several other women of like persuasion, suggested that a national organization be set up. At a more formal meeting the following day she was elected to a ten-member Committee of Organization to implement this idea. Though J E N N I E F O W L E R W I L L I N G and E M I L Y HUNTINGTON M I L L E R shared in the leadership, Mrs. Brown is said to have drafted the "Call" for the convention held in Cleveland that November at which was founded the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union,

the most durable and powerful temperance organization in the nation's history. The evidence suggests that Mrs. Brown strongly desired the presidency of this new group, but her link with the Good Templars stood against her; the post instead went to ANNIE T. W I T T E N M Y E R , and Martha McClellan Brown took no further part in W.C.T.U. affairs. In 1876, as one of a minority faction favoring the admission of Negroes, she withdrew as well from the American branch of the Good Templars, joining with English delegates to form a more liberal body. The two factions were reunited a decade later, but Mrs. Brown's subsequent connection with the organization, whose membership had declined rapidly from its post-Civil War peak, was primarily limited to lecture visits to England in 1881 and 1891. Her chief activity of later years was in the Prohibition party. Early in 1869, as a rising Good Templar leader, she had played a part in the founding of an Ohio political party dedicated to prohibition, and that May she was present at the meeting of the Grand Lodge of the Good Templars in Oswego, N.Y., which laid the groundwork for the formal establishment of the national Prohibition party several months later. Her principal work for the party, however, did not begin until her break with the Good Templars. In 1876 she was named a vice-president and a member of the platform committee at the national convention and was appointed to a four-year term on the party's executive committee. Next year she moved from Pittsburgh (where her husband had taken a church the year before) to New York City to fill an unsalaried post as secretary of the National Prohibition Alliance, an ostensibly nonpartisan lecture bureau with close Prohibition party ties. Its aim was to generate support for the political battle against alcohol, as opposed to the "gospel" approach of the W.C.T.U., with its emphasis on personal abstinence. For five years, while her husband and children remained in Pittsburgh, Mrs. Brown spent most of her time in New York. In 1882, when the W.C.T.U. threw in its lot with the Prohibition party, the National Prohibition Alliance declared its goal achieved and ceased operations. While Mrs. Brown's efforts may have influenced these events somewhat, it was unquestionably F R A N C É S E . W I L L A R D of the W.C.T.U. who played the decisive role. After serving two further terms (1884-86, 1892-96) on the Prohibition party's national executive committee and holding such posts as assistant secretary at several national conventions, Martha Brown left the convention of 1896 when it adopted a single-plank platform,

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thereby dropping its longstanding commitment to woman suffrage—a cause she also supported. Thereafter she took no part in party affairs. Her primary interest had, indeed, already shifted to the academic sphere. In 1882, when her husband became president of Cincinnati Wesleyan Woman's College, having raised $73,000 to keep that foundering institution afloat, she assumed the positions of vice-president and professor of art, literature, and philosophy. Her son Orvon, then nineteen years of age, also joined the faculty as science teacher. Despite this concerted family effort, the financial crisis persisted, and Cincinnati Wesleyan closed its doors in 1892. Thereafter, while her husband, until his retirement in 1909, held various Methodist appointments in the Cincinnati area and taught at a school founded in Germantown, Ohio, by their eldest son, Martha McClellan Brown became increasingly prominent in Cincinnati philanthropic and civic affairs. She was active in the movement to organize mothers' clubs in the schools; in 1886 she launched a "Fresh Air" program to provide summer holidays for Cincinnati's poor children; and in 1914 she became president of a new Woman's Rotary Club in Cincinnati, said to be the world's first. She frequently lectured on educational, literary, and civic subjects, and in her old age resumed her activity on behalf of the Good Templars, making a final temperance lecture tour of England in 1911. "She was queenly in appearance, cultured in mind, and was equally at home among the great and lowliest of earth," wrote a family friend; "on the platform she had few peers." After the death of her husband in 1915 she resided with her youngest son, Kleon, in Dayton, Ohio, where she died, at seventyeight, of ptomaine poisoning. Funeral services were held at St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church, Cincinnati, with burial in Spring Grove Cemetery in that city. [The fullest accounts of Mrs. Brown's career are the sketch in Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893); the sketch of her husband in Biog. Cyc. and Portrait Gallery with an Hist. Sketch of the State of Ohio, V (1891), 1144-17; and the entry on Mrs. Brown in Ernest H. Cherrington, ed., Standard Encyc. of the Alcohol Problem, I (1925), 433-34 (cf. also V, 1929, p. 2049). Also useful are Who Was Who in America, vol. I (1942), and obituaries in the Cincinnati Enquirer, Cincinnati Times Star, and Dayton Jour, of Sept. 1, 1916. The following sources provide background information on the temperance movements in which she was active (in some cases modifying the rather broad claims of the sketches above) and specific details of her work: D. Leigh Colvin,

Prohibition in the U.S. (1926), pp. 60-72, 119, 123, 129, 188, 255-56, 653; I. Newton Peirce, The Hist, of the Independent Order of Good Templars (1869), pp. 500, 510; James Black, Brief Hist, of Prohibition (pamphlet, Prohibition Reform Party, c. 1880), pp. 30, 31, 38-39; Ν.Ύ. Times, Feb. 27, 1882 (on her part in the rapprochement of the Prohibition party and the W.C.T.U.); and, on her role in organizing a state woman's temperance association and the W.C.T.U.: Eliza D. Stewart, Memories of the Great Crusade (1888), pp. 234, 238, 420-21; Mary F. Eastman, The Biog. of Dio Lewis (1891), pp. 212, 214, 230-31; Frances E. Willard, Woman and Temperance (1883), pp. 122-26; Helen E. Tyler, Where Prayer and Purpose Meet: The WCTU Story (1949), pp. 11, 12, 18, 22-23; Ohio Statesman (Columbus), Feb. 28, 1874; Cleveland Daily Herald, Nov. 19, 1874. See also: Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, III (1886), 226-27, IV (1902), 17, 173, 428; William H. Perrin, ed., Hist, of Stark County (1881), pp. 437, 439; Methodist Episcopal Church, West Ohio Conference, Minutes, 1916, pp. 112-13 (obituary account of William Kennedy Brown); files of Wesleyan Female College Alumna. Information was also supplied by a daughter, Marie Brown (Mrs. Oscar) Shanks of Chicago; a daughter-in-law, Mrs. Katharine Kennedy Brown of Dayton; and a granddaughter, Mrs. L. W. Scott Alter of Cincinnati.] FRANCIS PHELPS WEISENBURGER

B R O W N , Mary Willcox. See Willcox Brown. B R O W N , Nancy. See Brown.

GLENN, Mary

LESLIE, Annie Louise

B R O W N , Olympia (Jan. 5, 1835-Oct. 23, 1 9 2 6 ) , Universalist minister and woman suffragist, was born in Prairie Ronde, Kalamazoo County, Mich., the eldest daughter of Asa B. and Lephia Olympia (Brown) Brown. There were two other daughters and a son in the family. Her parents were Universalists who had recently moved west from Vermont. Olympia was educated in a school built by her father on the family farm and in an academy in Schoolcraft, Mich. Encouraged by her parents to continue her education, she spent a year ( 1 8 5 4 - 5 5 ) at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts, where a friend later recalled her as a "pale, slim little girl with a head almost too large for her slender body and crowned with a wealth of soft brown hair" (Neu, p. 2 7 8 ) . She found Mount Holyoke's religious orthodoxy oppressive, however, and in 1856 enrolled at Antioch College, a coeducational institution newly founded at Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she received the B.A. degree in 1860. While at Antioch she was instrumental in in-

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Brown viting ANTOINETTE BROWN BLACKWELL, the Congregational minister, to Yellow Springs. "It was the first time I had heard a woman preach," she later wrote in her autobiography, "and the sense of the victory lifted me up." Despite the prevailing prejudice against women in the professions, she too decided upon a career in the ministry, and in 1861 she entered the St. Lawrence University theological school at Canton, N.Y. She was graduated in June 1863 and that same month was ordained a minister by the Northern Universalist Association meeting in Malone, N.Y.—the first American woman to be ordained by full denominational authority. After a year of preaching in several Vermont towns and studying elocution at Dio Lewis' Boston gymnastic school, she took her first pastorate, at Weymouth, Mass., in July 1864. In 1870 she accepted a call to the Universalist church in Bridgeport, Conn., where she served until 1876. While there, in April 1873, she was married to John Henry Willis, the proprietor of a local tea and food store, continuing with his approval to use her maiden name. They had two children: Henry Parker Willis (born 1874), later professor of banking at Columbia University, editor of the New York Journal of Commerce, and one of the principal framers of the Federal Reserve Act; and Gwendolen Brown Willis (bom 1876), who became a teacher of classics at the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. Mrs. Brown's interest in reform had been kindled as a girl by her reading, especially of Horace Greeley's New York Weekly Tribune with its accounts of reformist and woman's rights activities. In 1866, while living in Massachusetts, she accepted an invitation from suSAN Β. ANTHONY to attend a suffrage convention in New York City, purchasing a new silk umbrella and leather valise for the occasion. There she met Miss Anthony, LUCY STONE, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, and other leaders and became a charter member of the American Equal Rights Association. In 1867 she spoke with Miss Anthony and others in New York state in support of woman suffrage and, at Lucy Stone's request, traveled from July to October throughout Kansas, speaking nearly three hundred times in the campaign to secure woman suffrage by amendment of the state constitution. The following year she organized the Boston gathering which led to the founding of the New England Woman Suffrage Association, on whose executive board she sat. In 1878 the family moved from Bridgeport, Conn., to Racine, Wis., where Mrs, Brown had been called as pastor of the Universalist Church of the Good Shepherd; her husband entered

the publishing business, becoming principal owner of the Racine Times. The most active and influential phase of Mrs. Brown's suffrage work came in Wisconsin. Elected president of the state Woman Suffrage Association in 1884, she was reelected annually until 1912. In 1885 the legislature passed a rather vaguely worded statute granting women the ballot in "any election pertaining to school matters," and the following year it was approved by the voters. Since nearly all elections involved school matters to some extent, Mrs. Brown, considering the law capable of broad construction, urged women to vote in all state and local elections. When election officials refused her ballot in a Racine municipal canvass in 1887, she instituted a court suit against them, presenting her case in an appeal said to have been "pronounced by the best lawyers as unsurpassed in logic, legal acumen, keen sarcasm and righteous indignation" (History of Women Suffrage, IV, 990). The action was unsuccessful, however, and the accompanying indebtedness so burdened Wisconsin suffragists that Mrs. Brown's chief task for some years was to keep the movement alive. Although in subsequent years she continued to preach, filling ministerial posts in several Wisconsin towns, she resigned her Racine pastorate in 1887 to devote herself to suffrage work. A small, frail woman, she nevertheless possessed a powerful speaking voice and was a tireless campaigner. She travelèd extensively throughout the state, speaking and organizing suffrage clubs wherever possible. Her husband died in 1893, and until the Times Publishing Company was sold in 1900, Mrs. Brown was primarily occupied with business responsibilities. Shortly after 1900, as younger women in Wisconsin became interested in suffrage, the movement began a slow growth, climaxed in 1912 by an unsuccessful referendum campaign in which the younger women, bypassing Mrs. Brown's Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association, formed the Political Equality League. When the two groups merged later in 1912, Mrs. Brown resigned her presidency in some bitterness. She was also active in suffrage and other affairs outside Wisconsin. When the woman suffrage movement split in 1869 she maintained good relations with both factions, though she was closer to the National Woman Suffrage Association and in 1884 was chosen a vice-president. She attended many national suffrage conventions, often being asked to speak or to offer prayer. Between 1889 and 1916 she campaigned in South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, and Maryland. In 1886 she was appointed by the

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State of Wisconsin a delegate to the National Conference of Charities and Correction. Believing that the best chance for woman suffrage lay in enfranchisement by Congressional resolution, Mrs. Brown was somewhat alienated from the National American Woman Suffrage Association because of its emphasis on state campaigns. In 1892 she called a convention in Chicago which formed the Federal Suffrage Association and elected her vice-president. With the aid of CLARA, BEWICK COLBY, this was reorganized in 1 9 0 2 as the Woman's Federal Equality Association (the former name was later readopted). Mrs. Brown became its president in 1903, retaining the post until 1920. Though Mrs. Colby regularly testified in Congressional hearings on federal suffrage proposals, the group never became an important force in the struggle, and during the final years of suffrage agitation Olympia Brown joined the Congressional Union (later the National Woman's Party), founded in 1 9 1 3 by Alice Paul and L u c y Bums, serving on its advisory council and supporting its more militant tactics and its policy of holding the party in power in Washington responsible for the failure of a suffrage amendment. Although in her eighties, she distributed suffrage literature denouncing President Wilson in front of the W h i t e House in 1917 and on one occasion publicly burned two of Wilson's speeches.

than as an organizer and administrator, and she found it difficult to bring younger women into the movement or to work harmoniously with them. Though never a national figure of the first magnitude, she was an important leader in Wisconsin during a difficult period and for over half a century remained one of the suffrage movement's most vigorous spokesmen.

Beginning in 1914, Mrs. Brown spent a major part of each year with her daughter in Baltimore, where she was active in support of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and other liberal causes. She died there of heart disease in 1926 at the age of ninety-one, several months after her first European trip. Burial was in Racine's Mound Cemetery. Olympia Brown's lifetime spanned the days from the organization of the first woman's rights groups to the final victory in 1920. Buttressed by her Universalist belief in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, she advocated suffrage as woman's due and as the means whereby women could improve their communities and raise the level of political morality. Subordinating other causes to suffrage (although for some years she supported the Wisconsin Woman's Christian Temperance Union), she was indifferent to most reforms of the Progressive era, had little use for conventional politicians, and at times, notably in the 1880's as she saw the votes of foreign-born men keep the ballot from native-born women, was betrayed into bitter attacks on the immigrants. Her intense individualism made her more effective as a speaker and campaigner

[Olympia Brown Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; Wis. Woman Suffrage Assoc. Papers and Ada James Papers, State Hist. Soc. of Wis.; Olympia Brown, Acquaintances, Old and New, among Reformers (1911) and Democratic Ideals: A Memorial Sketch of Clara B. Colby ( 1 9 1 7 ) ; the 1963 Annual Jour, of the Universalist Hist. Soc., devoted to Olympia Brown, which includes a hitherto unpublished 76-page autobiography, edited and completed by her daughter; Charles E. Neu, "Olympia Brown and the Woman's Suffrage Movement," Wis. Mag. of Hist., Summer 1960, a perceptive analysis; Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage ( 6 vols., 18811922); files of the Wis. Citizen, published by the Wis. Woman Suffrage Assoc., 1887-1919. The papers of the Nat. Woman's Party, Library of Congress, and files of the Suffragist, its weekly journal, have data on Mrs. Brown's later suffrage work. Obituaries are in the Racine Jour.-News, Oct. 25, 1926, Baltimore Sun, Oct. 24, 1926 (see also editorial, Oct. 25), N.Y. Times, Oct. 24, 1926, and Equal Rights (published by the Nat. Woman's Party), Oct. 30, 1926. Miss Gwendolen B. Willis of Racine, Wis., also supplied information.] LAWRENCE L. CHAVES

B R O W N S C O M B E , Jennie Augusta ( D e c . 10, 1 8 5 0 - A u g . 5, 1 9 3 6 ) , painter, specialist in genre and scenes of early American history, was born in a log cabin near Honesdale, Pa., the only child of William Brownscombe, a farmer from Devonshire, England, and Elvira (Kennedy) Brownscombe. Through her maternal grandmother, Rhoda Steams, who had come to Wayne County, Pa., in the 1790's from Connecticut, she traced her ancestry to early settlers of Massachusetts. Encouraged by her mother, who herself wrote poetry, Jennie when still a child began to compose verses and draw pictures. As a schoolgirl she exhibited paintings at the W a y n e County Fair, where they won ribbons. She attended the Honesdale public schools through high school, and for two years after her father's death, in January 1868, taught school in Honesdale. In 1 8 7 1 she went to New York City to enter the Cooper Institute (later Cooper Union) School of Design, where she studied under the painter Victor Nehlig. Subsequently she took classes at the National Academy of Design with Lemuel E .

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Wilmarth and at the Art Students' League. "Grandmother's Treasures," shown at the academy's annual exhibition in 1876, was the first painting she sold. She supported her studies mainly by teaching at the Art Students' League, though at the same time she also did illustrations for Scribner and other publishers and for Harpers Weekly, made crayon portraits, and, for a brief period, wrote newspaper art notes. In 1882 Miss Brownscombe went abroad to study with Henry Mosler, an American genre painter, at his studio in Paris and in Brittany. An eye injury suffered soon after her return in 1883 kept her from painting for a year, but thereafter she resumed work at her studio in New York City, periodically visiting Honesdale until her mother's death in 1891. From about 1888 to 1895 she spent part of each year in Europe, maintaining a winter studio near Rome. Her work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1900 and at the Water Color Society in Rome; she also exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. During one of her winters abroad, probably about 1890, Miss Brownscombe began an association with George Henry Hall, a popular painter of genre and still-life subjects. Hall strongly influenced her style and coloring technique, and under his tutelage her craftsmanship improved, although she never achieved his power. From 1908 or earlier until his death in 1913 they shared a summer studio in the Catskill Mountains at Palenville, N.Y. After 1913 Miss Brownscombe continued to summer there; her winters were spent in New York and Bayside, Long Island. It was as a genre painter that Jennie Brownscombe became best known, but her work reached a popular public little aware of her name. Soon after 1882 magazines, calendar firms, and publishers of prints began to seek her out, and such pictures as "Love's Young Dream" and "Sunday Morning in Sleepy Hollow" were widely reproduced in photogravures, etchings, or engravings; over a hundred prints were copyrighted. Painstakingly correct in perspective and design, these studies—many of them commissioned by the publisher—were often stilted and repetitious. During the 1890's, influenced by stories of her mother's colonial forebears and by the current revival of interest in America's past, Miss Brownscombe turned to historical subjects. "The Peace Ball" (painted 1895-97, now at the Newark Museum) shows General Washington introducing Rochambeau and Lafayette to his mother after the Yorktown victory. This was the first of some fifteen or more imaginary

Washington scenes. In other paintings she depicted "The First American Thanksgiving" (Pilgrim Museum, Plymouth, Mass.), B E T S Y ROSS sewing her flag, a colonial gentleman ringing the Liberty Bell, and D O L L E Y M A D I S O N giving a ball. During the 1920's Jennie Brownscombe painted several portraits, including those of William Hopkins Leupp, a trustee of Rutgers University, and Dr. Charles Story, a physician at Flushing Hospital and Miss Brownscombe's distant cousin. A working artist until the end of her life, at the age of seventy-six she did the color illustrations for Pauline Bouvé's Tales of the Mayflower Children (1927); despite a stroke in 1931, she painted "Children Playing in an Orchard" (1932) for the Lincoln School in Honesdale. Businesslike while painting, sure of her technique, she ignored criticism, praise, changes in the art world, and demands of society; she called her art and its accompanying research "great fun." Miss Brownscombe was a member of the National Arts Club and the New York Municipal Art Society, as well as the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Mayflower Descendants. Originally a Methodist, she later joined the Episcopal Church. She was slender, with a thin face in which large brown eyes and a dimpled chin were distinctive, and reserved in manner. She lived simply with one companion or servant. At the age of eightyfive she died in New York City of atrophy of the brain with cardiac complications. She was buried beside her parents in Glen Dyberry Cemetery, Honesdale. [Letters, paintings, photographs, and prints, Wayne (Pa.) Hist. Soc.; clippings, N.Y. Public Library (Room 3 1 3 ) ; copyright prints, Library of Congress, and copyright lists; articles on Jennie Brownscombe by E . B. Callaway in Illustrated Wayne County ( 1 9 0 0 ) and Wayne County Citizen, Aug. 3, 1929, Historical Supplement; Frances E . Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) ; Clara Erskine Clement and Laurence Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century ( 1 8 7 9 ) ; Walter Shaw Sparrow, Women Painters of the World ( 1 9 0 5 ) , which reproduces "The Peace Ball"; Arthur Hoeber, "Famous Am. Women Painters," Mentor, Mar. 16, 1914; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., XVI, 4 2 5 ; Encyc. of Am. Biog., new series, I ( 1 9 3 4 ) , 3 2 2 - 2 4 ; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1 9 1 4 - 1 5 ; Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1 9 4 2 ) ; obituaries in Ν.Ύ. Times and Scranton Republican, Aug. 6, 1936. Other information from correspondence, interviews with art museums, libraries, and friends of Miss Brownscombe, and from her death certificate.]

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FLORENCE

WOOLSEY

HAZZARD

Brownson

Brownson BROWNSON, Josephine Van Dyke (Jan. 26, 1880-Nov. 10, 1942), Catholic social worker and religious educator, was born in Detroit, Mich., the third daughter and youngest of seven children of Henry Francis Brownson and his wife Josephine ("Fifine") Van Dyke. Her family background was distinguished both locally and nationally. Her maternal grandfather, James A. Van Dyke, lawyer and mayor of Detroit in the late 1840's, ranked among the foremost civic leaders of Wayne County and lower Michigan; her paternal grandfather was Orestes A. Brownson, the celebrated mid-nineteenth-century publicist and religious controversialist. Henry Brownson, after serving as an officer in the Union Army, practiced law for a time, then devoted himself to collecting and editing his father's writings, at the same time gaining national stature as a Catholic lay leader. One may surmise that the family heritage encouraged Josephine Brownson to seek out some socially useful task. She received her elementary and secondary education in the Sacred Heart convents of Detroit and Kenwood, N.Y. Wishing to become a public school teacher, she studied at the Detroit Normal Training School and received her first assignment, after graduating in 1903, at the Barstow School, one of the oldest public schools in the city. In 1914 she was assigned to Cass Technical High School to teach industrial mathematics, having in 1913 taken her A.B. degree at the University of Michigan after two years' study. A successful teacher, loved and respected by her pupils, she also showed administrative ability, becoming in 1919 second assistant to the principal at the Cass School. From early childhood, however, she had been deeply concerned with church work, especially the instruction of Catholic youth beyond the reach of parish church or parochial school. This problem became acute when immigrants in Detroit, as in most cities, took possession of fashionable downtown neighborhoods. While still in her early teens Josephine Brownson had begun assisting hard-pressed priests in the preparation of children for their first Communion. About 1896 she embarked upon her first independent venture, a catechetical class and rudimentary social center in the basement of a parochial school; her first members, young men of Italian background, she recruited from saloons in the neighborhood in the manner of a Salvation Army "lass." For these reclaimed Catholics and their families, chiefly Sicilian Italians, she and her growing circle of helpers raised funds for the erection of a new parish church (San Francesco Church, 1898). This schoolgirl's utilization of

the social service technique foreshadowed the national pattern of the early twentieth century, when in city after city Catholic laywomen established social centers geared to the religious instruction of immigrant children of Catholic background. As a further contribution to the movement, Miss Brownson and a group of women associates in 1904 founded the Weinman Settlement, in a made-over carriage house, to continue the work among the poor begun by a local Jesuit priest, Father Ferdinand L. Weinman. From this developed, under Miss Brownson's sponsorship, the League of Catholic Women (1916), whose purpose was to secure a vast expansion of social work in Detroit. Her own central interest, however, was religious instruction, which she now deemed it wise to separate from social service. Accordingly, in 1916, she also organized the Catholic Instruction League, which specialized in the problem of teaching religion to Detroit public school children of Catholic faith. Miss Brownson and her associates, mostly fellow teachers, started after-school classes and met once a month to discuss content and methods of teaching. In her booklet Stopping the Leak (1925), a syllabus for teachers, she urged a new approach to the catechism, one that would enlist the child's interest; religion should be taught as a story, not as a series of propositions to be memorized. For each of the eight grades of elementary school Miss Brownson prepared a textbook (the Learn of Me series); each text, whatever its level, contained the essentials of religion and sufficed to prepare the pupil for his first Holy Communion. Miss Brownson's warm and persuasive personality, her patience and good humor, aroused the interest of pupils and teachers and won for the plan a secure foothold. Progress was rapid after 1928, when she resigned from the faculty of the Cass School in order to devote full time to the cause of religious instruction. Also helpful was the ruling of the city superintendent in 1933, gained after a joint appeal by Miss Brownson and Protestant and Jewish groups, that afterschool religious classes might use public school classrooms provided they did not use teachers assigned to the particular school in which the religious classes were held. By June 1940, shortly after this lay activity had been taken over by the diocesan Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, the Catholic Instruction League numbered seventy-four classes, 454 teachers, and 14,309 pupils. This record was achieved without the help of "released time" or the educational agencies of the Catholic Church. It was the triumph of

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voluntary, cooperative effort under Miss Brownson's leadership. Laymen in other cities founded Catholic Instruction Leagues, sometimes drawing directly on Miss Brownson's experience; her textbooks were widely used and won praise as far afield as England. T h e value of her work was outwardly recognized in the honors conferred upon her, notably the papal decoration Pro Ecclesia et Pontífice in 1 9 3 3 and the University of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal in 1939. To catechetical instruction—in her opinion "the only career really worth while"—Josephine Brownson largely sacrificed her love of social relaxation, fine dinners, swimming, and travel. Limited in her later years by arteriosclerosis and hypertension, she died in Bon Secours Hospital in Grosse Pointe, Mich., near Detroit, of ventricular fibrillation, a few months after suffering a stroke. She was buried in Mount Elliott Cemetery, Detroit. [The best biographical accounts are: Monica Weadock Porter, Josephine Van Dyke Brownson, Alumna ( 1948), a pamphlet published by Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart; Walter Romig, Josephine Van Dyke Brownson (1955), which slights her social service work; and the article by Dorothy Jungwirth in Jour, of Religious Instruction, Feb. 1944. See also Am. Catholic Who's Who, 1942-43; Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, eds., Handbook of Settlements ( 1 9 1 1 ) , p. 144; "James A. Van Dyke," in Silas Farmer, The Hist, of Detroit and Mich., II (1889), 103738. Other information from "Josephine Van Dyke Brownson—Medalist in 1939," Univ. of Notre Dame Archives; from the Rev. Robert J. Kearns, S.J., Director, Univ. of Detroit Library; and from Miss Brownson's death certificate ( Mich. State Dept. of Health).] AARON

I.

ABELL

B R U C E , Catherine Wolfe (Jan. 22, 1 8 1 6 Mar. 13, 1 9 0 0 ) , philanthropist, patron of astronomy, was born in New York City, the second daughter and second of five children of George and Catherine ( W o l f e ) Bruce. Her father, who had emigrated from Scotland in 1795, had in partnership with his brother David become a leading printer and type founder; in 1814 they produced the first books in America that were printed from stereotype plates. Soon thereafter George Bruce began designing and cutting the script types that secured his fame. He died in 1866, a leading citizen of New York and the nation's foremost typographer. On her mother's side Catherine was a great-granddaughter of John David Wolfe, who had come to New York from Saxony in the early eighteenth century; the philanthropist CATHARINE cousin.

LORILLARD

WOLFE

Was

her

first

From birth Catherine Bruce enjoyed the advantages of wealth and culture. Educated privately in New York, she later traveled extensively in Europe. She had a fair command of Latin, French, German, and Italian. Like her father she displayed considerable artistic talent; painting was her favorite pastime. She also shared her father's delight in collecting art works, antiquities, and examples of fine typography. In 1887 she donated $ 5 0 , 0 0 0 for his memorial, the George Bruce Branch of the New York Free-Circulating (later the New York Public) Library, to which she added later gifts for endowment. She translated and in 1890 printed privately an exquisite edition of the Dies Irae of Tommaso da Celano. T h e historical record reveals little of her personal life. A spinster frequently confined by illness, a virtual recluse in her old age, she lived in comfortable obscurity with her younger sister, Matilda, who managed her affairs. Catherine Bruce did not begin her career as a patron of astronomical and astrophysical research until her seventy-third year. Apparently the study of the heavens had long fascinated her, though she lacked a technical knowledge of the science. In the February 1 8 8 8 issue of the Sidereal Messenger, a semipopular astronomical journal, she encountered an article by Simon Newcomb, the noted government astronomer, in which he suggested that most astronomical discoveries of significance had already been made. Such a discouraging view shocked Catherine Bruce and prompted her to underwrite further research. Considering science an endless frontier, she chided Newcomb for his pessimism: "Such a blow from a friend! I think we are beginning—else why set to work [on] Photography, Spectroscopy, Chemistry and soon but perhaps not in this generation Electricity. . . . T h e world is young" (letter to Simon Newcomb, Nov. 6, 1890, Newcomb Papers). On her own initiative, Catherine Bruce approached the scientific community with an offer of aid. Her first gift, of $ 5 0 , 0 0 0 in June 1889, financed the construction of a powerful photographic telescope for the Harvard College Observatory, a project of which she had learned from its director, Edward C. Pickering. Through Pickering, Newcomb, and other intermediaries, she channeled an additional $ 1 2 4 , 2 7 5 during the remaining eleven years of her life. T h e amount of her giving hardly placed her among the principal philanthropists of the late nineteenth century (her gifts to individuals seldom exceeded $ 1 , 0 0 0 ) , but the sum effect of her aid to science was incalculable. Bruce grants assisted many astrono-

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mers, both in America and abroad, at critical stages in their careers. She subsidized salaries and publications, purchased apparatus, and in 1897 endowed a gold medal for distinguished services to astronomy to be awarded periodically by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Well into the twentieth century a significant portion of the world's astronomical and astrophysical research was performed with Bruce instruments. Catherine Bruce successfully avoided public notice, but she gained an international reputation in scientific circles. Technical journals chronicled her contributions and praised her as "one of the most sympathetic and generous patrons astronomy has ever known" (Astrophysical Journal, March 1900, p. 168). In appreciation of her support of the Heidelberg Observatory, the Grand Duke of Baden presented her with a gold medal. She died in her home in New York City at eighty-four, of causes attendant on old age. Though she had once expressed a desire to "be useful to Astronomy now and always," she evidently preferred lifetime giving to deathbed benefactions, for her will contained only personal bequests to her family, servants, and friends. [Catherine Bruce left no collected body of personal papers. Her extensive correspondence with professional astronomers may be sampled in the Simon Newcomb Papers, Library of Congress, the Edward C. Pickering Papers, Harvard Univ. Archives, and the institutional records of most major astronomical observatories. Her will is filed with the Surrogates Court in N.Y. City, Liber 627. Her genealogy may be traced in Lyman H. Weeks, Book of Bruce ( 1 9 0 7 ) , pp. 325-28. Notices of her philanthropies appeared in the N.Y. Tribune, Jan. 22, 1887, and Jan. 5, 1888; and Science, July 18, 1890. The principal printed sources for her philanthropic activities are obituaries, the most informative of which are in the N.Y. Tribune, Mar. 23, 1900; Astrophysical Jour., Mar. 1900; Astronomische Nachrichten, May 15, 1900; and Popular Astronomy, May 1900. The last contains a detailed and apparently complete accounting of her gifts to astronomy. See also the notice in Appletons' Annual Cyc., 1900, p. 465; Harry M. Lydenberg, Hist, of N.Y. Public Library ( 1 9 2 3 ) ; and Solon I. Bailey, The Hist, and Work of Harvard Observatory (1931).] HOWARD S.

MILLER

BRUNSWICK, Ruth Jane Mack (Feb. 17, 1897-Jan. 24, 1946), psychoanalyst, was born in Chicago, the only child of Julian William and Jessie (Fox) Mack. Both parents came of old American German-Jewish families. Julian Mack, a native of San Francisco, had grown up in Cincinnati, as had his wife. A graduate of the Harvard Law School, he was a distin-

guished liberal jurist who served on state and federal courts and was prominent also in social welfare and Zionist organizations. His daughter was educated irregularly but early became unusually well versed in literature, music, and the arts. In 1913-14 she took a senior course at University High School, Chicago, and then entered Radcliffe College, from which she graduated in 1918. At Radcliffe she took special advanced work in medical psychology with Elmer Ernest Southard, Harvard's famous professor of neuropathology. Under Southard's sponsorship and with the aim of becoming a psychiatrist, she planned to attend the Harvard Medical School, but because of her sex was not admitted. She therefore went to the Tufts Medical School, receiving her M.D. cum laude in 1922. Meanwhile, on July 19, 1917, at the end of her junior year in college, she had married Herrman Ludwig Blumgart, a Harvard graduate of that year who later became a distinguished cardiologist. They were divorced in 1924, and on Mar. 29, 1928, she was married to Mark Brunswick, a composer. This marriage also ended in divorce, in 1945. By Brunswick she had a daughter, Mathilda Juliana. Immediately after her graduation from medical school Ruth Mack Blumgart went to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud, and ultimately she became a member of the intimate circle of psychoanalysts around Freud. From 1925 to 1938, save for a brief interval in 1928—29 when she and her second husband returned so that their child could be born in the United States, she practiced in Vienna. She was active in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and became an instructor in the Psychoanalytic Institute. Her special interest was the psychoanalytic treatment of severe mental illnesses, and at Society meetings she mostly commented on papers that touched on that topic. Freud referred patients to her, among them the "Wolf-Man," famous in psychoanalytic literature because of the details Freud published from his analysis. That he sent this patient to Dr. Brunswick when new difficulties arose some years after his original treatment of him is a striking mark of Freud's confidence in her. Small, feminine, and vivacious, Dr. Brunswick was more active than many analysts in the treatment of her patients. Thoroughness marked both her analytic work and her written contributions. Her colleagues considered her a brilliant clinician and therapist, and the effectiveness of her treatment of the "Wolf-Man," and his gratitude to her, are known from his testimony. The warmth and generosity of her friendship were especially evident at the time

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Hitler took over Austria, when her vigorous action helped many of her friends and colleagues to leave the country. An amateur musician and poet, she had belonged to a social group in Vienna whose members were involved in advancing knowledge, practicing humanitarianism, and enriching the cultural life of both Europe and America. Although in her youth she had shared her father's Zionist sympathies, she was not otherwise involved in Jewish affairs and was by conviction an atheist. When the Germans entered Austria in the spring of 1938, Dr. Brunswick returned to New York City, where she resumed her practice. She taught courses in dream analysis and psychoanalytic technique at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and she continued her concern with the treatment of borderline and psychotic patients. She died in her New York City home, at the age of forty-eight, of myocarditis following pneumonia; her body was cremated. Dr. Brunswick made significant contributions to psychoanalytic and psychiatric theory. Of her four major articles, three are classics in the field of psychoanalytic literature. She pioneered in the psychoanalytic treatment of the psychoses and added greatly to the understanding of the psychological processes involved in such illnesses. Using clinical evidence, she worked out, in collaboration with Freud, the dynamics of the growth of the emotional relationship of the very young child to his mother (libido development during the preoedipal phase) and the role this relationship may play in later mental illness. From childhood to the end of her life Ruth Mack Brunswick was plagued by minor illnesses that restricted her productivity; she carried a relatively light case load, and her publications were few. Those who knew her brilliance in conversation and seminar felt that through both formal and informal teaching she made an important additional contribution. [The bibliography of Dr. Brunswick's works in Alexander Grinstein, Index of Psychoanalytic Writings (1956), I, 263-64, is complete except for an abstract in Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, XIX (1933), 244. There are informative obituaries in the N.Y. Times, Jan. 26, 1946, and (by Herman Nunberg) in Psychoanalytic Quart., Apr. 1946. Her official activities may be followed in the announcements and reports of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Soc. and Inst, in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, and in the announcements of the N.Y. Psychoanalytic Inst. An account of Dr. Brunswick's most famous case is Muriel M. Gardiner, "Meetings with the Wolf-Man," Bull, of the Menninger Clinic, Mar. 1953. See also Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud,

vols. II and III (1955-57). Unpublished sources include: records of Radcliffe College and Tufts Medical School; personal information from Herrman L. Blumgart, Maria Bonaparte, David Brunswick, Mark Brunswick, Anna Freud, Muriel M. Gardiner, Marianne Kris, and Max Schur. A few papers, consisting mostly of notes on scientific matters, are in the possession of Dr. Marianne Kris of N.Y. City. The date and place of birth are confirmed by U.S. passport records and by Dr. Brunswick's death record, N.Y. City Dept. of Health.] JOHN CHYNOWETH

BURNHAM

BRUNTON, Ann. See MERRY, Ann Brunton. BRYAN, Anna E . (July 1 8 5 8 - F e b . 21, 1 9 0 1 ) , kindergarten educator, was bom in Louisville, Ky., the second daughter and second of three children of Parish G. Bryan, a piano maker, and Eliza H. Belle (Richard) Bryan. Both parents were natives of Kentucky, the father of Irish, the mother of French descent. After graduating from Louisville's Girls High School, Miss Bryan chanced to hear, on a visit to Chicago, of the training school operated by the Chicago Free Kindergarten Association, and enrolled. After completing the course in 1884 she stayed on in Chicago as a teacher at the Marie Chapel Charity Kindergarten. In 1887 she was called back to Louisville to head a new training school and Free Kindergarten Association being formed in that city. Already critical of the prevailing kindergarten methods that were based on the teachings of Friedrich Froebel, Miss Bryan welcomed the opportunity to try out alternatives. The permissive, experimental climate she fostered at the Louisville training school greatly influenced P A T T Y S M I T H H I L L , one of the school's first graduates and an immediate addition to its staff, thus contributing to the eventual thoroughgoing reform of kindergarten theory and practice in which Miss Hill took the lead. In 1894 Miss Bryan returned to Chicago to become principal of the kindergarten normal department at Armour Institute, leaving Miss Hill as her successor at Louisville. During her seven years as its head, the Louisville kindergarten association had expanded from one kindergarten to eight, and its teacher training classes from an initial enrollment of five to forty or fifty. Anna Bryan's special strength was her ability to inspire and guide others. She had a warmth and gentleness that won the trust and devotion of students and colleagues. While at Louisville she undertook numerous speaking engagements, though she preferred to direct her energies toward developing teachers who

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Bryan were creative and who could grow and change in the light of new knowledge. Although she drew inspiration from Froebel's writings, she abhorred the general acquiescence in his rigid sequence of kindergarten activities—prescribed games with balls, small blocks, and thin sticks, and sewing and pasting exercises —much of which seemed to her artificial and unchildlike in its disregard of the need for spontaneity. As early as 1890 Anna Bryan expressed her views before the kindergarten department of the National Education Association, drawing illustrations from her experiments in the Louisville kindergartens. Her work at Louisville attracted visitors and students from many states. Leading educators of the Midwest, especially Francis W. Parker, then head of the Cook County Normal School in Chicago, offered encouragement and criticism. Indeed, her whole approach, with its emphasis on the necessity of respecting the child's integrity as a learner and on teaching which avoided authoritarian tactics, suggested Parker's. Later (1894), after Miss Bryan had returned to Chicago, John Dewey sought her advice in establishing the kindergarten section of his experimental school at the University of Chicago. As the child study movement of G. Stanley Hall swept the country, Anna Bryan joined with Hall, Patty Smith Hill, and others to interpret and apply its findings to kindergarten education. This she did particularly through her work in the International Kindergarten Union as chairman of its child study committee (1897-1901) and as a member of its committee on teacher training. Throughout her short professional life Anna E. Bryan drove herself mercilessly; her students have said that she did the work of three women. Apparently she was not strong physically, and several times she was forced into temporary retirement from her Armour Institute post. She succumbed to heart disease in Chicago at the age of forty-two and was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville. [Anna E . Bryan, " T h e Letter Killeth," Nat. Education Assoc., Jour, of Proc. and Addresses, 1890, pp. 5 7 3 - 8 1 ; memorial articles in Kindergarten Mag., Apr. 1901 ; Cora L . Stockton, " A Glimpse of the Louisville Kindergartens," Kindergarten, Apr. 1890; Patty Smith Hill in Committee of Nineteen, Pioneers of the Kindergarten in America (1924), pp. 2 2 3 - 3 0 ; M. Charlotte Jammer, "Patty Smith Hill and Reform of the Am. Kindergarten" ( Doctor of Education Project Report, Teachers College, Columbia Univ., 1 9 6 0 ) , pp. 4 4 ^ 9 ; death certificate from county clerk, Cook County, 111.; obituaries in Louisville newspapers; information from city directories, census schedules, etc., supplied by Mrs. Dorothy Thomas Cullen, the Filson Club,

Louisville, and Mr. G. Glenn Clift, Ky. Hist. Soc., Frankfort.] M.

CHARLOTTE

JAMMER

BRYAN, Mary Edwards (May 17, 1838?-June 15, 1913), journalist and author, was born at Lloyd, Jefferson County, Fla., near Tallahassee. Her father, Major John D. Edwards (1800-1883), was a well-to-do planter and early member of the Florida senate. Her mother, Louisa Crutchfield (Houghton) Edwards (1813-1891), was a native of Athens, Ga., and a relative of Alexander H. Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy. Mary's early education was undertaken by her mother on their isolated plantation; she was a precociously bookish child, fond of lonely rambles. When she was about eleven, her family moved to Woodland plantation near Thomasville, Ga., where she was enrolled in the Fletcher Institute. A shy girl, well ahead of her schoolmates intellectually, she experienced at this time, according to one report, a religious conversion so intense that she spent whole nights on her knees in prayer (Tardy, pp. 319-20). Her formal education ceased on Jan. 10, 1854, when she was married to Iredell E. Bryan (1832-1909), eloping with him to his plantation on the Red River in Louisiana. Within a year, for reasons that are veiled in reticence, her father brought her back to Georgia, though her husband reportedly paid her occasional visits. Her first child, a son, was born at about this time. She had already published poems and a story in a Thomasville paper, and around the beginning of 1858 she began to contribute to the Georgia Literary and Temperance Crusader. Becoming its literary editor a year later, she spent most of 1859 in Atlanta, producing a great part of the Crusader's copy, writing all kinds of material in a variety of styles. The strain proved too great, however, and she resigned her editorship and returned to Thomasville. But she soon began to make copious contributions, including a full-length novel, to the newly founded Southern Field and Fireside of Augusta, Ga., reportedly for a liberal salary. In the summer or fall of 1860 Mrs. Bryan returned to her husband's Louisiana plantation, though it is not clear whether she remained there during the Civil War years while Bryan served in the Louisiana cavalry. She was with him, however, shortly after the end of the war. With Bryan partially disabled and his plantation lost, they moved to Natchitoches, La. There, in 1866-67, Mrs. Bryan was co-editor of the Semi-Weekly Natchitoches Times, a position she gave up after the

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Bryan death of her third and youngest child, a boy, in the spring of 1867. In 1874 Mrs. Bryan moved with her husband and family to Clarkston, Ga., just outside Atlanta. She soon became associate editor of the Sunny South, a widely circulated family weekly published in Atlanta. Over the next ten years, while holding this position, she began to publish novels in book form, of which Manch (1880) and Wild Work (1881), the latter dealing with carpetbag rule in the South, proved popular. Her success brought an offer from New York, and in 1885 Mrs. Bryan moved to that city to become assistant editor of two magazines published by George Munro, Fireside Companion and Fashion Bazaar. During the ensuing decade she did a great variety of writing for Munro, who reportedly paid her an annual salary of $10,000; in her spare time she completed at least nine novels, most of which Munro published. While in New York she was active in the Sorosis and Woman's Press clubs and conducted a literary salon of some repute. Mrs. Bryan returned to Georgia about 1895, settling again at Clarkston and resuming her connection with the Sunny South, although she also edited for a few years another Munro magazine, Half Hour ( 1 8 9 7 - 1 9 0 0 ) . After the Sunny South merged with Uncle Remus's Magazine (1907), she wrote for the latter a popular column called "Open House." At the end of her life she was also writing for another Atlanta magazine, the Golden Age. Outliving her husband by four years, she died in Clarkston in 1913; after Methodist services, she was buried beside him in Indian Creek Cemetery there. She was survived by three children: Fred, Pearl (Bryan) Byrd, and Ada (Bryan) Wilcox; at least two other children, both sons, had predeceased her. Mary Bryan's early work shows literary promise. Her poetry, though without originality, is often vigorous, sensitive, and earnest. Her high purpose at this time is evidenced by her correspondence and by some of her essays. In "How Should Women Write?" (Southern Field and Fireside, Jan. 21, 1860) she called on her sex to write honestly about ethical and social questions, without fear of being sneered at as "strong-minded," and thus to lend their aid to the "gradual reformation" of society. From the start, however, Mrs. Bryan was a versatile and facile writer, and in later years she merely exploited these talents. Her popular novels, written at high speed, are conventionally melodramatic and sentimental. But if she failed to achieve literary distinction, she scored a notable and early

success as a professional writer and editor, a career the more uncommon for one of her Southern background. [Mary Forrest, Women of the South Distinguished in Literature ( 1 8 6 1 ) , pp. 464-67; Mary T. Tardy, The Living Female Writers of the South ( 1 8 7 2 ) , pp. 316-24; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., VIII, 374-75; Atlanta Constitution, June 17, 1913; Atlanta Jour., May 9, 1935; letters of Mary E. Bryan to W. W. Mann (owned by Mary Garland Smith, Richmond, Va. ), as published in Ga. Hist. Quart., Dec. 1957; information from Albert Sydney Johnson, III, great-great-grandson of Mrs. Bryan. See also James S. Patty, "A Woman Journalist in Reconstruction La.," La. Studies, III ( 1 9 6 4 ) , 77-104. Mrs. Bryan's marriage date comes from county records. Since in a letter to W. W. Mann she states that she was married when she was fifteen, this would seem to establish her birth year as 1838, though later dates have been given.] JAMES s.

PATTY

B U C K , Lillie West Brown. See LESLIE, Amy. B U C K E L , Cloe Annette (Aug. 2 5 , 1 8 3 3 Aug. 17, 1 9 1 2 ) , physician and Civil W a r nurse, was born in Warsaw, N.Y., the daughter of Thomas Buckel and his wife, whose maiden name was Bartlett. When both parents died less than a year after her birth, she went to live with grandparents. Before she was four they also died and Annette, as she was known, was taken in by two young aunts. Though they were stern disciplinarians who gave her little affection, she early learned to read and write, attended the local district school, and had further schooling in a nearby town. At fourteen she began to teach in rural elementary schools in New York state and Canada, earning $ 1 . 2 5 a week and board. She decided to study medicine while still in her teens. To earn money for this purpose she took employment in a Connecticut burnishing factory, often studying Latin while she worked, her grammar book propped up before her. She entered the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1 8 5 6 , borrowing money on her life insurance to help pay the tuition; two years later, having completed a thesis on "Insanity," she received her M.D. degree. After a year of postgraduate study under

Dr.

MARIE

ZAKRZEWSKA

at

the

New

York Infirmary for Women and Children, Dr. Buckel chose to start her medical practice in Chicago. In December 1 8 5 9 she joined another woman doctor there in founding a dispensary for women and children (A. T.

Andreas, History oí Chicago,

II, 1885, p. 5 4 6 ) .

In 1 8 6 3 , moved by the wartime need for nurses, Dr. Buckel volunteered her services to

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Buckel Gov. Oliver P. Morton of Indiana, who that August sent her to General Grant's Department of the Tennessee to "look after the condition and wants of Indiana's sick and wounded soldiers" (Morton to Grant, Aug. 14, 1863, California Historical Society). She reportedly set up half a dozen field hospitals. In December Joseph K. Barnes, the army's acting Surgeon General, authorized her "to visit the U.S. General Hospitals in the South west for the purpose of consulting with Medical Directors and Surgeons in charge upon the selection & appointment of Female Nurses," and undertook to appoint ("upon application by surgeons in charge") any persons she recommended (letter of authorization by Barnes, Dec. 22, 1863, California Historical Society). By September 1864 she was apparently also acting as agent for DOROTHEA DIX in the selection and assignment of army nurses, at that point in Louisville (Powers, p. 9 5 ) . Later that fall, however, she became chief of female nurses at the Jefferson General Hospital in Jeffersonville, Ind., a post she held for the balance of the war. Throughout this period she was referred to as Miss (not Dr.) Buckel. Returning to medicine at the end of the war, Dr. Buckel practiced briefly in Evansville, Ind. Then in September 1866 she joined the staff of the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, of which Dr. Zakrzewska was now head, first as assistant physician, then as a resident physician specializing in respiratory ailments. By 1872, however, her health had failed, and she took a two-year leave of absence in Europe. While abroad she observed surgery in the clinics of Vienna and Paris, and upon her return in 1875 she was appointed attending surgeon at the New England Hospital. Continued ill health, however, led her to resign two years later to seek a more favorable climate in California. Her destination was the San Francisco area, where a cousin, Washington Bartlett, later governor of the state, was a well-known political figure. Settling in Oakland in 1877, she opened a medical practice, became the first woman admitted to the Alameda County Medical Association (June 1878), and was appointed a consulting physician at the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children (later the San Francisco Children's Hospital) founded

in

1875

by

CHARLOTTE

AMANDA

BLAKE

and others. In her later years Dr. Buckel's work centered increasingly on problems of child welfare and health. In 1901, when the California capitalist Francis M. ("Borax") Smith established the Mary R. Smith Trust to maintain BROWN

cottage homes in Oakland for orphan and delinquent girls, Dr. Buckel became a trustee and chairman of the committee on the admission of children. Through the Home Club, an Oakland women's association she had been active in founding, she secured the creation in 1904 of a pure milk commission which, acting under the club's auspices, and with Dr. Buckel as president ( 1 9 0 4 - 0 9 ) , worked to exclude tuberculous cows from dairies supplying milk to Oakland. Dr. Buckel's favorite avocations were nature study, astronomy, and music. An inveterate organizer, she founded a local Agassiz Society to encourage children in nature study, created a Chautauqua circle for her older friends, and for five years headed the biology section of the Ebell Society, a women's cultural and study club in Oakland. In 1906 she moved with a long-time friend, Charlotte Playter, to Piedmont, Calif., in the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay. She died there of arteriosclerosis in 1912, shortly before her seventy-ninth birthday. Her body was cremated. Her will left her estate in trust for the benefit of feebleminded children, a neglected group whose welfare and education had been a particular concern of her final years. A grant to Stanford University in 1914 from this bequest made possible the establishment of a Buckel Foundation research fellowship in this particular field of child psychology. [The fullest account of Dr. Buckel is Eliza M. Mosher's sketch in Medical Woman's Jour., Jan. 1924, pp. 15—16. Also useful are Margaret Elizabeth Martin's article in Calif. Hist. Soc. Quart., Mar. 1940; and Adelaide Brown, "A Hist, of the Development of Women in Medicine in Calif.," Calif, and Western Medicine, May 1925. Her Civil War work, of which she seldom spoke in later years, is documented in a small collection of her papers at the Calif. Hist. Soc.; in five letters by her at the Ind. State Library, Indianapolis (Civil War Miscellany, Military Agency and Sanitary Commission Correspondence), chiefly dating from 1866; and in Elvira J. Powers, Hospital Pencillings (1866), pp. 95, 129, 141, 194, 197, 200-01. Annie S. Daniel, "A Cautious Experiment," Medical Woman's Jour., Oct. 1939, and Agnes C. Vietor, A Woman's Quest: The Life of Marie E. Zakrzewska ( 1 9 2 4 ) , have information on her New York and Boston work. See also the Annual Reports of the New England Hospital for Women and Children, 1866-77, and the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children, 1881-88; A Sketch of the Origin and Work of the Home Club Milk Commission in Oakland, Calif, (pamphlet, c. 1905); San Francisco Call, May 4, 1894, and Aug. 18, 1912; and, on the work of the Buckel Foundation, Stanford Univ., Annual Report of the President, 1915, pp. 50-51. Additional information supplied

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Burk

by Calif. State Board of Health (death certificate), Ind. State Library, Alameda-Contra Costa Medical Assoc., the New England Hospital (Boston), and the Woman's Medical College of Pa.] JOAN M .

JENSEN

B U R K , Martha Cannary ( M a y 1, 1 8 5 2 ? - A u g . 1, 1 9 0 3 ) , better known as Calamity Jane, the celebrated figure of Western legend, poses a problem for biographers. W a s she a frontier Florence Nightingale, Indian fighter, army scout, gold miner, pony express rider, bullwhacker, and stagecoach driver? Or merely a camp follower, prostitute, and alcoholic? Various accounts make her father a farmer, a gambler, an army sergeant, and a minister, and her birthplace Illinois, Missouri, and Fort Laramie, Wyo. It seems most likely, however, that she was born on a farm near Princeton, Mo.; an obituary notice published there in 1 9 0 3 reported that her parents were still well remembered locally and identified her father as Robert Canary (Cannary). Census records, while not decisive, support this version. She herself, in an autobiographical sketch written near the end of her life, stated that her maiden name was " M a r t h y " Cannary, that she was born in Princeton on May 1, 1852, the eldest of five children, and that in 1 8 6 5 her family emigrated overland to the gold-mining town of Virginia City, Mont. An expert rider from an early age, she spent much of the time during the five-month trip off with hunting parties, and she recalled that she was "at all times with the men when there was excitement and adventures to be had." Her mother died, she reported, in 1 8 6 6 and her father a year later. Orphaned and adrift, she attached herself to a railroad construction camp in Wyoming. Most biographers agree that her early life may well have followed some such pattern. T h e rest of her autobiography must, however, be regarded as largely fictitious. Written in 1 8 9 6 to promote a brief venture as the star attraction of a traveling dime museum, it was designed to enhance her reputation as a frontier heroine. Between the years 1 8 6 8 and 1876, she claimed, she served as an army scout on expeditions under Generals Custer, Miles, Terry, and Crook. Army records do not mention such employment, and her statement is further discredited by demonstrable errors regarding dates, routes of march, and commanding officers. Actually, after the railroad camps she had first joined were disbanded, Jane established herself at a brothel near Fort Laramie. According to one report, when her current favorite among the soldiers received

orders to march with the Newton-Jenney expedition into the Black Hills of Dakota in 1875, she disguised herself in men's clothing and went along as a camp follower. She seems clearly to have accompanied the army detachment sent into the same area under Gen. George Crook in 1876, for the diary of one of the soldiers reports that "Calamity Jane is hear going up with the troops"—an early record of her famous nickname. That summer she returned to the Black Hills, arriving in Deadwood with a gold-rush party that included Wild Bill Hickok. F o r most of the next four years she remained in the area. But she was always a wanderer, and in succeeding years, as indicated by local newspaper reports and later reminiscences, she drifted from place to place in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, and the Dakotas. Of her claimed exploits, there is evidence that she did indeed hire out occasionally as a bullwhacker, helping to whip along the ox teams hauling freight wagons across the plains from Pierre to Rapid City, S.Dak. There is also evidence that when an epidemic of smallpox broke out in Deadwood in 1 8 7 8 she volunteered to nurse the stricken miners. But it is doubtful that she ever fought Indians, prospected for gold, rode for the pony express, or drove a stagecoach, although she associated with men who did. Claiming that she could do a man's work seems to have amused J a n e and her friends; such pretensions gave her a certain local fame and distinguished her from other frontier prostitutes, while enabling her to demand service at bars normally closed to women. In her autobiography she mentions her marriage, in August 1885, to Clinton Burk of Texas and the birth of a daughter on Oct. 28, 1887. No legal proof of this marriage has been found, and the residents of Deadwood, to which she returned with Burk and the child in 1895, believed that the little girl was Burk's by another woman. He himself soon vanished from her life, and she placed the child with the sisters of St. Martin's Convent in nearby Sturgis, S.Dak. In 1941 a diary and wedding certificate purporting to prove that Jane had been married to Wild Bill Hickok were produced by a Mrs. Jane Hickok McCormick, who claimed to b e their daughter, but these documents have not been generally accepted. Much of the confusion about Jane's marital status is the result of her habit of calling every man with whom she lived her "husband." Besides Burk and Hickok, the title has been conferred on men named Washburne, Somers, Shaw, Siechrist, Utter, White,

267

Burk

Burlin

Steers, Dorsett, Blake, Hunt, and King. Still, the fact that any names are remembered indicates that Jane was not an ordinary prostitute: she preferred to live with one man at a time, and she frequented brothels only when sick or destitute. As to temperament, it is generally agreed that Calamity Jane was easygoing, loyal to her friends, and full of sympathy for those who were sick or in trouble. When she was drunk— and her sprees sometimes lasted for days—she fired her guns, cursed at the top of her voice, and howled like a coyote, but she never became mean or vicious. She wore men's clothes when she chose, but these were probably the cast-off garments of various "husbands" rather than the tailored buckskins in which she posed for publicity shots. Some who knew her claimed that she was beautiful, at least before her face was marked by dissipation; others insisted that she was always homely. In photographs which have survived, her figure is thick and her features are coarse and mannish, but standards of beauty were not high on the frontier. During the 1880's and '90's she continued to drift through Montana and Wyoming, local newspapers periodically reporting her sprees or arrests for drunkenness or immoral conduct. Her principal residence after about 1886 appears to have been Livingston, Mont.; there she was living in 1901 when a Buffalo, N.Y., newspaperwoman sought her out. From this visit grew her second venture into showmanship, a short-lived appearance at the PanAmerican Exposition at Buffalo. She spent her last months ill and in poverty in her old haunts in the Black Hills, dying at Terry, S.Dak., in 1903 of "inflammation of the bowels." Thousands attended the elaborate funeral arranged for this frontier derelict by the Black Hills Pioneer Society. She was buried near Wild Bill Hickok in Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, as "Calamity Jane / Mrs. M. E. Burke." Martha Cannary became a figure of national interest not because of what she was but because of the image of her created in the public imagination. After the Civil War, Americans became fascinated by westward expansion; those who stayed at home were eager for details of life on the frontier. Residents of the Dakotas enjoyed repeating the tall tales of Calamity Jane's doings to gullible tourists, and reports of her exploits soon began to appear in Eastern papers, especially after the gold rush of 1876 focused attention on the Black Hills. On the basis of these reports, imaginative authors created a heroine

suited to the popular Western novel. Jane's literary fame began as early as 1877 when Edward L. Wheeler, one of the most successful writers on Erastus Beadle's dime-novel staff, began a series of tales about Deadwood Dick, the Robin Hood of the Dakotas, and his daredevil partner, Calamity Jane. In these stories she appears as a slender buckskin-clad girl with beautiful flashing eyes who rides and shoots as well as any man. It is hinted that she is well educated and of good family but, having been betrayed by a man whom she trusted, has chosen a Western exile. Her behavior toward men is governed by a rigid personal code of honor, for, "the one fatal step taken, [she] had courage to refuse the next." When she is not busy facing down barroom villains or rescuing helpless "pilgrims" from outlaws, she wanders on the hills in the moonlight proclaiming her undying love for Deadwood Dick in the sentimental accents of the conventional romantic heroine. However remote the connection between this fictional image and real life, there can be no doubt that Calamity Jane captured the public imagination, perhaps because in an age when most women were inhibited by genteel conventions, she seemed to move easily in a frontier environment, demanding and receiving equal rights in a man's world. [Roberta Beed Sollid, Calamity Jane: A Study in Historical Criticism (1958), is a thorough and well-documented study of the various versions of the legend, with a good bibliography. Also of value are Joseph G. Rosa, They Called Him Wild Bill (1964), pp. 158-64, 205-06; L. G. (Pat) Flanney, John Huntons Diary, II (1958), 109-11; Nolie Mumey, Calamity Jane (1950); and J. Leonard Jennewein, Calamity Jane of the Western Trails (1953), a pamphlet which quotes the Princeton (Mo. ) obituary and includes an annotated bibliography. Most accounts reprint the text of the 7-page autobiographical Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane (1896). Glenn Clairmonte, Calamity Was the Name for Jane (1959), is based on Mrs. McCormick's documents. For Calamity Jane's fictional embodiment, see Edward L. Wheeler, Deadwood Dick on Deck; or, Calamity Jane, the Heroine of Whoop-up ( Beadle's Half Dime Library, Dec. 17, 1878), and Blonde Bill; or, Deadwood Dick's Home Base (ibid., Mar. 16, 1880; both later reprinted in Beadle's Pocket Library). For a listing of these and other Beadle publications see Albert Johannsen, The House of Beadle and Adams (2 vols., 1950). The Missouri census records are discussed in Clarence S. Paine, "Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane," in Roderick Peattie, ed., The Black Hills (1952), pp. 165-76.] MERRIT CROSS

BURLIN, Natalie Curtis. See

268

CURTÍS,

Natalie.

Burnett

Burnett

BURNETT, Frances Eliza Hodgson (Nov. 24, 1849-Oct. 29, 1924), popular author, was born at Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England, the first daughter and third of five children of Edwin Hodgson, a dealer in decorative hardware, and Eliza (Boond) Hodgson, whose family claimed connections with Cheshire gentry. Her father was fairly prosperous, but in 1854, before the fifth child was born, he died. Although her mother tried to carry on the business, it slowly declined, and the family was forced to move to a small house in a once-fashionable square which had become an island of embattled gentility in the midst of a working-class district. Frances was educated in a neighborhood dame school attended by both boys and girls. When the Civil War cut off the supply of American cotton on which Manchester's economy depended, the town's prosperity abruptly ended, and before the war was over Mrs. Hodgson had to sell out and move to shabbier lodgings. A brother who had emigrated to America wrote to offer help. He had, he said, a thriving dry goods store in Knoxville, Tenn., where her sons could work to support her family; but by the time they arrived, in the early summer of 1865, he was unable to fulfill his promise, and for more than a year the family lived in poverty in New Market, a nearby village. The shock of the change from Manchester to the Tennessee mountains was underscored by the incongruity between the rough house and the linen and silver the Hodgsons had brought with them. Frances, at sixteen, reacted to these hardships with the energy and determination she was to display all her life. She tried to start a school, to raise chickens, to give music lessons. Since childhood she had been writing stories; finding one in an old copybook, she decided to rewrite it and to try to sell it. Its acceptance by Godey's Lady's Book in 1868 launched her literary career. From the beginning her fiction brought together the practical and romantic poles of her own nature. In a typical plot, the hero was beset by unpleasant circumstances and prosaic bad luck, which the author, sweeping probabilities aside, quickly transmuted into a romantic situation and a happy ending. Miss Hodgson's work grew increasingly popular and profitable, although her success rarely kept pace with her ambition. After a few years she moved up from ladies' magazines to Scribner's and Harper's. In 1872 she became engaged to Dr. Swan Moses Burnett, a son of the leading citizen of New Market, who had recently begun a medical practice in Knoxville. Before consenting to be married, however, she went

to England and stayed more than a year. The wedding took place on Sept. 19, 1873. Their first son, Lionel, was born the next September. The couple were determined to leave Tennessee, and with an advance to Mrs. Burnett of a hundred dollars a month from Charles J. Peterson, editor of Petersons Ladies' Magazine, they sailed for Europe in 1875. They settled in Paris, where Dr. Burnett studied eye and ear diseases, but the arrival of their second son, Vivian, in April 1876 cut their stay short —they called him "The Little Calamity"—and a few months later they returned to Tennessee. Mrs. Burnett's first full-length novel, That Lass o' Lowrie's, appeared as a serial in Scribner's (1876-77) and then as a book in 1877. Her reproduction of the dialect of Lancashire mill hands and the realism with which she described working-class life were considered daring at the time; her heroine, however, was no mill girl, but a sort of princess in disguise. Still, the book was an unqualified success, and the royalties enabled the Burnetts to move to Washington, where they hoped to find more opportunities. Dr. Burnett soon distinguished himself as an eye and ear specialist in the capital city, but neither his income nor his fame kept pace with his wife's. For some ten years she wrote voluminously, earning a considerable income, some critical praise, and a widening circle of distinguished friends. But for the most part she was restless and unhappy and complained of chronic nervous ill health; she resented the compulsion she felt to write stories that would please the public in order to keep up with increasing expenditures. Her sons, however, were her unmitigated joy; it was her dream to make their lives perfect. She spent endless energy on their appearance, curling their long hair every day and dressing them elaborately. It was when they were six and seven that she fashioned the costumes of velvet and lace later made famous by Little Lord Fauntleroy. Serialized first in Si. Nicholas magazine, published in book form in 1886 with illustrations by Reginald Birch, this account of a precocious American boy who inherits an English title and reconciles his crusty aristocratic English grandfather to his unassuming American mother at long last realized Mrs. Burnett's dreams of a really large income. The play which she wrote from the novel was a success in both England and America, and she subsequently dramatized a number of her other books, the most successful being A Lady of Quality, published in 1896 and staged a year later. She now began to make frequent trips to Europe, usually alone, in search of both health

269

Burnett

Burr

and fictional material. In 1890 Lionel became ill, and despite her lavish care died before the end of the year. She had been brought up in the Church of England but had taken little interest in it; now, in her sorrow, she turned to Spiritualism and then to Christian Science, interests her later fiction reflects. She was mostly in England during the 1890's, leasing Maytham Hall in Kent, which pleased her because it resembled a feudal manor. The Secret Garden (1911), which with S ara Crewe (1888) continues to be popular with children, was written in memory of the rose garden she planted there. She divorced Dr. Burnett in 1898 and two years later married Dr. Stephen Townesend, a young English physician who had helped her during Lionel's illness and who had been her secretary and protégé for some time. The Shuttle (1907) describes the difficulties of this marriage, which ended after a year. Mrs. Burnett's earnings continued to be substantial, but she always needed money to support the grand style in which she lived. She dressed extravagantly, in trailing chiffon trimmed with yards of lace, and in her later years took to wearing titian-colored wigs. In 1909 she built a house in Plandome, Long Island, N.Y., and spent the winters in Bermuda. She suffered increasingly from nervous indigestion, but to the end of her life kept on writing. She died at Plandome in her seventyfifth year and was buried in God's Acre in Roslyn, Long Island. From her first story to her last, almost fifty years later, Mrs. Burnett continued to try to obliterate the gulf between life and dreams. When she was past fifty she wrote to her son outlining a story she was then finishing and exclaimed delightedly that its cleverness lay "in the way in which the most wildly romantic situation is made compatible with perfectly every-day and unromantic people and things" (Vivian Burnett, p. 301). Her great popularity suggests that in the middle-class reading public of this epoch her restless desire to make life more luxurious and exciting was widely shared. [Mrs. Burnett's autobiography, The One I Knew Best of All ( 1 8 9 3 ) , is a sentimental memoir of her life until she was eighteen. The biography by her son Vivian, The Romantick Lady ( 1927 ), is adulatory but contains a great deal of information. Marghanita Laski's sketch of the author in Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett ( 1 9 5 0 ) is an appreciative study of her children's stories. Other biographical material includes Miles Mathew Jefferson, "Frances Hodgson Burnett, Novelist, as a Factor in the Life of Her Times" ( unpublished master's thesis, Columbia Univ., 1930); Henry C. Vedder in Am. Writers of

To-day ( 1894 ) ; and Elizabeth Bryant Johnston's sketch in Our Famous Women ( 1 8 8 4 ) ; and there are impressions of Mrs. Burnett in Mrs. Daniel Chester French, Memories of a Sculptor's Wife (1928), pp. 126-36. For a selection of contemporary critical opinion, see "The Literary Spotlight," Bookman, Oct. 1922.] BEATRICE K.

HOFSTADTER

BURR, Theodosia (June 21, 1783-January 1813), society belle, daughter and champion of Aaron Burr, was born in Albany, N.Y., where Burr had the previous year begun a law practice and married Theodosia (Bartow) Prévost, the American-born widow of a British officer in the Revolutionary War. Himself a lieutenant colonel in the Continental army, Burr was a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the noted colonial divine, and a son of the Rev. Aaron Burr, Presbyterian clergyman and president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton). The Burrs' second daughter, Sally, lived only three years, and though he had two stepsons by his wife's former marriage, it was upon Theodosia as his only child that Aaron Burr lavished his love and attention. She grew up in New York City, to which Burr moved soon after her birth. Himself an omnivorous reader, he minutely supervised Theodosia's education, writing out instructions for her tutors. In this enterprise he had the full sympathy of his wife, of whom he once wrote that she had "the ripest intellect and the most winning and graceful manners" of any woman he had ever known. His study of Rousseau's Émile and Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman further persuaded him that the education of a young lady should be in every respect as rigorous as that of a young man. "I yet hope, by her," he wrote of his daughter, "to convince the world what neither sex appear to believethat women have souls!" After Mrs. Burr's death, in 1794, when political duties often took him away from home, he corresponded directly with the eleven-year-old Theodosia, exhorting her to diligence in her studies, which included Horace, Plutarch, Gibbon, mathematics, natural science, and French. He meticulously combed her letters, correcting errors and praising felicitous passages. Yet she also took lessons in dancing and music and early became a charming hostess, "elegant without ostentation, and learned without pedantry," in the judgment of a British visitor. At Richmond Hill, the Burr estate on Manhattan Island overlooking the Hudson, she took full charge of her father's many entertainments. Overwhelmed by his close attention, Theo-

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Burr dosia fell completely and permanently into the orbit of Burr's magnetic personality. She in turn was his central interest. "For what else, for whom else, do I live?" he wrote her shortly before her marriage. On Feb. 2, 1801, the year her father became vice-president of the United States, the seventeen-year-old Theodosia Burr was married in Albany to Joseph Alston of South Carolina and went to live on his large rice plantation. Alston, twenty-two at the time of the marriage, entered the lower house of the South Carolina legislature the next year; he became speaker in 1805 and in 1812 was elected governor. Their only child, Aaron Burr Alston, was bom May 29, 1802. In the unhealthful climate of tidewater South Carolina Theodosia fell victim to a lingering illness, and in 1803 she undertook the first of several vain pilgrimages to Northern spas such as Ballston and Saratoga. Meanwhile, Aaron Burr's career followed its ill-starred course. After the duel with Alexander Hamilton in 1804 he embarked upon hazy and ill-formed intrigues for the establishment of an independent republic in the West to which both Theodosia and her husband gave their undivided support. Theodosia accompanied Burr in 1806 on the western journey which brought the conspiracy to a head and took part in the long meetings held on Blennerhassett's Island in the Ohio River. She returned briefly to South Carolina at the end of the year, but with Burr's arrest (Feb. 19, 1807) and indictment for treason she came to Richmond, Va., and remained by her father through his trial and acquittal. In 1808, under an assumed name, Theodosia traveled to New York City to see her father off to Europe, to which he was driven by threats of further prosecution, financial troubles, and popular anger. She now found herself ostracized. "The world begins to cool terribly around me," she wrote her father. Her pleas to Albert Gallatin and D O L L E Y MADISON for a mitigation of official hostility toward Burr and her efforts to raise money for him met with scant success. Her Alston in-laws resented their linkage with the infamous Aaron Burr, and even relations with her husband became strained. Theodosia remained in New York for a year, in constant correspondence with her father. In England Burr formed a close friendship with Jeremy Bentham, and Theodosia joined in his enthusiasm for the prophet of Utilitarianism, volunteering to translate Bentham's Traités de Législation into English, a task she lid not live to accomplish. As he

wandered about Europe, Burr faithfully kept, for Theodosia's eyes alone, a journal of his every action, including sundry amatory adventures. Theodosia's adoration remained undiminished. "You appear to me so superior, so elevated above all other men . . . ," she wrote the disgraced exile on Aug. 1, 1809; "I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man." She did, however, resist his importunities to join him in Europe, and instead returned that year to her husband in South Carolina. Aaron Burr returned to America in May 1812. Theodosia looked forward to a reunion in New York, but a double tragedy intervened. In June her son died. The following January the pilot ship Patriot on which she had embarked for New York disappeared in the Atlantic. In later years legends sprang up, supported by the imaginations of romantic novelists, that the Patriot had fallen into pirate hands and that Theodosia had, with angelic sweetness, walked the plank. Her own family, however, were convinced after a wideranging search that the Patriot had foundered in a storm off Cape Hatteras. Theodosia Burr Alston is remembered for her witty, intelligent letters and for the unwavering devotion she lavished upon her brilliant but erratic father. [Theodosia Burr is best approached through the extensive Aaron Burr literature. Two indispensable sources are Matthew L. Davis, ed., Memoirs of Aaron Burr. With Miscellaneous Selections from His Correspondence ( 2 vols., 1 8 3 6 ) , and The Private Jour, of Aaron Burr, during His Residence of Four Years in Europe; with Selections from His Correspondence ( 2 vols. 1 8 3 8 ) . A compilation from the above two sources is Mark Van Doren, ed., Correspondence of Aaron Burr and His Daughter Theodosia ( 1 9 2 9 ) . Nathan Schachner, Aaron Burr ( 1 9 3 7 ) , is the most recent biography; see also Thomas P. Abernethy, The Burr Conspiracy ( 1 9 5 4 ) . A selection from some recently uncovered letters of Theodosia Burr to her half brother John Bartow Prévost is in Dorothy Valentine Smith, "An Intercourse of the Heart, Some Little-Known Letters of Theodosia Burr," N.-Y. Hist. Soc. Quart., Jan. 1953. Mary V. S. White, ed., Fifteen Letters of Nathalie Sumter ( 1 9 4 2 ) , contains insights into Theodosia's family life by an intimate friend. Arney R. Childs, ed., Rice Planter and Sportsman: The Recollections of J. Motte Alston, 1821-1909 ( 1 9 5 3 ) , includes family reminiscences of Theodosia and her husband. Popularized sketches of Theodosia Burr may be found in Virginia T. Peacock, Famous Am. Belles of the Nineteenth Century ( 1 9 0 1 ) ; Gamaliel Bradford, Wives ( 1 9 2 5 ) ; and Meade Minnigerode, "Theodosia Burr," Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 6, 1924. Charles Felton Pidgin, Theodosia: The First Gentlewoman of Her Time ( 1 9 0 7 ) , is loosely organized and sometimes

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careless in detail, but does contain useful information, particularly on Theodosia's ancestry and on the legends surrounding her death. Of her vigorous "afterlife" in American historical fiction, an early example is Charles Gayarré, Fernando de Lemos (1872), and a recent one, Anya Seton, My Theodosia (1941).] P A U L S.

BOYER

B U T L E R , Mother Marie Joseph (July 22, 1860-Apr. 23, 1 9 4 0 ) , Roman Catholic nun, founder of the Marymount schools and colleges in the United States and Europe, was born at Ballynunnery, County Kilkenny, Ireland. Christened Johanna, she was the fourth daughter and seventh of eight children of John and Ellen (Forrestal) Butler. The Butler name was an ancient one in Ireland, dating back to the twelfth century; the Forrestals, originally of the French family De Forrestier, had settled in Ireland in the eighteenth century. Brought up on her father's estate, Johanna was a highspirited girl, preferring horses to embroidery and causing her parents some concern over her tomboy activities. She was a good student, however, both at the public school of The Rower in Inistioge parish and later at the day school conducted by the Sisters of Mercy in nearby New Ross. She received religious instruction primarily at home and in the parish chapel; in addition, she early participated in her mother's charitable work for the church. At sixteen, tall, slim, and already showing the regal grace which was often remarked in her later years, she became interested in the religious life through a friend whose sister was a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary, an order in Béziers, France, founded in 1849 to educate girls of the upper class. With the help of the parish priest, who was convinced of the sincerity of her call, she won the reluctant consent of her parents, and in 1876 she entered the convent at Béziers, taking the veil six months later and with it the name Marie Joseph. While still a novice, in 1879, she was sent to teach in the convent school at Oporto, Portugal; there on Apr. 22, 1880, she made her first profession. Within a year she was transferred to the school in Braga, Portugal, where she took charge of the English and French departments. Commanding respect as a disciplinarian and able to participate enthusiastically in the students' recreation as well, she became a favorite of students and parents alike; her natural dignity also helped her in dealing with public officials, many of whom had little patience with religious orders. In 1893 she was appointed superior of the Braga

convent and school. After ten years there she was sent to America to take charge of the congregation's school at Sag Harbor, Long Island, N.Y., and to extend the order's work in the United States. One of Mother Butler's long-cherished aims had been to carry out the original founders' plan to establish an institution of higher education for Catholic girls. In 1907 her cousin James Butler gave the order some property in Tarry town, N.Y., in memory of his wife, who had shared Mother Butler's dream. The following year Marymount School opened with one pupil and the long-range goal of becoming a Catholic women's college on a par with the best of secular women's colleges. Left on her own financially after the original gift of property, Mother Butler put her excellent administrative and business talents to use, successfully inaugurating and expanding the school in Tarry town. Once the work there had taken root—a novitiate was erected in 1910, and in 1918 the college opened—she pursued the even more ambitious plan of founding branches of the school in Europe and in other parts of the United States. The years 1 9 2 1 - 2 2 saw the beginnings of Marymount School in Los Angeles, at the urgent request of Bishop John J. Cantwell; then, in 1923, a French branch, Mariemont, was begun in Paris. A day school for younger students was opened in New York City in 1926; ensuing years brought the establishment of still other schools—Mariamonte in Rome ( 1 9 3 0 ) , Marymount in Santa Barbara, Calif. (1938)—and several additions to the existing plants. Mother Butler's educational program stressed social and physical training as well as intellectual and religious development. Aware of women's changing status, she early established courses in political science and law (the latter to serve as a guide in the management of property), and she later altered the curriculum further to prepare students to participate more actively in the world of affairs. Marymount alumnae were expected to become leaders in Catholic circles and convincing apologists for the faith. Mother Butler also strongly emphasized her belief in the duty of Catholic women to engage actively in church charitable work. With this in mind she established the Mother Butler Mission Guilds, groups of women who sewed for the mission churches and the poor, and clinic schools, which trained Marymount students for social service among the poor. She was responsible too for the development of the retreat movement in the United States, which spread to other American houses and in which

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hundreds of Catholic laywomen participated. In 1926 Mother Butler was elected Mother General of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Mary, the first American superior to head a Catholic congregation whose motherhouse was in the Old World. Although she continued to spend much of her time in the United States—she became an American citizen in 1927—her duties were now international, extending beyond the educational aspects of her work at Marymount. Under her generalship the congregation expanded; new schools in England and Brazil and a new novitiate in Ireland were founded. As Mother General she traveled extensively, visiting the various foundations in her charge. After her last such visit, to Rome, in the summer of 1939, she returned to Tarry town gravely ill but lived to celebrate the diamond jubilee of her first profession. She died at Tarrytown the following day of a heart attack and was buried in the crypt of the college chapel at Tarrytown. [Katherine Burton, Mother Butler of Mart/mount ( 1 9 4 4 ) , a biography; J. Kenneth Leahy, I Knew a Valiant Woman ( 1 9 4 9 ) and As the Eagle ( 1 9 5 4 ) ; Mother Butler Quart., Sept. 23, 1944; material from archives of Marymount, Tarryton, N.Y.] KATHERINE

BURTON

B U T T E R W O R T H , Mary Peck (July 27, 1686 o.s.-Feb. 7, 1 7 7 5 ) , presumed counterfeiter, was born at Rehoboth, Mass. (then in the Plymouth Colony), the first child among four daughters and five sons of Joseph Peck, an innkeeper and perhaps also husbandman in Rehoboth, and Elizabeth (Smith) Peck. Nothing is known of Mary's life until she married John Butterworth, Jr., a prosperous housewright of the same town, on Mar. 1, 1710/11. Though she probably appeared to lead an ordinary life, at least by the summer of 1716 she had begun counterfeiting the £ , 5 bills of credit issued by Rhode Island the previous year. Her crime was not uncommon, but she invented a method of making a facsimile of genuine money without using a copper plate that could be produced as evidence against her. According to Nicholas Campe, one of her accomplices, she placed a piece of "fine watter starched musoline" on a genuine bill "& So Pucked out the Letters upon Said musoline," which was then pressed on a piece of blank paper. Modern experiment shows that a hot iron was probably necessary to pick up the image on the muslin and to deposit it on the clean paper. Presumably, the incriminating cloth was burned at once. She then used

crow quill pens of various widths to strengthen the image of the bill into an almost perfect duplicate of an impression from the official plate. Mary Butterworth expanded her illegal operations steadily for several years, uninterrupted by the arrest of her brother Nicholas Peck for passing a bogus bill. (He was acquitted at Newport, R.I., in September 1716.) At first she relied on her relatives, especially for the actual counterfeiting. She organized her kitchen workshop along the traditional lines of domestic industry with herself as a very domineering master craftsman. Her most important assistants were her brother Israel Peck, who made the pens and filled in part of the ornamental designs before she finished the lettering of the bills, and Hannah Peck, Nicholas' wife, who became her equal in penmanship. The bills were passed by a growing number of Rehoboth people. Beginning with several Pecks, the circle enlarged to at least a dozen, including even Daniel Smith, town clerk and justice of the Bristol County Court of General Sessions. The passers bought counterfeits from Mary Butterworth for half the face value in genuine money, a price apparently warranted by the high quality of her work. Eventually she supplied eight types of bill, of which Nicholas Campe alone passed over £ 3 0 0 . Some of the profit presumably went into the new house which John Butterworth built for his wife in 1722. By that year, however, suspicions were abroad in the neighborhood. The uninvolved justices of the Bristol court, apparently led by Nathaniel Byfield, sent the sheriff to search Daniel Smith's house. Of course, no plates were found. Nor did any of the passers break under interrogation until August 1723, when Nicholas Campe confessed before Gov. Samuel Cranston in Newport, R.I. Campe's wife apparently agreed to testify in court. Still, when Rhode Island brought charges against one man for passing a bogus bill in Newport, the grand jury there would not indict him. In Massachusetts, Byfield upon seeing Campe's deposition immediately ordered the arrest of Mary Butterworth, her husband, and five others, and authorized the search of their houses for evidence. Charges were quickly dropped against Nicholas Peck and John Butterworth, but the others were presented to the grand jury at the ensuing "Court of Assize & General Gaol Delivery" at Bristol. The accused produced depositions impugning Campe's confessions; and since no tangible evidence existed and no-

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body else betrayed the ring, the grand jury on Sept. 10 refused to indict Israel Peck and Mary Butterworth, whereupon the court freed them from jail and dropped charges against the rest as well. Protected by numerous prominent relatives, Mary Butterworth returned to the obscurity of a respectable housewife. Aside from the birth of the last two of her seven children—twin boys born in October 1725—nothing is known of her long life after her release. Her husband died in his ninety-third year in 1771. Mary

Butterworth lived to be eighty-nine and died of old age in Rehoboth. [A full account of the Rehoboth counterfeiting, together with documents and genealogical details, is in Richard LeBaron Bowen, Early Rehoboth, II (1946), 57-118. A slightly different version by the same author is in the New England Hist, and Genealogical Register, July and Oct. 1942, and a briefer account in his R.I. Colonial Money and Its Counterfeiting, 1647-1726 (1942), chap, v.] SYDNEY V.

JAMES

c

CABRINI, Saint Frances Xavier (July 15, 1850-Dec. 22, 1917), Roman Catholic nun, foundress of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, was born at Sant' Angelo Lodigiano in Lombardy, Italy, to Agostino Cabrini, a prosperous farmer, and Stella (Oldini) Cabrini. Baptized Maria Francesca, she was the youngest of a family of thirteen, of whom only three girls and a boy reached adolescence. Her earliest years were influenced by her uncle Don Luigi Oldini of Livagra, a priest, who is said to have stirred her interest in foreign missions, and her sister Rosa, a teacher, who directed her primary education. Of her confirmation, on July 1, 1857, she later remarked, "From that moment I was no longer of the earth. . . . I cannot tell why, but I knew the Holy Ghost had come to me." From the age of eleven she took annual vows of virginity and at eighteen a permanent vow. At thirteen she went to study with the Daughters of the Sacred Heart in Arluno, where at the age of eighteen she received her schoolteacher's license with highest honors. For reasons that are not clear, perhaps uncertain health (she was a victim of smallpox in 1872), Francesca was refused admission to the Daughters of the Sacred Heart. Instead she began teaching in the village of Vidardo. In August 1874, at the urging of Don Antonio Serrati, her pastor there, she went with him to his new parish in the town of Codogno to work in the House of Providence, an orphanage run by women trained by the Sisters of Nazareth. Here, without joining any formal order, she donned the religious habit on Oct. 15, 1874, and took religious vows on Sept. 14, 1877. Bishop Domenico Gelmini of Lodi made her superior of the orphanage, and when it

was closed in 1880 she began under his direction an institute of missionary sisters with seven young women from the orphanage. An abandoned seventeenth-century Franciscan friary in Via Unione was acquired for a motherhouse, and here, on Nov. 14, 1880, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart offered the first mass, said to mark the "birthday" of the order. A religious foundress at the age of thirty, Mother Cabrini quickly set about formulating rules for the new order, presenting a draft to Serrati, now a Monsignor, in the summer of 1881, after which they were revised by Bishop Angelo Bersani, Gelmini's coadjutor. The new order grew rapidly, and in November 1882 a branch was established at nearby Grumello; by 1887 there were seven convents, and Mother Cabrini was dreaming of founding another in China. In September of that year she set out from Milan for Rome, where she gained permission for two establishments: a free school at Porta Pia and a nursery in the suburb of Aspra. Five missionary sisters from Codogno then took an apartment in Via Nomentana which thus became the Roman motherhouse. In Rome Mother Cabrini won favor with Pope Leo XIII, who found her "a woman of marvelous intuition and of great sanctity." On Mar. 12, 1888, by a Decretum Laudis, her institute was formally recognized and approved by the Vatican.

Her decision to go to the United States was prompted by Bishop Giovanni Battista Scalabrini of Piacenza, the founder of the Congregation of St. Charles Borromeo in New York City, who was deeply concerned over the plight of Italian emigrants settling there. After her first meeting with Scalabrini in 1887, Mother Cabrini gradually gave up her dream

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Cabrini of China, and when the Pope instructed her to go to America, she was already prepared. Knowing of a letter from Archbishop Michael A. Corrigan of New York asking for workers among the city's 40,000 Italians, and believing that there was an orphanage where she could begin, Mother Cabrini sailed with six of her nuns for New York, only to discover upon her arrival on Mar. 31, 1889, that no such orphanage yet existed and that Corrigan was unprepared for her. She persuaded the reluctant prelate, however, to allow her to start a school for the Italian children of St. Joachim's parish. After first living with the Sisters of Charity, a predominantly Irish order, she opened a house of her own on East 59th Street, with aid from the family and friends of Luigi Palma di Cesnola, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Here Archbishop Corrigan, as a sign of his good will, offered mass on May 3, in what is considered the first American motherhouse of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. In July Mother Cabrini returned to Europe to oversee the Italian convents. Arriving in New York a second time in the spring of 1890, she acquired a Jesuit property at West Park, N.Y., near Peekskill, to which in July she moved the orphanage she had established in New York. She sailed for Rome again in August, returning a year later with twenty-nine nuns. In October 1891, after borrowing passage money from Archbishop Corrigan, she set sail with fourteen nuns for Nicaragua, where at the invitation of several wealthy citizens she opened a school in Granada. The Nicaraguan foundation was one of the turning points of her career, for her work now became international in character. With phenomenal rapidity over the next decade she opened establishments in Panama, Argentina, and Brazil, and in Paris, Madrid, Turin, and London. Meanwhile, her work within the United States expanded. In 1892 she laid the foundations of a convent, school, and orphanage in New Orleans. That same year in New York City she opened Columbus Hospital, which gained state recognition in 1895. At the request of Bishop Charles McDonnell of Brooklyn she opened a school in that city; in 1899 she went to Chicago to begin a school in the Church of the Assumption parish and returned to New York to found the Sacred Heart Villa Academy, a boarding school for well-to-do girls. In 1902 she was in Denver and the following year in Seattle to begin further educational establishments. She founded an orphanage and school in Los Angeles in

1905. The success of her hospital in New York encouraged her to undertake similar projects in Chicago (where she converted the North Shore Hotel into Columbus Hospital) and in Seattle (where in 1916 the former Perry Hotel became a third Columbus Hospital). In addition to their work in schools, orphanages, and hospitals, her sisters were encouraged to do prison work, especially bringing spiritual consolation to men condemned to death. The Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart had received a final Decree of Approbation from the Pope in 1907. In 1909 in a ceremony at Seattle Mother Cabrini became a naturalized citizen of the United States and the next year was made superior general of her order for life, with eventual authority over sixty-five houses and some 1,500 daughters. In April 1917, while visiting Columbus Hospital in Chicago, she suffered a recurrence of the malarial disorders which had weakened her since the start of her Latin American missionary travels. On Nov. 21, when she fainted as she left the altar rail, it was obvious that she was seriously ill. She died a month later at the hospital. After requiem masses in Chicago and New York, she was buried in the order's cemetery at West Park, N.Y. Her remains were reinterred in 1933 beneath the chapel sanctuary of the high school named in her honor at Fort Washington, New York City. This fragile little woman was gifted with a remarkable ability to organize and raise funds for the many charitable institutions which she created. Although plagued almost from birth by illness, her energies and cheerfulness never failed. "Difficulties! Difficulties!" she would exclaim with gentle scorn. "What are difficulties? Childish trifles magnified by our imagination, which is not yet accustomed to focus itself upon, or to plunge itself into, Almighty God." She had little use for self-pity. "I dislike querulous victims," she said. "With one ounce of love of God one bears burdens silently and joyfully." She disdained sentimentality and affectation, and kept her conferences with her spiritual daughters brief, lively, and practical. "Robust, vigorous, strong, masculine" were the words she preferred in describing spirituality. Her whimsical humor was a delight. On Nov. 8, 1928, George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago ordered a hearing on the merits of her cause for canonization. Pope Pius XI on Mar 30, 1931, introduced this cause; on Oct. 3, 1933, she was pronounced "Venerable"; on Nov. 21, 1937, her virtues were declared heroic; and on Nov. 13, 1938,

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she was beatified and named "Blessed." On July 7, 1946, she was canonized, the first American citizen to achieve sainthood. [The best biographies are A Benedictine of Stanbrook Abbey, Frances Xavier Cabrini ( 1 9 4 4 ) , and Theodore Maynard, Too Small a World: The Life of Francesca Cabrini ( 1 9 4 5 ) . See also Cyril C. Martindale, Life of Mother Francesca Saverio Cabrini ( 1 9 3 1 ) ; Nello Vian, Mother Cabrini ( 1 9 3 8 ) ; Alban Butler, The Lives of the Saints, First Supplementary Volume, by Donald Attwater ( 1 9 4 9 ) , pp. 1 9 1 - 9 6 ; James J. Walsh in Catholic World, Apr. 1918; Cecilia Mary Young in Commonweal, Jan. 26, 1934; Joseph B. Code in ibid., Dec. 17, 1937. On the steps leading up to her canonization, see Catholic World, Dec. 1938, pp. 3 6 0 - 6 1 , Aug. 1946, pp. 4 6 6 - 6 7 ; Commonweal, Nov. 11, 1938, May 12, June 30, 1939, July 19, 1946; N.Y. Times, Mar. 25, 1931, June 17, 1936, Oct. 27, Nov. 22, 1937, Sept. 1, 1938.] ANNABELLE M.

MELVILLE

CAHILL, Marie (Dec. 20, 1870-Aug. 23, 1933), actress, was popular on the musical comedy and vaudeville circuit for four decades. Little is known of her background or early life. Her birthplace is usually given as Brooklyn, N.Y.; her parents were Richard and Marie (Grogean) Cahill, both natives of Ireland. It seems reasonably certain that she spent her early years in Brooklyn and attended parochial schools. The strong influence of her Catholic education was reflected in her lifelong refusal to perform during Holy Week and in her moral attitudes toward feminine behavior. It was in Brooklyn that her theatrical career began. Sometime in the mid-1880's Miss Cahill was given the soubrette role in an Irish romantic drama, Kathleen Mavourneen. What induced the manager of a traveling stock company to hire an inexperienced actress is not clear, but very likely the ample proportions of Miss Cahill's figure, as they have been recorded in photographs, promised to be a box office attraction. In 1888 she made her way from Brooklyn to New York City, where she played in the farce C.O.D. at Poole's Eighth Street Theatre. Her first musical comedy role followed that same year, the part of Patsy in Charles Hoyt's original play The Tin Soldier. Now well established as an actress, she toured England and the Continent in 1893-94, played at the leading New York theatres, notably the Herald Square and the Victoria, and performed under thé direction of the best managers, Augustin Daly and George Lederer among them. Ephemeral as the comedies in which she appeared may have been—Morocco Bound (1894), Sporting Life (1898), Monte

Carlo (1898), Three Little Lambs (1899), Star and Garter (1900)—they were a medium of expression whose rhythms and moods spoke to a mass audience. For this audience Marie Cahill was fast becoming an alert and articulate interpreter of the comedy of life. In 1902 the supporting actress became a "headliner." One of her songs in The Wild Rose—"Nancy Brown," a sentimental ballad in which a sophisticated, worldly-wise city girl tells of her impossible infatuation for a handsome rural lad—caught the national imagination. This and the ballad "Under the Bamboo Tree," which she sang in Sally in Our Alley (1902), provided the basis of a solo vaudeville act which earned her $1,000 weekly. She also starred in 1903 in a new musical, Nancy Brown. Secure in this public recognition, Miss Cahill could assume the prerogatives of stardom, even to the point of successfully feuding with her managers. In 1905 she made theatrical news by walking out on It Happened in Nordland shortly before it went on tour. For the next fifteen years, shrewdly capitalizing upon her early successes, Marie Cahill appeared in a new vehicle almost every theatrical season, generally in roles that were variations upon Nancy Brown. During 1906-07 she toured the United States and Canada with Marrying Mary; in 1908 she was at Wallack's Theatre playing the title role in The Boys and Betty; in 1911 she revived H.M.S. Pinafore in the role of Buttercup. Other heroines which she imbued with her Irish charm were Celeste Deremy in The Opera Ball (1912), Polly Bainbridge of Ninety in the Shade (1915), Phoebe Larrimore in Just around the Corner (1919), and Gloria Wentworth in the musical satire The New Yorkers (1930). Her characterizations contrasted vividly with those of the melodramatic actresses, for Marie Cahill brought to the stage the restrained grace of the Gibson Girl. Her humor and pathos were not the products of extravagant words or gestures but revealed themselves through the significant glance and the studied vocal inflection. Her singing placed stress upon narrative and mood rather than upon musical artistry. Her costuming was unaffected, often consisting of a simply designed dress with a long skirt and high neckline. Her taste in costumes was at least partially dictated by her moral views, about which she was seldom reticent. Her objection to the revealing attire of women in the theatre became legendary, and the chorus girls in her shows generally found themselves singing and danc-

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ing in long skirts. When EVA TANGUAY made popular the sensational Salome dance and costume in 1908, Marie Cahill expressed herself vigorously in the press and to public officials, demanding censorship to protect "the young and innocent." Her moralism also flowed along positive channels; she generously supported the Mary Anderson Guild, which sponsored cruises and other wholesome relaxation for young women of the theatre. Well aware of the many problems facing the career woman, Marie Cahill advised marriage as a means of achieving a balanced life. Without marriage, she reasoned, the professional woman is likely to become "aggressive" and lose "her higher sensibilities." Her own marriage, on June 18, 1903, to her business manager, Daniel V. Arthur, was without either scandal or issue. When asked by an interviewer what the greatest danger for modem women might be, she replied with characteristic forthrightness, "Obesity." And she cherished no girlish illusions about the royal road to success. In a book of saucy anecdotes, It's Hard to Convince You ( 1 9 0 3 ) , she offered a piece of advice that reveals her resilience in the face of experience: "If you don't succeed the first time, try and fail again." Throughout her career she made her home in New York City. She died there in 1933, at sixty-two, of chronic Bright's disease. After a requiem high mass in a church near the theatre district, she was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, Brooklyn. Marie Cahill's career exemplified the earnest professionalism which had overtaken frivolous entertainment during the early decades of the twentieth century. Although her medium was a series of roles as stock characters in rather conventional productions in this era of George M. Cohan, Frank Daniels, and Augustin Daly, she brought to each performance the talent and personality which made for successful theatre. In spite of her humble background, she had a natural grace and dignity; this lent an aura of respectability to an emergent art form too often irresponsible and tasteless. [The clipping files of the Harvard Theatre Collection and the Frank Lenthall Collection (private) provide ample information on Miss Cahill's career. Summary accounts may be found in John Parker,

ed., Who's Who in the Theatre (6th ed., 1930),

and Walter Browne and E. De Roy Kock, Who's Who on the Stage, 1908. Three articles of particular value are contained in the Boston American,

Jan. 26, 1906, Ν.Ύ. Dramatic

Mirror, Feb. 17,

1906, and N.Y. Times, Aug. 24, 1933. Miss Cahill's death record is the source of her date of birth and her parents' names.] ALBERT

F. MC LEAN,

JR.

CALAMITY JANE. See nary.

BURK, Martha Can-

C A L D W E L L , Mary Gwendolin ( 1863-Oct. 5, 1909), philanthropist and socialite, later the Marquise des Monstiers-Mérinville, was born in Louisville, Ky.,the elder of the two daughters of William Shakespeare Caldwell and his wife, Mary Eliza Breckinridge. Her father, son of James H. Caldwell, an eminent New Orleans actor, producer, and business promoter of English birth, had made a considerable fortune constructing and operating gas plants in the Middle West; her mother came of an old Kentucky family. After Mrs. Caldwell's death, the father moved Mary (also known as Mamie) and her younger sister Mary Elizabeth (also known as Lena) to New York City. There he was converted, shortly before he died in 1874, to Roman Catholicism. Under the terms of his will his daughters were made the wards of Roman Catholic friends and left a legacy of several million dollars. Both girls were educated at the Academy of the Sacred Heart on 17th Street. While studying there, they became acquainted with a family friend and fellow Kentuckian, the Rev. John Lancaster Spalding, then assistant pastor of New York's St. Michael's Church and soon to be appointed the first bishop of Peoria, 111. (New York Freeman's Journal, Oct. 1, 1887). There exists some doubt as to whether Miss Caldwell's offer, in 1884, to donate $300,000 to establish a national school to advance Catholic philosophy and theology resulted from her friendship with Bishop Spalding—a leader in the movement for founding such a Catholic university—or from a clause in her father's will that made it obligatory for her to donate onethird of her inheritance "to the Catholic Church to found a university when she reached twenty-one" ( N e w York Times, Nov. 16, 1904). In any event, the Third Plenary Council of the Catholic hierarchy, meeting in Baltimore in 1884, accepted her offer, and stipulated that Miss Caldwell was to be considered the founder of what became the Catholic University of America (Ellis, p. 9 7 ) . She made subsequent gifts of $60,000 to endow a chair of theology and $20,000 to support two scholarships, but these sums were lost in the failure of the broker Thomas E. Waggaman. Both Caldwell sisters traveled abroad, becoming acquainted with international society. In 1889 Mary became engaged to Prince Joachim Joseph Napoleon Murat, invalid grandson of the King of Naples (and nearly thirty years her elder), but within a year the engagement ended when the Prince reportedly

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insisted that she settle half of her fortune on him. On Oct. 19, 1896, in a Paris church, with Bishop Spalding in attendance, she was married to François Jean Louis, Marquis des Monstiers-Mérinville, a middle-aged French nobleman of conservative background. Her sister, who had embraced the Lutheran faith after marrying Moritz, Baron von Zedtwitz, the German minister to Mexico, in 1890, was left a widow in 1896 when the Baron was killed in a yachting accident. The two sisters drew together, and the younger seems to have encouraged the Marquise's doubts about Catholicism. Though in 1899 she received the University of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal, the Marquise was soon trying to rid herself of "the subtle, yet overwhelming, influence of a Church which pretends not only to the privilege of being 'the only true Church,' but of being alone able to open the gates of heaven to a sorrowful, sinful world" (interview, New York Times, Nov. 16, 1904). On Oct. 30, 1904, she announced that her "honest Protestant blood" had "asserted itself" and that she had finally "cast off 'the Yoke of Rome.' " Catholics were further stunned when she added, "Since I have been living in Europe my eyes have been opened to what that Church really is and to its anything but sanctity." Among those who knew her well her decision occasioned little surprise, for as the New York Times noted, "The Marquise is an original character and extremely impulsive," and she had for several years been in poor health, having in 1902 suffered a stroke that left her paralyzed and, in addition, impaired her speech. Determined to keep her title, the Marquise paid her husband $8,000 a year to refrain from instituting divorce proceedings after they were separated in 1905. She was returning to America four years later when she died suddenly of Bright's disease, at forty-six, in her stateroom on the North German Lloyd liner Kronprinzessin Cecile as it lay anchored outside New York harbor. She was buried at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Ky. At the time of her break with Roman Catholicism her portrait was removed from the Catholic University of America, but her name still identifies one of its larger buildings. [John Tracy Ellis, The Formative Years of the Catholic Univ. of America ( 1946 ) ; N.Y. Times, Dec. 10, 20, 1884; July 23, Aug. 18, Oct. 31, Nov. 1, 1889; Jan. 2, June 9, 1890 (on her engagement to Prince Murat), June 18, 1890; Aug. 19, 20, 1896 (on her sister's marriage); Oct. 20, 1896; Nov. 16, 1904; and obituary, Oct. 6, 1909. Family data from Mrs. Dorothy Thomas Cullen, Curator and Librarian, The Filson Club, Louisville, Ky. On her grand-

father, James H. Caldwell, see Oral S. Coad and Edwin Mims, Jr., The Am. Stage ( 1 9 2 9 ) , p. 135.] JAMES P. SHENTON

CALKINS, Mary Whiton (Mar. 30, 1863-Feb. 26, 1930), philosopher and psychologist, was born in Hartford, Conn., the oldest of the five children of Wolcott and Charlotte Grosvenor (Whiton) Calkins. Her father, a native of Painted Post, N.Y., was of Welsh lineage, his earliest American ancestor being Hugh Calkins, who had come to Hingham, Mass., in 1638. Her mother, a Bostonian, was descended from John and PRISCILLA ALDEN of the Plymouth Colony. Mary Calkins spent most of her childhood in Buffalo, N.Y., where her father, a graduate of Yale and of Union Theological Seminary, was a Presbyterian minister. In 1880 he moved to a Congregational pastorate in Newton, Mass., Miss Calkins' home for the rest of her life. After elementary schooling in Buffalo, supplemented by private lessons in German, she entered the Newton High School at the age of seventeen. Her graduation essay, "The Apology Which Plato Should Have Written—A Vindication of the Character of Xantippe," probably reveals more of an interest in the rights of women than in philosophy. In 1882 she entered Smith College as a sophomore. Because of the death of her sister in 1883 she stayed at home the following year, studying Greek and tutoring two of her younger brothers. She reentered Smith in the fall of 1884 as a senior and graduated with her class in 1885, having specialized in the classics and philosophy. In 1886, while on a trip to Europe with her family, she met and traveled to Greece with a young Vassar instructor in the classics, ABBY LEACH. The acquaintance turned her interests toward a teaching career, and in September 1887, with her father's encouragement, she accepted a position as tutor in Greek at Wellesley College. She remained at Wellesley for the next forty-two years, becoming successively instructor in Greek (1889-90), instructor in psychology (1890-94), associate professor of psychology (1894—96), associate professor of philosophy and psychology (1896-98), and professor of philosophy and psychology from 1898 until her retirement in 1929. The shift from Greek to psychology came at the invitation of the single member of the newly established department of mental philosophy, who, sensing her promise, offered her a post on condition that she prepare herself for it by an additional year of study. Miss Calkins thereupon began graduate work in psychology at Clark University with Edmund C.

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Calkins Sanford, and in psychology and philosophy at Harvard with William James, Hugo Münsterberg, and Josiah Royce. She later wrote with appreciation of the laboratory training she had received from Sanford and with enthusiasm of the privilege of being the sole student in a seminar given by James in 1890, just after the publication of his Principles of Psychology. From 1892 to 1895, in addition to her teaching at Wellesley, she worked in the psychology laboratory at Harvard under Münsterberg. She passed with distinction the oral examination for the Ph.D. and completed a monograph on association which would have been her doctor's thesis had the Harvard corporation approved the recommendation of the department to grant her the Ph.D. degree. Several years later Radcliffe offered to confer the degree, but Miss Calkins declined on the ground that all her work had been done at Harvard. Later she was the recipient of two honorary degrees, a Litt.D. from Columbia in 1909 and an LL.D. from Smith in 1910. In 1891, a year after she began her teaching in psychology, she set up a laboratory at Wellesley, the first in any women's college and one of the early ones in the country. Although she said later that she was not primarily an experimentalist, she did considerable experimental work, which resulted in papers on dreams, color theory, memory, space-time consciousness, emotion, and association. Her primary interest was in methods, foundations, and point of view. She regarded psychology as the science of the self, arguing that to treat "ideas" apart from the conscious organism was abstract and unempirical ("every idea," she wrote, "is the experience of a self who is conscious"). After the first systematic statement of her position in an article in 1900, her published papers in psychology (there were some sixty-eight in all) were largely devoted to the exposition and defense of "self-psychology." Her view was a minority one, but it is significant that her emphasis on the conscious self and its attitudes and on the social reference of self-consciousness has been recognized by later psychologists working in the field of personality as in some degree foreshadowing their own position. In philosophy her chief interest was in metaphysics. She considered as the decisive influence on her thinking the philosophy of Josiah Royce, under whom she studied at Harvard. Her position, which she called "personalistic absolutism," had two main tenets: first, that "the universe is through and through mental in character, that all that is real is ultimately mental, and accordingly personal, in nature"; and second, that "the universe literally is one

all-including (and accordingly complete) self of which all the lesser selves are genuine and identical parts, or members" (Contemporary American Philosophy, pp. 203, 209). For the last twenty years of her life her teaching and writing were largely in the field of philosophy, on which she published some thirty-seven articles in American and foreign periodicals. Her most important book, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, appeared in 1907. In 1918 she published The Good Man and the Good, in which she dealt with the foundations of morals from the point of view of the moral self. Her achievements were recognized by her election to the presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1905 and of the American Philosophical Association in 1918; in each case she was the first woman to be so honored. In 1927 she gave two lectures at the University of London on "Conceptions of Meaning and of Value." In 1928 she was made an honorary member of the British Psychological Association. To an unusual degree Miss Calkins lived the philosophy she taught. A student once called her "the most perfectly integrated personality I have known." Serene, good-humored, warm in her personal relations, she was superlatively honest in matters of the intellect, seeking to give the fairest possible hearing to viewpoints different from her own. She governed her time, says her brother, with "inflexible will," displaying a "capacity for uninterrupted toil." Deeply religious, she had achieved for herself a complete synthesis between intellect and faith; and she sought, with her usual logical consistency, to apply the principles of Christianity to the everyday world. Her interest in social problems dated from the year after her graduation from college when she and her mother were among the original members of the Social Science Club of Newton, a group of women resolved to study social and economic problems. In later years she became an ardent supporter of the Consumers' League and the Civil Liberties Union, an uncompromising pacifist, and a friend of J A N E ADDAMS and Norman Thomas, frequently voting the Socialist ticket. Her last four years were shadowed by illness. She died of cancer at her Newton home in her sixtyseventh year and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Mass. Miss Calkins did distinguished work both in psychology and in philosophy. Her books were widely used: there were four editions of her A First Book in Psychology (1909) and five of The Persistent Problems of Philosophy. Her teaching, her lectures, and her writings were models of clarity. She was not primarily an in-

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novator; she was rather an expositor, a systematize^ and a defender of a kind of idealism that belongs in the great tradition of Western philosophy. She was influential primarily because of the incisiveness, rigor, and orderliness of her exposition. She was passionately convinced that personalism was the true position. That it should prevail both in philosophy and in psychology was her deepest concern both as a teacher and as a scholar. [In Metnoriam, Mary Whiton Calkins, 1863-1930 ( 1 9 3 1 ) , a pamphlet containing a biographical sketch by a brother, the Rev. Raymond Calkins, and tributes by several colleagues; chapter by Miss Calkins in Carl Murchison, ed., The Hist, of Psychology in Autobiog., vol. I ( 1 9 3 0 ) ; George P. Adams, ed., Contemporary Am. Philosophy, vol. I ( 1 9 3 0 ) ; Boston Transcript, Feb. 27, 1 9 3 0 ; Boston Globe, Mar. 15, 1 9 3 0 ; death record from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics.] VIRGINIA

ONDERDONK

CAMPBELL, Helen Stuart (July 4, 1839-July 22, 1918), author, reformer, and home economist, was bom Helen Campbell Stuart in Lockport, N.Y. Her parents, Homer H. and Jane E. (Campbell) Stuart, were Vermonters of Scottish descent. Early in her childhood her father moved to New York City, where for half a century he was a lawyer and at one time president of the Continental Bank Note Company. Helen was educated in New York public schools, at the Gammell School of Warren, R.I., and at Mrs. Cook's Seminary in Bloomfield, N.J. In or about 1860 she was married to Grenville Mellen Weeks, who the next year graduated from University Medical College (now part of New York University). In the Civil War he served as surgeon aboard the U.S. ironclad Monitor and after the war was medical director of the Florida military district and a surgeon and Indian agent in the West. Shortly after his return to civilian life in 1871 the marriage broke up, and it ultimately ended in divorce. Beginning in 1862, Helen Campbell published children's stories under her married name in the Riverside Magazine, Our Young Folks, and St. Nicholas. These were well received, and in 1868-69 a number were collected in the four-volume "Ainslee Series," which sold well enough to warrant a London reprint. She also published several adult novels under the names "Campbell Wheaton" and "Helen Stuart Campbell," the latter the name she subsequently used throughout her life. Shorter works of popular fiction appeared in Lippincott's, the New England Magazine, and Harper's. During the late 1870's she became active in

the early home economics movement. Having taken lessons from J U L I E T CORSON, Mrs. Campbell in 1878 began teaching in the Raleigh (N.C.) Cooking School. While there she wrote a textbook, The Easiest Way in House-Keeping and Cooking (1881). In 1880 she was associated with Mrs. Anna Lowell Woodbury in founding a mission cooking school and diet kitchen in Washington, D.C. Back in New York, she served as literary and household editor of the short-lived Our Continent magazine (1882-84). Later, in 1893, she helped organize the National Household Economics Association, an outgrowth of the Women's Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition; this subsequently (1903) merged into the committee on household economics of the General Federation of Women's Clubs. Helen Campbell's career had meanwhile taken a new turn in 1882 with the publication of The Problem of the Poor, in which she described the work of a city mission on the New York waterfront with which she was associated, run by Jerry McAuley, a reformed criminal. The book also dealt generally with poverty in New York, stressing particularly the evil effects of low wages upon women. This was followed in 1886 by Mrs. Herndon's Income (originally a series in Lyman Abbott's Christian Union magazine), portraying the impossibility of living decently on the poor wages being paid many women workers. Mrs. Campbell also contributed a column on "Woman's Work and Wages" to Good Housekeeping. For a time she continued to write light novels, but her growing reputation rested on her books about the poor. The New York Tribune commissioned her to study conditions among women in the needle trades and department stores of New York City; her weekly articles, which began in October 1886, were collected in the following year as Prisoners of Poverty. After a lengthy European trip she wrote a sequel, Prisoners of Poverty Abroad, published in 1889. Herself drawn toward social reform, she joined the First Nationalist Club of Boston, founded by followers of Edward Bellamy, and wrote occasionally for the Bellamyite monthly the Nationalist, for the Rev. W. D. P. Bliss* American Fabian, and, particularly, for Benjamin O. Flower's Arena. In 1891 her monograph, "Women WageEarners," received an award from the American Economic Association. A general survey of the condition of working women in America and Europe, it concluded by suggesting workers' associations and Consumers' Unions as means of forcing better wages and working conditions. It was published in 1893 with an

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introduction by Richard T. Ely, the liberal University of Wisconsin economist, with whom she studied that year. Ely persuaded the regents of the university to invite her to deliver two courses of lectures in the spring of 1895 on "Household Science" and "Social Science," Ely personally arranging for her remuneration. Although the lectures did not, as she had hoped, lead to a permanent academic appointment, the first series was published in 1897 as Household Economics—a subject she viewed as "the connecting link between the physical economics of the individual and the social economics of the state." Meanwhile she had served briefly (1895-96) as head resident of Unity Settlement (later Eli Bates House) in Chicago, in association with the writer CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, with whom she had lived for a time in California in 1894. In 1897, once more on the recommendation of Ely and others, she was appointed professor of home economics at the Kansas State Agricultural College, where a Populist-dominated administration was hiring a number of Eastern reformers. Plagued by ill health and difficulty in getting along with subordinates, she resigned in March 1898 to resume her career as a free-lance writer and lecturer. Mrs. Campbell produced little after 1900. After leaving Kansas she spent several years in Denver, and around the tum of the century she moved with Charlotte Perkins Gilman to New York City. For the last six years of her life she was in the Boston area, dying at her home in Dedham, Mass., in 1918 (of endocarditis and nephritis) at the age of seventy-nine. As early as 1896 she had visited and written enthusiastically about "Green-acre," a summer retreat at Eliot, Maine, that had gradually become a center of the Baha'i religion. In her final years she became a Baha'i devotee, and her remains were taken to Eliot for burial. Helen Campbell's vivid portrayals of New York poverty had considerable impact in her day. She was miscast as a scholar; even so friendly a critic as B. O. Flower wrote: "Mrs. Campbell skims over the surface of conditions, and though often very helpfully suggestive, she fails to strike at the root of economic evils" (Arena, Aug. 1901). Though not of the first rank, she was one of a significant group of writers who, several decades before the muckrakers, drew the nation's attention to appalling conditions in American slums. [The general biographical accounts—Frances E . Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) ; Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., IX, 126; Who's Who in America, vols. I - I X (which records some of her various residences ) ; and the

obituary in the Boston Transcript, July 23, 1918— must be supplemented by a variety of scattered material. On her husband, see his entry in Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1 9 4 2 ). On her magazine writing, see Frank L . Mott, A Hist, of Am. Mags., vols. I l l and IV ( 1 9 3 8 - 5 7 ) ; and the listings in the Nineteenth Century Readers' Guide and Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. For her work in home economics, see Mary J. Lincoln, " T h e Pioneers of Scientific Cookery," Good Housekeeping, Oct. 1910, p. 4 7 1 ; Hazel T. Craig, The Hist, of Home Economics (pamphlet, 1 9 4 5 ) , p. 8 (on the Nat. Household Economics Assoc.); and Lydia Η. Farmer, ed., The Nat. Exposition Souvenir ( 1 8 9 3 ) , pp. 3 6 4 - 6 5 (on Mrs. Woodbury's school). On the McAuley mission, see Mrs. Campbell et al., Darkness and Daylight; or, Lights and Shadows of N.Y. Life ( 1 8 9 1 ) . Her poverty writings are treated in: Robert H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the U.S. ( 1 9 5 6 ) ; Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age ( 1 9 5 4 ) ; and Walter F . Taylor, The Economic Novel in America ( 1 9 4 2 ) . On her reform activities, see Arthur E . Morgan, Edward Bellamy ( 1 9 4 4 ) , p. 2 5 1 , and Benjamin O. Flower, Progressive Men, Women, and Movements of the Past Twenty-Five Years ( 1 9 1 4 ) , pp. 1 2 4 - 2 5 . On her academic appointments, see Richard T. Ely Papers, State Hist. Soc. of Wis.; records of the Univ. of Wis. Board of Regents, June 20, 1894, Univ. of Wis. Archives; and Julius T. Willard, Hist, of the Kans. State College of Agriculture and Applied Science ( 1 9 4 0 ) . On her association with Charlotte Perkins Gilman, see the latter's The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman ( 1 9 3 5 ) ; and Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Handbook of Settlements ( 1 9 1 1 ) , p. 4 7 . On her Baha'i connection, see her article on Green Acre in Outlook, Oct. 3, 1896, and Charles M. Remey, "Reminiscences of the Summer School Green-acre, Eliot, Maine" (2-vol. typescript, Library of Congress), I, 4 5 . There are occasional references to her peripatetic later career in the Woman's Jour., e.g., Dec. 2, 1893, p. 3 7 7 ; Sept. 26, 1896, p , 3 0 5 . Death record from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics.] HOSS E .

PAULSON

CANNON, Annie Jump (Dec. 11, 1863-Apr. 13, 1941), astronomer, was born in Dover, Del., the only daughter and the oldest of the three children of Wilson Lee Cannon and Mary Elizabeth (Jump) Cannon, both natives of Delaware. The family included an older half brother and three older half sisters, children of her father's first marriage. Wilson Cannon, of Scottish descent, was a prosperous shipbuilder and merchant and a member of the Delaware senate; a Unionist, he broke with the Democratic party at the outbreak of the Civil War to cast the deciding vote in the senate against secession. On her mother's side she was descended from William Barrati, who had settled in Maryland in 1675.

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Growing up in a happy and cultured family, Annie attended public school in Dover and the Wilmington Conference Academy there. She early became interested in the stars, taught at first by her mother, who as a schoolgirl had taken a course in astronomy. In a makeshift observatory in the attic of their large house, Annie learned to recognize the constellations and their positions in the sky, recording her observations by candlelight—a hazardous practice of which her father did not approve. As a child she was also intrigued by the pretty spectra cast by prisms dangling from an ornate candelabrum, which later in her Cambridge home she was to cherish as an early omen of her life's work. When she graduated from the academy at the age of sixteen, her father, encouraged by her teachers, sent her to Wellesley College in Massachusetts, which had opened its doors five years earlier. Her work there with SARAH F . WHITING, professor of physics and astronomy, strengthened her interest in the stars, and from Miss Whiting's keen interest in spectroscopy she derived, as she later wrote, "a desire to continue the investigation of spectra" (Popular Astronomy, December 1927, p. 544). After her graduation in 1884 Miss Cannon returned to her home in Dover. A gifted pianist, she now devoted much of her time to music. She was beautiful, and popular among her friends, and seemed fully to enjoy her life as a member of Dover society, though she showed no special interest in beaux. She also traveled; her photographs of Spain were greatly admired in a day when photography was not yet a common hobby. Her life in Dover ended abruptly, however, in 1893 with the death of her mother, to whom she had been exceptionally close. Seeking a change, Miss Cannon returned in 1894 to Wellesley for postgraduate study and to assist Professor Whiting. Next year she enrolled as a special student in astronomy at Radcliffe College, where she studied for two years. In 1896 she began working as an assistant at the Harvard College Observatory. There, under the direction of Prof. Edward C. Pickering, she joined the already illustrious WILLIAMINA

PATON

STEVENS

FLEMING

and

the

young Antonia Maury (d. 1952) in investigations of stellar spectra—the study of the characteristics revealed when the light of a particular star is photographed through a prism. Miss Cannon was not a pioneer in this work; her function was rather to simplify and perfect the systems of stellar classification already in use, which she did most effectively, and to carry forward the task of applying these systems in a comprehensive survey of the skies. Her great

achievement lies in the mass of her work: no other astronomer or group of astronomers has yet matched the sheer bulk of Miss Cannon's output in the field of spectral classification. In nine quarto volumes known as The Henry Draper Catalogue (1918-24)—financed by the memorial gift of MARY ANNA P A L M E R DRAPER —she classified the spectra of all stars from the north pole to the south pole of the heavens, from the very brightest to the faintest visible on the Harvard plates. In two additional volumes, called The Henry Draper Extension (1925-49), she classified still fainter stars, using photographic plates exposed especially to show them. Her total classification of the spectra of some 350,000 stars, many of them more than one hundred times fainter than the limit of visibility to the naked eye, provided in abundance much-needed data for further research in astrophysics and stellar statistics. Like Mrs. Fleming before her, Miss Cannon discovered, by virtue of the peculiarities in their spectra, large numbers of relatively rare types of stars, including some 300 variable stars and five "novae." In 1900 she took over the observatory card catalogue of the literature on variable stars, then containing 14,000 cards; at the time of her death it comprised about a quarter of a million references and was of inestimable value to all Harvard research on this topic. Most of her published papers during her forty-five years at Harvard dealt with stellar spectra and variable stars; besides the catalogues already cited, she published over ninety lesser catalogues and shorter papers. After the death of Mrs. Fleming in 1911, Miss Cannon succeeded her as curator of astronomical photographs, examining and passing on the quality of every plate that was taken between 1911 and 1938. The Harvard observatory's plate collection, the largest in the world, grew during her curatorship from about 200,000 to nearly 500,000. For her accomplishments, which she modestly attributed to patience, Miss Cannon was the recipient of numerous honors. She was the first woman to receive an honorary Doctor of Astronomy degree from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands (1921) and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Oxford (1925). Four American colleges similarly honored her. Like Mrs. Fleming she was made one of the few honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society (1914). In 1922 she won the Nova Medal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, in 1931 the Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1932 the Ellen Richards Prize from the Society to Aid Scientific Research by Women.

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She was also elected to membership in two honorary societies, the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences of Boston. A League of Women Voters survey in 1922 named her America's leading woman scientist. In 1938 she was appointed the William Cranch Bond Astronomer at Harvard University, one of the early women to hold a titled corporation appointment at Harvard. Keenly appreciative of the honors that came to her, she herself established in 1933 the Annie J. Cannon Prize of the American Astronomical Society, to be awarded triennially to a woman who had rendered distinguished service to astronomy; with characteristic femininity she stipulated that the prize should be an appropriately designed brooch for the recipient to wear, rather than a ceremonial medal. Her personal charm, her love for people, and her enthusiasm for the stars made Annie Cannon a popular lecturer. She enjoyed travel, and attended the meetings of the International Astronomical Union held every three years, missing only the first in 1922, when she was in Arequipa, Peru, taking objective-prism photographs of stellar spectra at Harvard's southern Boyden Station. Her deafness in later years, believed to be the result of exposure to the unaccustomed cold during her first winter at Wellesley, almost never proved a handicap she could not surmount with hearing aid and lip reading. She was especially fond of children and frequently had parties for them at "Star Cottage," her home at 4 Bond Street at the foot of Observatory Hill; her egg-rolling contest for the observatory children at Easter was an annual affair. She enjoyed cooking and delighted in entertaining. A Republican and a strong believer in suffrage, belonging to the National Woman's Party, she was moved to righteous indignation when women showed a lack of interest in voting. Her church affiliation, originally Methodist, was later Congregational. Miss Cannon officially retired from Harvard in September 1940, although she continued to work on a special commission from Yale University. The following April, at the age of seventy-seven, she died of heart failure and arteriosclerosis at Cambridge. She was buried in Lakeside Cemetery, Dover, Del. [The fullest biographical account is the chapter on Miss Cannon in Edna Yost, Am. Women of Science (1943). Also useful are Biog. Cyc. Am. Women, II (1925), 7-11 (by Sarah F. Whiting); Annie J. Cannon, "Sarah Frances Whiting," Popular Astronomy, Dec. 1927; and obituaries of Miss Cannon in: Am. Philosophical Soc., Year Book, 1941 (by Harlow Shapley); Science, May 9, 1941; Observatory,

May 1941; Popular Astronomy, Aug. 1941; and Nature (London), June 14, 1941. See also Am. Men of Science (6th ed., 1938); N.Y. Times, Apr. 14, 1941, and editorial, Apr. 15; Equal Rights, May 1941. On her father, see Biog. and Genealogical Hist, of the State of Del. (1899), II, 1342-43. Other information from Del. Public Archives Commission, Dover; Wellesley College alumnae records; and death record from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics. Her portrait, painted by Orville H. Peets, hangs at the Univ. of Del., and one by her Wellesley contemporary, Helen (Martin) Rolfe, at the Wellesley College Observatory.] DORRIT

HOFFLEIT

CANNON, Harriet Starr (May 7, 1823-Apr. 5, 1896), first mother superior of the Episcopal Community of St. Mary, was born in Charleston, S.C., the younger of the two daughters of William and Sarah (Hinman) Cannon. Her parents, who had come to Charleston from Bridgeport, Conn., to establish an importing business, died of yellow fever in September 1824, and Harriet and her sister, Catherine Ann, two years older, were taken back to Bridgeport to the home of a maternal aunt, a Mrs. Hyde. Growing up in a family of five cousins, Harriet had an uneventful childhood except for an accident which cost her the sight of one eye; she attended grammar school and took lessons in voice, piano, and organ, for which she showed some talent. She was a sociable girl, fond of dancing and company. After the marriage in 1851 of her sister, to whom she had been very close, she took lodgings in Brooklyn, N.Y., supporting herself by giving private music lessons and singing in the choir of Grace Church. She planned shortly to join Catherine and her husband in California, but on the eve of her departure, in 1855, her sister suddenly died. This blow marked the crisis of Harriet Cannon's life and was probably the single event most responsible for her turning to a religious calling. On Feb. 6, 1856, she was received as a probationer in the Episcopal Sisterhood of the Holv Communion, a deaconesslike order formally organized in 1852, under the leadership of A N N E A Y R E S , by the Rev. William Augustus Muhlenberg to aid the poor in his parish, the Church of the Holy Communion in New York City. She became a full member a year later. For two years Sister Harriet nursed in an eighteen-bed infirmary adjoining the parish house. In 1858, when St. Luke's Hospital on Fifth Avenue, founded by Dr. Muhlenberg, was completed, she was placed in charge of a forty-bed ward. Though happy nursing the poor and gratified by St. Luke's growing reputation for improved hospital care, Sister Har-

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riet was not content with the procedures of the sisterhood. With some of the other sisters, she petitioned for a corporate organization and pressed for modifications toward traditional monasticism, a concept opposed as "popish" by both Dr. Muhlenberg and Sister Anne Ayres. As a result of the disagreement, Harriet Cannon and one of her associates were asked to leave St. Luke's; three others left with them. Although at the moment homeless and without formal organization, the sisters did not give up hope of establishing a religious community. In September, at the invitation of Bishop Horatio Potter of New York, they assumed management of the House of Mercy, a rescue home for young women who had become prostitutes. In this decaying, debt-ridden mansion at 86th Street and Broadway housing slatternly, rebellious, half-starved girls, they set to work with zeal. Their success in improving the lot of their charges impressed Bishop Potter, whom they had approached for permission to organize a sisterhood. After due consideration, he helped them formulate a community on classic conventual models, including "a contemplative life of prayer and devotion" as well as "an active life of labor," a true monastic order rather than a philanthropic sorority. On Feb. 2, 1865, Harriet Cannon and four of her associates, in a service at St. Michael's Church in the Bloomingdale section of Manhattan, became the initial members of the Community of St. Mary— the first religious community to be officially constituted by an Anglican bishop since the dissolution of the English monasteries in the sixteenth century. The informal leader of the group had been Sister Jane Haight, but by September 1865, when the Community held its first chapter meeting, she was seriously ill with tuberculosis, and the members elected Sister Harriet their first superior, an office she held until her death three decades later. She made her formal life vows on Feb. 2, 1867. In addition to the House of Mercy, the sisters, under Mother Harriet's guidance, took over the management of the Sheltering Arms, an orphanage and home for waifs, in the autumn of 1864 and of St. Barnabas' House for homeless women and children the following February. These first ventures, however, suffered from the attacks of "no-nunnery" Protestants, who provoked their resignation from St. Barnabas' House in 1867 and their dismissal from the Sheltering Arms in 1870. Public suspicion, however, began to be dispelled by the work of St. Mary's Free Hospital for Poor Children, established in 1870. One of the Community's central concerns, the hospital grew under Mother Harriet's leadership, expanding

to larger quarters in 1881 and winning the support of the socially prominent and wealthy. The Community also benefited from the loyal backing of the Rev. Morgan Dix, rector of Trinity Church, who was its chaplain from 1866. Dr. Dix was a significant influence in the development of the Community, and Mother Harriet did not fully realize her potential as its leader until his resignation in 1874. Meanwhile the Community began a convent school, a project in which Mother Harriet became particularly interested after a trip to England in 1867. St. Mary's School opened on West 46th Street on May 1, 1868, and others followed: St. Gabriel's School in Peekskill, N.Y., in 1872; St. Mary's School in Memphis, Tenn., in 1873; and Kemper Hall in Kenosha, Wis., in 1878. Despite Mother Harriet's reluctance to have the Community become involved in parish work, in 1874 the sisters took over Trinity Infirmary in Dr. Dix's parish. In 1880 this work grew to encompass a mission house serving immigrants in lower Manhattan; six years later a similar undertaking was started in Chicago. The steady growth of the Community and its gradual acceptance by the public afforded Mother Harriet great satisfaction. At her death, which came of acute bronchitis at St. Mary's Convent in Peekskill on Easter Sunday, 1896, she left ninety-one "choir sisters" and thirteen "minor sisters" working in thirteen houses in New York, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. She herself had earned a place of honor in the history of the Episcopal Church in the United States which has since been commemorated by a window in the Bishop's House at the National Cathedral in Washington. She was buried in the cemetery at the Peekskill convent, her home for the last twenty years of her life. [Sister Mary Hilary, C.S.M., Ten Decades of Praise ( 1 9 6 5 ) , the story of the Community's first century; Morgan Dix, Harriet Starr Cannon ( 1 8 9 6 ) ; Sister Hilary, "The Life of Harriet StanCannon" (unpublished MS. in the archives of St. Mary's Convent, Peekskill, N . Y . ) . ] SISTER M A R Y H I L A R Y ,

C.S.M.

CARAWAY, Hattie Ophelia Wyatt (Feb. 1, 1 8 7 8 - D e c . 21, 1 9 5 0 ) , United States Senator from Arkansas, was born on a farm near Bakerville, Humphreys County, Tenn., the daughter of William Carroll and Lucy Mildred (Burch) Wyatt. Her father had come to Tennessee from North Carolina, as had her mother's family. While still a child, Hattie moved with her parents to neighboring Hustburg, where William Wyatt farmed and ran a general store. The meager education afforded by this rural community was supplemented by listening to the

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Caraway political discussions around the cracker barrel in her father's store. At fourteen she enrolled in the Dickson (Tenn.) Normal School, a small denominational "college" (better termed an academy), graduating with a B.A. degree in 1896. A fellow classmate, seven years her senior, was Thaddeus Horatius Caraway of Clay County, Ark.; they were married on Feb. 5, 1902. In Jonesboro, Ark., where they soon settled, Hattie Caraway spent a decade as a housewife and farm woman of the classic Southern model. Managing their small plantation while her husband practiced law, she devoted her time to purely domestic pursuits and the rearing of her three sons, Paul Wyatt, Forrest, and Robert Easley. She took little interest in social activities, and none at all in the political activities which soon engaged her husband's attention. Her routine varied little even after her husband was elected to Congress in 1912. Dividing her time between Jonesboro and Washington, she continued to devote herself to homemaking. When the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, she "just added voting to cooking and sewing and other household activities," as she dryly observed later. Although associated with church activities and the Jonesboro Woman's Club, she had never identified herself with the Arkansas suffrage organization. The same year she became a voter Hattie Caraway became a Senator's wife, when her husband, after three terms in the House of Representatives, was elected to the upper house. Reelected in 1926, he died on Nov. 6, 1931, before the expiration of his term. Gov. Harvey Parnell of Arkansas at once appointed Hattie Caraway to her husband's Senate seat, announcing that "she was rightfully entitled to the office held by her distinguished husband." He voiced a formula already twice applied in Arkansas in the case of Congressional vacancies: in 1929 when Pearl Oldfield had been appointed to succeed her husband, William Oldfield; and in 1930 when Effiegene Wingo succeeded her husband, John Wingo. Mrs. Caraway was sworn in on Dec. 9, 1931, and in a special election on Jan. 12, 1932, she was elected without opposition to serve the balance of the term expiring March 1933. She thus became the first woman to be elected to the United States Senate, having been preceded in that body only by R E B E C C A L A T I M E R F E L T O N with her courtesy tenure of one day. The new woman Senator occasioned wide newspaper comment. With her short, plump figure clad in a severe dark dress, she suggested an old-fashioned housewife, temporarily displaced in a legislative hall but most at home

among her pots and pans, an impression further strengthened by her folksy humor and simple manner. These concealed, however, a realistic understanding of the duties of a legislator and a practical desire to test the range of her own competence. She was in her office at eight in the morning; read the Congressional Record of the preceding day; studied material pertinent to the bills pending; and faithfully attended committee meetings and Senate sessions. Her committee assignments included her husband's seat on the important Agriculture and Forestry Committee and, later, the Commerce Committee. She made no speeches, explaining that "so far the men have left nothing unsaid"; but she never missed a roll call. On May 9, 1932, Vice-President Charles Curtis invited her to preside briefly over the Senate. While the publicity spotlight was focused on this precedent-making event, Hattie Caraway seized the occasion to announce her intention to seek renomination in the August primaries. The announcement came as a "distinct surprise" to Arkansas politicians, including the seven strong candidates already in the field. Her Senate colleague, the veteran legislator Joseph T. Robinson, declared a hands-off policy. But late in the campaign Robinson's old political enemy Huey Long of Louisiana launched a spectacular nine-day whirlwind tour across Arkansas with his "share the wealth" caravan, rallying the "common people" against "Wall Street and the pot-bellied politicians" and proclaiming the 'little widow woman" the true heir of the egalitarian philosophy of her late husband. Infected with the contagion, the candidate herself made a few vigorous speeches, assailing Hoover's "manicured Farm Board" and the ousting of the Bonus Army. Thus aided, Hattie Caraway won decisively in the heaviest primary vote ever recorded in the state. With her election that November, she entered upon a full six-year Senatorial term. Senator Caraway now found herself a national figure, whose homely and down-to-earth views were sought and widely quoted. Senator Long soon found he had not won a recruit and charged her with ingratitude. Her reply was characteristically laconic: "I am Senator Caraway." Her husband, known for his bitterly partisan oratory, had represented the interests of the poor whites of his state and section but had also ardently supported Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations and made an able fight against the Teapot Dome scandal. From him Mrs. Caraway inherited an interest in flood control, distrust of lobbies, and opposi-

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tion to isolationism; she backed Lend-Lease in 1941. In 1943 she became co-sponsor of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, the first woman member of Congress to endorse it. For the most part a reliable supporter of the New Deal, she occasionally pursued an independent line, as when she voted to override the veto of the Bonus Bill, an act remembered warmly by the veterans' lobby in 1938. She introduced no major legislation but, always unobtrusively attentive to the interests of her constituents, sponsored a fair quota of public and private bills of direct concern to Arkansas. Adding to her precedents, she became the first woman chairman of a committee (Enrolled Bills) and the first woman president pro tempore of the Senate (Oct. 28, 1943). In 1936 the Senate seat beside her was occupied by Rose McConnell Long, the handsome, charming widow of Huey Long, appointed and then elected to fill the unexpired term of her husband. There was no doubt about Senator Caraway's intention to seek another term in 1938. This time her campaign was "unchaperoned" and against a strong opponent, Congressman John L. McClellan, whose slogan was "Arkansas needs another man in the Senate." President Roosevelt gave her perfunctory support; but organized women supported her heartily, as did veterans' organizations and most labor unions. The campaign was a bitter one and ended with McClellan's defeat by 8,000 votes. The period 1938-44 saw a continuation of her loyal support of the major Roosevelt policies. She had long since come to regard herself as "an integral part" of the Senate and felt that her experience had demonstrated that there was "no need to set women apart from serious consideration as qualified legislators" (Washington Evening Star, Apr. 7, 1936). As the 1944 elections approached, Senator Caraway, now sixty-six, announced her candidacy, as expected, but declared that Senate duties came first and did very little campaigning against the most forceful of her long series of political rivals, thirty-nine-year-old Congressman William Fulbright. In the primary battle Hattie Caraway ran a poor fourth. Asked to comment while the returns were being counted, she said, "The people are speaking." Her reticent, rather mournful manner, like her plain appearance and conservative tastes, had changed little during her thirteen years in the Senate. When the 78th Congress held its last session, on Dec. 19, 1944, the Senate rose in tribute to her, an act described by reporters as "almost without precedent." President Roosevelt appointed Mrs. Caraway to the Federal

Employees' Compensation Commission (later the Bureau of Employees' Compensation) early in 1945. She served until July 1946, when she became a member of the Employees' Compensation Appeals Board. Resigning after a stroke of apoplexy in January 1950, she died that December in a sanatorium in Falls Church, Va., six weeks before her seventy-third birthday. She was buried beside her husband in West Lawn Cemetery, Jonesboro. Ark. A lifelong Methodist, Hattie Caraway never lost her identification with the rural postbellum South and the conservative social attitudes characteristic of this region. (She remained a staunch prohibitionist and opposed an antilynching law in 1938.) She steadily resisted being regarded as a "curiosity"; and she never lost her ability to hold her tongue except when she had something to say. These qualities, added to her practical intelligence, integrity, and common sense, won the admiration and respect of her colleagues. George Creel, impressed with her "keen and comprehensive grasp of issues," summed up prevailing feeling when he said that she gave one "a sense of complete capability, joined to an air of invincible placidity." [Newspaper accounts are a principal source. The N.Y. Times index, 1931^5, lists that paper's many stories; see also, in the years of Mrs. Caraway's election campaigns, the Washington Evening Star, Little Rock Democrat, and Arkansas Democrat (Little Rock), and the obituary in the N.Y. Times, Dec. 22, 1950. Pertinent periodical articles are: obituary of Thaddeus Caraway in the Nation, Nov. 18, 1931; Herman B. Deutsch, "Hattie and Huey," Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 15, 1932; George Creel, "The Woman Who Holds Her Tongue," Collier's, Sept. 18, 1937; and "The Last of the First," Time, Aug. 7, 1944. See also Biog. Directory Am. Cong., 1950; Annabel Paxton, Women in Congress ( 1945), pp. 15-29; Louise M. Young, Understanding Politics (1950), p. 194 and passim.] LOUISE M .

YOUNG

CARNEGIE, Louise Whitfield (Mar. 7, 1 8 5 7 June 24, 1946), philanthropist, wife of Andrew Carnegie, was born in the Chelsea district of New York City, the eldest of four children of John William and Fannie (Davis) Whitfield. Both her maternal and paternal ancestors had come from England prior to the Revolution, the Davises settling in Connecticut and the Whitfields in New York. Her father was a prosperous New York merchant, head of Whitfield, Powers & Company, a retail and wholesale house for textiles and notions. In 1862 the Whitfield family moved to East 18th Street near Gramercy Park. There young

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Louise played happily with the neighborhood children, including Theodore Roosevelt and his sister. For twelve years she attended the famed Miss Haines' School, located at 10 Gramercy Park, consistently ranking first in her class. When she was sixteen her parents took her on a tour of Europe. She first met her future husband a few years later when a friend brought him to the Whitfield home for a New Year's Day visit. Twenty-two years older than Louise and the same age as his future mother-in-law, Carnegie at first paid little attention to the quiet girl. But as the visits continued over the next few years, he discovered that she shared his interest in horseback riding as well as his love for music and books. With her mother's permission, she accepted his many invitations to go riding with him in Central Park. The romance was a troubled one. Her father had died in 1878, and as her mother was a semi-invalid, most of the responsibility for the management of the household, including the care of a four-year-old brother, fell on Louise. Moreover, the very success and wealth of her suitor somewhat overawed her; she could not believe that Carnegie in any way needed her. But the most difficult barrier was Carnegie's devotion to his mother and the latter's possessive attitude. When it finally became clear that Carnegie had no intention of marrying so long as his mother remained alive, Louise Whitfield asked that their three-year secret engagement be ended. But neither seemed willing to end the romance completely, and after Mrs. Carnegie's death in November 1886 they were married at the Whitfield home on Apr. 22, 1887. Louise Carnegie had never planned for a career other than that of wife and mother, but her role as the wife of one of America's wealthiest men proved far more demanding than she could have imagined. Carnegie, after many years of living in a hotel suite, was delighted to have a home that could be the center for his many business and philanthropic interests, and his wife was to be his official hostess. For ten years after their marriage they rented a castle in Scotland each summer, but after the birth of their only child, Margaret, in 1897, Mrs. Carnegie felt that they should have their own home in Scotland as well as their winter home on 51st Street in New York. In 1899, accordingly, Carnegie purchased and remodeled Skibo Castle on Dornoch Firth in northern Scotland. This became, each summer, a gathering place for the great of two continents. Louise Carnegie did insist, however, that for one month of every summer she, Carnegie, and their daughter must go into retreat at a

secluded lodge on their estate. Here Carnegie, with her encouragement, did most of his writing, and here she found the private family life she had always wanted. Although acceding always to Carnegie's wishes, his wife nevertheless had an influence upon him that was as pervasive as it was subtle. Associates who had known him before his marriage were in agreement that Mrs. Carnegie did much to smooth off his rough edges. She encouraged his interest in music and literature, and although never entering directly into his business affairs, she applauded his more generous instincts in that area. She aided Charles Schwab in his successful efforts to convince Carnegie that he should sell out to the Morgan syndicate in 1901. Mrs. Carnegie was her husband's first and most enthusiastic convert to his Gospel of Wealth doctrine. Of all his numerous philanthropies, the field that was closest to her own heart was that of international peace. In this area she was largely instrumental in the formation of the Church Peace Union. Deeply religious herself (a member of the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York), she was able to persuade her husband, who had always been indifferent to organized religion, that the churches of all denominations might be useful organizations for spreading the doctrine of peace. The Carnegies' hopes and efforts for world peace received a severe blow in August 1914. Andrew Carnegie, leaving Skibo hurriedly for what proved to be the last time, never recovered from this disillusionment. Although he lived until August 1919, the war had suddenly made him an old man, and the direction of most of his affairs was now the responsibility of Mrs. Carnegie. In the twenty-seven years that remained to her after the death of her husband, Louise Carnegie maintained many of his interests. Although not herself a major philanthropist, she devoted time and money to promoting American participation in the League of Nations, contributed $100,000 to Union Theological Seminary, and took an active interest in such causes as the Near East College Association and Grenfell Mission in Labrador. Though she continued the annual summer migrations to Skibo, the old days of entertaining crowds of celebrities were over. She now lived as quietly as possible, giving most of her attention to her daughter and four grandchildren. Many honors came to her in these years, including honorary degrees from St. Andrew's University and New York University, but she always accepted them as memorials to her husband. She was never under illusion about her own place in history. "I am," she said, "the unknown wife

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of a somewhat well-known business man." She died at her home on 91st Street in New York City at the age of eighty-nine and was buried beside her husband in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, N.Y. By prior arrangement with her husband, she left the bulk of her nineteen-million-dollar estate to their daughter. [Carnegie Papers, Library of Congress; Carnegie autograph collection, N.Y. Public Library; Robert Franks Papers, Home Trust office, Hoboken, N.J.; Carnegie papers, Ross and Connell Law Office, Dunfermline, Scotland; personal papers in the possession of Mrs. Margaret Carnegie Miller, N.Y. City. Published sources include: Burton J. Hendrick and Daniel Henderson, Louise Whitfield Carnegie (1950); Andrew Carnegie, Autobiog. (1920); Burton J. Hendrick, The Life of Andrew Carnegie ( 1 9 3 2 ) ; obituary in N.Y. Times, June 25, 1946.] JOSEPH

FRAZIER

WALL

C A R R E Ñ O , Teresa ( D e c . 22, 1 8 5 3 - J u n e 12, 1 9 1 7 ) , concert pianist, was born in Caracas, Venezuela, into a cultured and comfortably situated family, the second daughter and second of the three children of Manuel Antonio Carreño and his wife, Clorinda García de Sena y Toro. Her father, a gifted amateur musician, was for a time minister of finance in the Venezuelan government, having chosen a political career rather than the musical one of earlier Carreños. On her mother's side she was descended from the patrician house of Toro; her great-aunt Maria Teresa Toro was the wife of Simón Bolívar, and she herself was christened Maria Teresa. She showed an extraordinary musical talent as early as the age of three. She did not begin formal training on the piano, however, until she was six, at first under the able tutelage of her father, then under the professional teaching of Julius Hohenus. In July 1862, after a political upheaval in which Manuel Carreño lost his cabinet post, the Carreños left Venezuela for New York City, where Carreño hoped to support his family by teaching music while providing Teresa with the musical training her gift demanded. She gave her first performance in New York on Nov. 7, 1862, in a private audition in Irving Hall for friends and musicians; her first public appearance followed on Nov. 25. Winning popular and critical acclaim as a child prodigy, she came to the attention of the noted pianist Louis M. Gottschalk, who gave her occasional lessons and became one of the most important influences in her musical education; his compositions were to appear frequently in her early concert repertoire. Her father, pressed by financial necessity, reluctantly permitted her first public

success to be followed by other concerts. After her Boston debut on Jan. 2, 1863, Teresa appeared in a series of performances throughout New England; that fall she played for President Lincoln at the White House. Her public appearances then ceased, her father apparently having heeded the warning of such critics as John Sullivan Dwight of Boston, who feared the results of too early success and too little serious training. In 1866 the Carreños, now gearing their lives completely to Teresa's development as a concert pianist, went to Paris, where her European career began auspiciously on May 14 in a concert with Eugène Vivier, the horn virtuoso. Assisted by Rossini and Franz Liszt, she quickly found her way into the most select musical circles in Paris and began a period of study with Georges Matthias and Emmanuel Bazin, interspersed with concerts in England, France, and Spain to pay expenses. A desire to emulate ADELINA p a t t I J whom she admired tremendously, led her to study singing also, taking lessons from Rossini and Enrico Delle Sedie. In 1 8 6 8 she met Anton Rubinstein, who became a lifelong friend as well as "the outstanding influence of her girlhood" (Milinowski, p. 8 6 ) . During the next few years she made frequent European appearances, usually under the management of Maurice Strakosch, though she toured Great Britain in the spring of 1 8 7 2 as piano soloist in the company of his rival, Col. J. H. Mapleson. That fall she returned to the United States with the Strakosch company, of which the violinist Émile Sauret was also a member. She and Sauret were married in the early summer of 1873; they had one daughter, Emilita, born Mar. 23, 1874, and a son, born a year later, who died in infancy. T h e two artistic temperaments clashed, however, and the marriage was not a success; Sauret and Teresa Carreño separated just before the birth of their second child. Remaining in the United States, and reluctantly giving her daughter up for adoption, she now sought a therapeutic change by studying singing. Although she had made occasional appearances earlier, a performance as Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni in New York on F e b . 25, 1876, is considered the beginning of her short-lived operatic career. After moderate success as a singer, she returned to her greater talent as a pianist. Her association with opera continued, however, through her common-law marriage to the baritone Giovanni Tagliapietra in 1876, another ill-fated union, entered into before her divorce from Sauret was final. Again, the attempt to combine artistic careers was unsuccessful, and the problems of professional jealousy were in-

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Carreño tensified by Tagliapietra's financial recklessness. Three children were born to them: Lulu (1878, died 1881), Teresita (1882), and Giovanni (1885). Important also during this period was her friendship with the MacDowell family, which marked the beginning of her informal but influential instruction of young Edward MacDowell, the pianist and composer. In 1889 Carreño left for Germany, where success would soon place her in the rank of the greatest pianists and, incidentally, provide an escape from her matrimonial problems. Her Berlin debut on Nov. 18 of that year won her the overwhelming praise of both the critics and the city's discriminating concert public. Her Olympian performance, awesome for its power and independence of interpretation, earned her the title "Brünnhilde, die Walküre," which was hers for the rest of her life. Now at the apex of success as a concert pianist, she settled in Berlin. The following year she made the first of numerous European tours, climaxed by a meeting with the composer Edvard Grieg, who complimented her performance of his piano concerto despite the brashness of her interpretation. Rivaled only by Eugen d'Albert, the French composer and pianist, Teresa Carreño enjoyed, with few exceptions, unreserved critical acclaim and the wholehearted admiration of such noted skeptics of woman musicians as Hans von Bülow and Brahms. Her playing was often marked by exaggeration, occasional pounding, faster than standard tempo, and general bravura style, but it was redeemed by the individuality and fire of her performance. Her repertoire included works by SaintSaëns, Liszt, Grieg, Tschaikowsky, and Edward MacDowell, whose compositions she introduced to many European audiences without marked success. She also performed several of her own compositions, her waltz "Mi Teresita" being a popular and familiar encore. Carreño's inevitable meeting with d'Albert led to her third marriage, on July 27, 1892, shortly before the birth of their first daughter, Eugenia. Perhaps even more tempestuous than her earlier liaisons, the marriage ended in acrimony in 1895 after the birth of a second daughter, Hertha. Undoubtedly, however, d'Albert was an important influence in Carreño's development as a pianist: her style changed, gradually losing much of its flashiness, which was replaced by greater control and subtlety of interpretation. In 1893-94, during their brief period of happiness, Carreño and d'Albert gave dual concerts, performances which joined two extraordinary talents. The ensuing years were filled with concert appearances. In the 1895-96 season, still the

favorite of European audiences, Carreño gave seventy concerts; the following year, after a tour of Scandinavia, she signed a contract with Rudolph Aronson for forty concerts throughout the United States. Enormously successful, she returned to a summer of teaching in Bavaria and European concerts in the season of 1897-98. The four succeeding concert seasons she appeared alternately in the United States and in Europe, the intervening summers being devoted to her children and her students, both of whom received erratic but affectionate attention. On June 30, 1902, she married Arturo Tagliapietra, the younger brother of her second husband. This final marriage lasted until her death, proving the most peaceable, if not the most passionate, of her alliances. For the remainder of her life, Carreño continued her European concerts, interrupted by appearances in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States in 1907—08 and again in 1909-11. In December 1912, still a majestic woman of Latin beauty, she observed her golden jubilee as an artist. Her playing had mellowed, gained maturity: "The large all-comprehensive drive has given place to most clear, impersonal analysis, to the sublimation of a life filled with profound inner experience," wrote a commentator in 1913 (Milinowski, pp. 393— 94 ). Her last concert appearances were given in New York City and Havana, only a few weeks before her death. She died in New York in 1917, at sixty-three, of myasthenia gravis. Although she had counted herself a Yankee, after cremation her ashes were taken to Berlin and then in 1938 removed to Caracas, Venezuela, and deposited in the poets' corner of the Cementerio del Sur. In an appraisal which any artist would treasure, a later critic observed: "She was haughty, she was sloppy, she was incomparable" (Musical Quarterly, October 1940). [Marta Milinowski's detailed and sympathetic biography, Teresa Carreño (1940), based on family papers and personal acquaintance, supersedes all earlier accounts. See also N.Y. Times, June 13, 15, 17 (part VIII), 1917.] WILLIAM

DINNEEN

CARROLL, Anna Ella (Aug. 29, 1815-Feb. 19, 1893), political pamphleteer and alleged military strategist, was bom at Kingston Hall near the present-day Pocomoke City on Maryland's Eastern Shore, the eldest child of Thomas King Carroll and Juliana (Stevenson) Carroll. Her mother was the daughter of a prominent Baltimore physician. Her father, though of Catholic background and related to Charles Carroll of Carrollton and Archbishop John Car-

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roll of Baltimore, had been reared a Protestant by his maternal grandfather, Thomas King, a leading Maryland Presbyterian of English ancestry, from whom he inherited Kingston Hall. Five daughters and two sons followed Anna Ella, but she remained her father's favorite. She was his pupil, companion, and private secretary and read widely in the family library. In 1829 Thomas Carroll was elected governor of Maryland as a Jacksonian and strong nationalist, a position that contrasted sharply with the states' rights views of many slaveholding Southern planters. The Carroll family moved to Annapolis, where Anna Ella attended Miss Mercer's Boarding School, apparently her only formal education, and became active in the Presbyterian church. Grown at fifteen into a spirited, redheaded belle, she cut a fine figure in Annapolis society and began calling herself "Princess Anne." Governor Carroll could not support two households, however, and the family returned to Kingston Hall, where he joined them in 1830, his political career cut short by a decline in Jacksonianism in Maryland. His financial situation was now precarious, owing to exhausted lands, heavy debts, an ailing wife, and an overinvestment in slaves whom he declined to sell. Anna Ella sought to assist by conducting a boarding school on the estate, but with the panic of 1837 Carroll was forced to sell Kingston Hall to a neighbor and move with his family to a smaller plantation, Warwick Fort Manor, near Cambridge, Md. At about this time Miss Carroll left the family home, and little is known of her activities for the next fifteen years. She is said to have moved to Baltimore, but her name does not appear in city directories of this period. A nineteenth-century biographer says she "early commenced an extended relation with the press, writing usually anonymously on the political subjects of the day" ( Blackwell, I, 23 ). In the mid-1850's she emerged as a champion of the American or "Know-Nothing" party. This short-lived antiforeign, anti-Catholic movement was particularly strong in Baltimore, where about one-quarter of the population in the 1850's was made up of foreign-born Irish and German Catholics. In 1854 Miss Carroll delivered and printed a series of anti-Catholic lectures (see draft of Oct. 17, 1854, lecture in Anna Ella Carroll Papers, Maryland Historical Society), and in 1856, moving between Baltimore, New York, and Washington, she wrote feverishly for the Know-Nothing presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore, publishing three campaign pamphlets and a 365page book, The Great American Battle, which praised the Know-Nothings and damned "the

Papal system." An engraving of Miss Carroll in this book reveals her at forty to have been round faced, pleasant featured, and tending toward corpulence. Fillmore's decisive defeat ended the KnowNothings as a national force, but the movement continued strong in Maryland and Miss Carroll's pen remained active. In 1857 she published The Star of the West, a compilation of journalistic pieces continuing the anti-Catholic theme as well as praising William Walker's filibustering expeditions in Central America and advocating a transcontinental railroad. In 1858 she wrote newspaper articles and letters supporting Thomas H. Hicks, a Know-Nothing and family friend, in his successful campaign for the governorship of Maryland. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Miss Carroll moved to Washington, became a Unionist, and wrote encouraging and informative letters to Governor Hicks as he strove to keep Maryland in the Union. As a reward for these efforts she sought control over federal patronage in Maryland, but she was informed by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, to whom she had submitted a list of suggested appointees, and by President Lincoln, that Maryland jobs were in the hands of the men who had put together the state Republican organization (Chase Papers, Library of Congress). When Senator John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky made a fiery speech in July 1861 urging the wavering border states to secede, Miss Carroll wrote and published a vigorous Reply, which she submitted to the War Department for possible distribution by the administration. The Assistant Secretary of War, Thomas A. Scott, urged her to print an additional 10,000 copies and paid her $1,250 from his own pocket. She next suggested to Scott that she continue to write pamphlets in support of the administration, with financial details to be worked out later, and Scott appears to have acquiesced (see her letter to Lincoln, July 2, 1862, Anna Ella Carroll Papers). With this hazy mandate, she produced two lengthy pamphlets, The War Powers of the General Government (1861) and The Relation of the National Government to the Revolted Citizens Defined (1862). In them she argued that secession was a wholly unconstitutional act and that the Confederacy, with no legal existence, was merely the sum total of a great number of individual acts of rebellion and as such should be dealt with by the president, as commanderin-chief, rather than by Congress. She further asserted that after the rebellious citizens had been subdued and the military force withdrawn the states would resume their normal fune-

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tion, thus making "Reconstruction" an executive and not a Congressional prerogative. On this interpretation, too, it followed that Congress had no power to emancipate the slaves of the South. (Miss Carroll, along with many border-state Unionists, strongly opposed the abolitionists in Congress and vainly urged Latin American colonization schemes upon Lincoln as an alternative to presidential emancipation.) Although the extent to which these pamphlets were circulated and read is uncertain, they have been described by a recent student as "the best and most persuasive contemporary rationalizations of the theory upon which Lincoln acted" (Armstrong, p. 199). Miss Carroll's hopes for payment were threatened when Thomas Scott left the War Department in June 1862. Demanding $50,000, she took her claim to Lincoln himself, but the President denounced it as "the most outrageous one ever made to any government upon earth" (see Anna Ella Carroll to Lincoln, Aug. 14, 1862, Robert Todd Lincoln Papers). She was paid an additional $750 in 1863 but remained convinced that she had been wronged. In 1868 she supported her claim with a sworn affidavit describing the agreement with Scott, who responded with a general letter acknowledging her "valuable services." In 1870 Miss Carroll brought before Congress a new claim: that she had been an important wartime military strategist. The known facts of the case are obscure, but they appear to be as follows. In August 1861, with no official authorization, Miss Carroll accompanied Lemuel D. Evans, a Texas Unionist and former Know-Nothing leader, now a State Department agent, on a mission to St. Louis. Here she by chance encountered the wife of one Charles Scott, a river pilot and amateur strategist who was convinced that the Tennessee River offered to the Union forces a better access to the Confederacy than did the Mississippi River route then being contemplated. Representing herself to him as a War Department official, Miss Carroll persuaded Scott to set down in writing the advantages of a Tennessee River invasion, and upon her return to Washington in late November 1861, she submitted this plan, or her version of it, to Thomas A. Scott. It is also a fact that in January 1862 Thomas Scott was sent west by the War Department, and in February General Grant did move up the Tennessee River, taking Forts Donelson and Henry in a drive that ultimately broke Confederate power in the West. So far as is known, Miss Carroll made no claim to authorship of the Tennessee plan during the war. Indeed, in a letter to Secretary of War Stanton

on May 14, 1862 (Carroll Papers), she gave full credit to Charles Scott. And in an article in the National Intelligencer of Apr. 12, 1865, she described how she had passed the river pilot's plan on to the War Department and concluded: "I deem it a pleasant duty . . . to make known to the American people how much they are indebted to Captain Charles M. Scott for the crowning victory which now thrills with joy every patriot." But late in 1868 Miss Carroll went to Texas to visit her friend Lemuel Evans, who was now a power in Texas reconstruction politics and chief justice of the state supreme court. Shortly after this visit Miss Carroll placed the new claim before Congress. She now asserted that the Tennessee River strategy had been her idea; that Thomas A. Scott had passed it to his superiors (including Lincoln), all of whom read it with great enthusiasm; that Lincoln, encouraged by Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, had appointed Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War to implement the "Carroll Plan," which, under the supervision of Thomas A. Scott while on his Western mission, had been inaugurated with such success in February 1862. This breathtaking claim was embodied in a petition for payment presented to Congress in March 1870 and, with increasing elaboration and documentation, resubmitted periodically over the next fourteen years. As Miss Carroll grew older she lived in Washington with her sister, a government clerk, and devoted herself to collecting letters in support of her claim. Lemuel Evans gave her a long and enthusiastic affidavit, and she secured a valuable supporting letter from Thomas Scott. The circumstances surrounding the Scott endorsement are significant. In 1870, after her visit with Evans in Texas, Miss Carroll approached Scott, now vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and, after requesting that he support her claim, offered him "a charter of a R. Road in Texas" (John Tucker to Anna Ella Carroll, Apr. 26, 1870, Carroll Papers). Scott wrote a letter in support of the Carroll claim, and the following year he did indeed become one of the incorporators of the Texas & Pacific Railroad, which was immediately granted a subsidy of $6,000,000 by the Texas legislature. In May 1872 Lemuel Evans, visiting Philadelphia, suggested to Scott that a stronger letter would be valuable, and Scott promptly complied. Seeking further support, Miss Carroll recalled her friendship with Caroline Wade, wife of Benjamin Wade, the former Ohio Senator. In 1870 she sent Wade various documents outlining her claim, and he replied with a general

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supporting letter. In 1873 she sent him a memorandum of an 1870 conversation in which Wade had described to her a talk he had had with Edwin M. Stanton; Stanton, so went Miss Carroll's memorandum, had praised the "Carroll Plan" and said that Lincoln had been pleased with it. The seventy-three-year-old Wade replied that he did not doubt that the memorandum was correct, and Miss Carroll thereupon submitted it to Congress as Wade's own statement. Not only were these endorsements obtained in a questionable manner, but a comparison of letters in the Anna Ella Carroll Papers at the Maryland Historical Society with printed versions reveals that she frequently altered them to make the endorsement stronger. There is serious doubt, furthermore, that the "Carroll Plan"—whoever its author—did in fact influence Civil War strategy. The idea of a Tennessee River invasion route was "in the air" in the autumn of 1861, having been proposed by several military figures in November, and the specific proposal initiating the February action did not originate in Washington but was made by an officer in the field, Ulysses S. Grant. Nonetheless, Miss Carroll has never lacked supporters. Though Congress as a whole took no formal action on her claim, various Congressional committees reported favorably on it from time to time. In the 1880's woman suffragists made her a symbol of male injustice and argued her case in newspapers, pamphlets, and a two-volume biography by Sarah Ellen Blackwell (sister of ELIZABETH and E M I L Y BLACKWELL). Miss Carroll herself, though paralyzed and deaf, was still able to write a lively and imaginative version of her tale for the North American Review in 1886. She died in Washington in 1893, at the age of seventy-seven, and was buried in the family plot at Trinity Church near Cambridge, Md. Her dubious strategic claim, living on in historical fiction and in the popular press, has obscured the activities for which she genuinely deserves attention and study: her role in the Know-Nothing movement and her contributions to constitutional thought during the Civil War. [The most important source is the collection of Anna Ella Carroll's papers in the Md. Hist. Soc. Other useful material is in the Robert Todd Lincoln and Salmon P. Chase papers in the Library of Congress. There is no satisfactory biography of Anna Ella Carroll. Marjorie B. Greenbie, My Dear Lady ( 1 9 4 0 ) and (with Sydney Greenbie) Anna Ella Carroll and Abraham. Lincoln ( 1 9 5 2 ) , are interesting, partly fictionalized accounts that greatly exaggerate Miss Carroll's importance. Hollister Noble, Woman with a Sword ( 1 9 4 8 ) , is even more fanciful. Winifred E . Wise, Lincoln's

Secret Weapon, Anna E. Carroll ( 1 9 6 1 ) , is a juvenile. Biographical sketches appear in Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., V, 193; Appletons' Annual Cyc., 1894, p. 568; and Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) . The woman suffragists' apotheosis of Miss Carroll appears in Sarah E. Blackwell, A Military Genius: Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Md. ( 2 vols., 1 8 9 1 9 5 ) , and Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, II ( 1 8 8 1 ) , 3 - 1 2 . The famous "claim," accepted by nearly all the above writers, is set forward in various Petitions and Memorials to Congress between 1870 and 1878, of which the most exhaustive is Petition for Compensation for Services by Anna Ella Carroll, Feb. 14, 1876 (House Misc. Doc., No. 179, 44 Cong., 1 Sess., vol. I X ) . A more literary version is her "Plan of the Tenn. Campaign," North Am. Rev., Apr. 1886. For rebuttal, see Charles M. Scott, The Origin of the Tenn. Campaign, as a Refutation of the Fraudulent Claim of Miss Anna Ella Carroll ( 1 8 8 9 ) ; and Kenneth P. Williams, "The Tenn. River Campaign and Anna Ella Carroll," Ind. Mag. of Hist., Sept. 1950, and Lincoln Finds a General ( 1 9 5 2 ) , III, 4 4 8 - 5 2 , and IV, 4 5 5 - 5 7 . For a favorable modern appraisal of her Civil War pamphlets, see Walter P. Armstrong, "The Story of Anna Ella Carroll," Am. Bar. Assoc. Jour., Mar. 1949. The second pamphlet is reprinted in Frank Freidel, ed., Union Pamphlets of the Civil War, vol. I ( 1 9 6 7 ) . ] PAUL S. BOYER

CARSE, Matilda Bradley (Nov. 19 1835-June 3, 1917), temperance leader and welfare worker, was born at Saintfield, Ireland, near Belfast, the daughter of John Bradley, a linen merchant, and Catherine (Cleland) Bradley. A Presbyterian, she was of Scottish descent, some of her forebears having fled to Ireland in the seventeenth century because of religious persecution; one of her ancestors, it is said, founded Belfast's first hospital. Little is known of her early life, but she grew up and was educated in Ireland. In 1858 she came to the United States and settled in Chicago, where on Oct. 8, 1861, she was married to Thomas Carse, a railroad freight agent also of Irish birth and Scottish descent. They had three sons: David Bradley, Thomas Alexander, and John Bradley. During the Civil War Carse served as a railroad manager in Louisville, Ky. A sufferer from tuberculosis, he went in 1869 with his family to the French Riviera for health reasons, but died in Paris the next year. Returning to Chicago with her children, Matilda Carse, who had been left in comfortable circumstances, became a leader in local charitable and welfare work. The tragic death of her youngest son, Thomas, who was run over and killed by a drunken carter in 1874, turned her particularly toward the temperance cause.

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Carse In 1878 she was elected president of the Chicago Central Woman's Christian Temperance Union, a position she held until her death. In keeping with the broad reformist approach advocated by national W.C.T.U. president FRANCÉS E . W I L L A R D , the Chicago Union, under Mrs. Carse's direction, established the Bethesda Day Nursery for working mothers, the first of its kind in Chicago, as well as two kindergartens, the Anchorage Mission for erring girls, a temperance reading room for men, two dispensaries for the poor, two industrial schools, an employment bureau, and a scattering of Sunday schools. Matrons were introduced into Chicago police stations at her urging. She also directed three mothers' meetings and various gospel temperance meetings. To support these charities she raised some $10,000 a year. In 1880 Mrs. Carse founded and became president of the Woman's Temperance Publishing Association, a stock company composed entirely of women, which published books, brochures, and tracts on temperance and other social reforms, as well as the Signal, the weekly journal of the Illinois W.C.T.U. In 1882, under her guidance, the Publishing Association effected the merger of the Signal with Our Union, the early publication of the national W.C.T.U., to form a new official organ, the weekly Union Signal. This was under the financial control of the Woman's Temperance Publishing Association and the editorial control of the national W.C.T.U., with Matilda Carse an influential leader of both groups. The Publishing Association also issued other W.C.T.U. periodicals, including the Young Crusader and the Oak and Ivy Leaf. It reached its apogee around 1890 when over one hundred employees turned out 125,000,000 pages annually, including commercial printing as well as temperance literature. The business depression after 1893 seriously set it back, however, and Mrs. Carse's resignation in 1898 was followed in 1903 by its dissolution, the national W.C.T.U. purchasing the Union Signal and the Young Crusader. Mrs. Carse had meanwhile, in 1887, launched a still more ambitious undertaking: the erection of an office building, or "Woman's Temple," in downtown Chicago which she hoped would provide the national W.C.T.U. with both a headquarters and an income. Incorporating, under her presidency, the Woman's Temperance Building Association, she readily sold $600,000 in stock to Chicago capitalists and, with Frances Willard's enthusiastic endorsement, $300,000 in bonds to W.C.T.U. members, who also made many gifts to the project. The thirteen-story structure, de-

signed by the eminent Chicago architect John W. Root, had barely been completed, however, at a cost of $1,265,000, when the panic of 1893 cut off the expected return from rentals and undermined the building's financing. Mrs. Carse, backed again by Miss Willard, made strenuous efforts to raise new funds from individuals and from the W.C.T.U., but dissension set in, and in 1898, after Miss Willard's death, the W.C.T.U. convention voted to sever all connection with the ill-fated venture; it was taken over by the Chicago merchant Marshall Field, owner of the land and president of the trustees. The net loss to W.C.T.U. members in gifts and bond purchases had been perhaps half a million dollars. The project had divided and weakened the W.C.T.U., but there can be no question as to Mrs. Carse's high motives, and hers was not the only ambitious financial venture to founder in the depressed '90's. A practical reformer, Mrs. Carse displayed qualities of leadership, strength of conviction, and good business sense generally, despite occasional impulsiveness, as in the Temple project. A charming woman personally, she spoke with a soft but pronounced burr and was very conscious of her Scottish origins. Not surprisingly for a woman of her abilities, she was a firm believer in woman suffrage. As an influential W.C.T.U. leader she strove to smooth over internal disputes, taking a moderate position in the conflict between the "do-everything" policy of Frances Willard and the narrow temperance policy of ANNIE W I T T E N M Y E R and a few others. Besides temperance work, she served as president of the Chicago Foundling's Home Aid Society, for which she raised many thousands of dollars. She also founded and headed the Woman's Dormitory Association, formed to provide accommodations for working women visiting the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. She was the first woman to serve on the Cook County Board of Education ( 1 8 8 9 - 9 0 ) . She retired from active life in 1913 and died of heart disease four years later at the home of her son David in Park Hill-on-Hudson, N.Y., at the age of eightyone. She was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery, Chicago. Memorial services were held at the North Shore Congregational Church, of which she had been a founding member. [Most useful are the sketches in Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century ( 1 8 9 3 ) , and Clara C. Chapín, ed., Thumb-Nail Sketches of White Ribbon Women (1895). The Frances Willard MSS. in the Willard Memorial Library, W.C.T.U. national headquarters, Evanston, 111., provide further insights. On the Woman's Temple, see Samuel Unger, "A Hist, of

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the Nat. W.C.T.U." (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State Univ., 1933), pp. 36-43; and Mary Earhart, Frances Willard ( 1 9 4 4 ) . See also Ernest H. Cherrington, ed., Standard Encyc. of the Alcohol Problem, II ( 1 9 2 4 ) , 524; Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15; Chicago city directories, 1889-90; and obituary in Chicago Daily Tribune, June 4, 1917. The author Robert Carse, a grandson, supplied valuable details about Mrs. Carse's personal life.] NORTON

MEZVINSKY

CARTER, Caroline Louise Dudley (June 10, 1862-Nov. 13, 1937), actress, known professionally as Mrs. Leslie Carter, was born in Lexington, Ky., the younger of two children and only daughter of Orson (or Orison) and Catherine (Roth) Dudley. Her father, a dry goods merchant, died when she was about eight, and her mother moved from their home in Cleveland to Dayton, Ohio, where the girl's maternal grandfather, a German immigrant, had settled early in the nineteenth century. She attended the Cooper Seminary in Dayton, where her abundant red hair earned her the nickname "Carrot Top." A vivacious, popular girl, she attracted many local suitors, but on May 26, 1880, she was married to Leslie Carter, a Chicago industrialist. Fourteen years her senior, he had wealth and social prominence enough for her to mingle at ease with the most exclusive society of Chicago. Her home life did not run smoothly, however, and came to an end in 1889 when Carter won a divorce on grounds of adultery after a sensationally publicized trial. The court also gave him custody of their son, Dudley. Alone and adrift, Mrs. Carter determined upon a theatrical career after reading a letter from a girlhood friend who was being coached for the stage by David Belasco. Through Nathaniel K. Fairbank, a wealthy Chicago friend, she obtained Belasco's consent to take her as a pupil with the understanding that Fairbank would foot the bills. Desperate when Belasco ignored her for weeks after her first interview, Mrs. Carter followed him to the Adirondacks, where he was in seclusion working with Henry De Mille on their third play. Her tearful plea uncovered emotional power he had never expected to find in a pampered society woman, and he promised faithful support. Her preparation was long, painful, and exhausting. Years later, when she bounced into the public eye, Belasco explained his "system": body exercise, to limber all the joints; rough exercise, including how to fall without injury, on a mattress, on rugs, on the bare floor, forward, sideways, backward; chinning; voice cultivation; emotions and passions; and numerous roles, espe-

cially Shakespearean. "I would struggle with her around the room, slap her in the face, dash her against the wall, throw her over chairs and stamp on her. That ended her training." More formally, Mrs. Carter's training ended on Nov. 10, 1890, with her first professional role in The Ugly Duckling, a play which though doctored repeatedly failed to rise above the conventions of the day. The critics' unwarranted kindness led her managers to undertake a tour, but the project collapsed after four months, $40,000 in debt. Both Belasco and Mrs. Carter remained undaunted, however, and a year later she played an entirely different role in Miss Helyett, a musical comedy adapted from a Parisian success. Pleased with his pupil's development, Belasco now aimed high. For two years his next production was delayed because managers who did not share his confidence in Mrs. Carter refused his stipulation that she play the lead. Moreover, the panic of 1893 made money scarce. But Belasco finally found a backer for his play in Max Blieman, an art dealer, and in New York on Oct. 22, 1895, Mrs. Carter captured the public as Maryland Calvert in The Heart of Maryland. Not only did she vaunt her athletic prowess by climbing to the belfry clock and silencing the clapper in the manner of ROSE H A R T W I C K T H O R P E ' S household poem, "Curfew Must Not Ring To-night," but she also ran the gamut of emotions from proud and audacious to filial and loving, commanding the stage, the drama, and the audience. Throughout her career she remained "Mrs. Leslie Carter," her use of the name stemming as much, apparently, from Belasco's keen eye for publicity as from the spite she felt to the end for the husband who had cast her off. For a decade she blazed on in triumph. As Zaza in 1899 she sounded notes of high passion. As Du Barry in 1901 she crowned Belasco's most lavish stage spectacle. As Adrea in 1905 she trembled on the precipice of tragedy. After grand national tours of The Heart of Maryland and Zaza Belasco exposed her to English admiration, which she gratefully accepted with broad gestures such as renting a large Georgian house near Hyde Park staffed with five servants brought from the United States and seven hired in England. Her success is best measured by a six-week appearance at New York's Academy of Music which closed the season of 1905-06. At prices lower than elsewhere in the city, she acted Adrea for one week, Zaza for two, and Du Barry for three, to gross receipts of $104,000. Mrs. Carter sacrificed this hard-won felicity on July 13, 1906, when she unexpectedly mar-

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ried William Louis Payne, a minor comic actor. Betrayed by this sudden desertion, Belasco refused ever to speak to his protégée again, and Mrs. Carter was once more adrift. Valiantly she strove to continue her career. In Kassa (1909) by John Luther Long, a co-author of Adrea, she assayed another bit of majestic tragedy and landed in bankruptcy, $82,000 in debt. She herself called the play "dramaless and gutless." With The Second Mrs. Tanqueray she revived interest briefly in 1913 and then toured in her popular repertoire. A thirty-minute version of Zaza, to which Belasco had given her producing rights, brought her applause throughout the vaudeville circuit in 1915. She added a movie version of Du Barry to other screenings of her starring roles. But in 1916 she gave up the unequal struggle and retired with her husband to live near London. At the urging of Arch Selwyn she emerged from retirement in 1921 to play in his production of Somerset Maugham's The Circle. Although her loyal followers from the past cheered her reappearance, here, as in later infrequent roles, her performance lacked something vital. Describing her retirement, Mrs. Carter explained the difficulty: "Certain living threads were woven in with my dramatic pattern. . . . I never felt complete without Mr. Belasco, without his sagacity, without his kindness, without his clear, sane dramatic feelings." Many times after he turned her away, Mrs. Carter pleaded for Belasco's forgiveness and help. Though he bestowed a few favors through the hand of his secretary, to his death he remained silent. Her pitiful, apologetic letters showered him with love, gratitude, and schemes for financial security; but he died at a distance in 1931, leaving her to fret out her fantasies for six years more. At her home in Los Angeles, Calif., she died, barely noticed, of angina pectoris at the age of seventy-five. Survived by her husband and their only child, an adopted daughter, Mary Carter Payne, she was buried in the family plot in Woodland Cemetery, Dayton. Plain rather than pretty, but with flashing green eyes, fiery red hair, and a slender, supple figure, Mrs. Carter developed a commanding stage personality under the calculating hand of her manager. With absolute faith in her tutor, she loyally performed as she was taught. Exploiting what he called "the magnetism of her highly keyed, temperamental nature," Belasco presented her in the grand dramatic role in an era when musical comedy, farce, and family melodrama composed the popular theatrical fare. As she progressed from Maryland Calvert to Adrea she was hailed as the American Bernhardt and likened to the im-

mortal Duse. Critics often raised eyebrows and outcries, but Mrs. Carter's sweeping style, dominating stage presence, and overpowering energy—both physical and emotional—ultimately carried all. Her audiences came to see life not as they knew it but as they thought it might be, thrilling, violent, often shattering. Naysayers might scoff at crudity, excess, or lack of subtlety, but as long as Belasco watched from the wings her public could only cheer. [Mrs. Carter's autobiography, "Portrait of a Lady with Red Hair," Liberty, Jan. 15-Mar. 19, 1927, is theatrical rather than reliable. Considerable attention, largely unfavorable, is given her in William Winter, The Life of David Belasco ( 2 vols., 1918 ) ; see also his The Wallet of Time, vol. II (1913). For an earlier critical reaction, see Lewis C. Strang, Famous Actresses of the Day, First Series (1899) and Second Series (1901). There are clippings about Mrs. Carter in the theatre collections of the N.Y. Public Library at Lincoln Center and of Harvard Univ. Craig Timberlake, The Bishop of Broadway: The Life and Work of David Belasco (1954), utilized some of this material, and through the courtesy of Thomas Curry, Belasco's secretary, printed some of Mrs. Carter's letters to Belasco written between 1927 and 1931. An analysis of her plays and performances appears in H. L. Kleinfield, "The Theatrical Career of David Belasco" (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard, 1956). Facts concerning her early life have been supplied by Miss Elizabeth Faries, Dayton (Ohio) Public Library. Her obituary, often inaccurate, may be found in the N.Y. Times, Nov. 14, 1937. Her death record (Calif. Dept. of Public Health) gives her birth year as 1863, but Who Was Who in America, vol. I (1942), has 1862.] H.

CARTER, Mrs. Leslie. See Louise Dudley.

L.

KLEINFIELD

CARTER,

Caroline

CARY, Alice (Apr. 26, 1820-Feb. 12, 1871) and Phoebe (Sept. 4, 1824-July 31, 1871), authors, were bom in Hamilton County, Ohio, eight miles north of Cincinnati, in the simple farmhouse which their father, Robert Cary, had built at the time of his marriage to Elizabeth Jessup. The fourth and sixth children in a family of seven daughters and two sons, the sisters were later to take pride in their substantial and well-educated ancestors. John Cary had come in 1630 from England to Plymouth Colony, where he taught the first Latin school. His great-grandson Samuel, Alice and Phoebe's great-grandfather, was a Yale graduate and a physician in Lyme, N.H.; their grandfather, Christopher Cary, moved from Lyme to Ohio after serving in the Revolutionary War. Hard work and frugality marked the life on the farm, but Elizabeth and Robert Cary were

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loving parents, and Alice and Phoebe grew up with strong family attachments. Alice was particularly devoted to her next older sister, Rhoda, and Phoebe, born between the two boys, to her younger brother. The girls were sensitive and imaginative, and early developed a keen love of nature and its beauties, though their schooling was limited to irregular attendance at the district school. Their early cultural resources Phoebe once enumerated as some half-dozen books, including "a Bible, hymn-book, The History of the Jews, Lewis and Clarke's Travels, Pope's Essays, and Charlotte Temple," the novel by SUSANNA H. ROWSON ( Woman's Journal, Aug. 5, 1871, p. 242). These were supplemented by issues of the Trumpet, a Universalist paper (with a Poet's Corner) subscribed to by the Carys, who were early and devout converts to Universalism. In 1835 Mrs. Cary succumbed to the family scourge of tuberculosis, of which Rhoda and a younger sister had died two years before. Alice and Phoebe felt deeply the loss of their adored mother, which their father's remarriage in 1837 to a childless widow did nothing to alleviate. A demanding utilitarian, their stepmother had no sympathy for their growing literary ambitions and actively disapproved of Alice's remarkable perseverance in pursuing, with Phoebe, her reading and occasional versifying. To ease the family dissension, Robert Cary built a new house on the farm for his wife and himself, leaving the old house to Alice and Phoebe, their two brothers, and their younger sister, Elmina. At fourteen Phoebe secretly submitted a poem to a Boston newspaper; she learned of its acceptance when, to her astonished delight, she saw it reprinted in a Cincinnati newspaper. At about the same time a Cincinnati Universalist paper, the Sentinel, printed Alice's poem "The Child of Sorrow." Thus the sisters began the prolific production of verses that appeared first, for the most part, in Western journals and newspapers, then in Eastern ones as well. Through Western editors they met Gamaliel Bailey, whose National Era, established in Washington, D.C., in 1847, regularly printed Alice's poems and sketches under the pseudonym "Patty Lee." The poems attracted the attention of Whittier, Poe (who proclaimed her "Pictures of Memory" one of the most musically perfect lyrics in the English language), Horace Greeley (who visited them in Ohio in 1849), and Rufus W. Griswold, that "midwife of female poets," who included selections of both sisters in his compendious and popular The Female Poets of America (1849). At Alice's request the enthusiastic Griswold found a

Philadelphia publisher who paid the sisters $100 for their first volume, Poems of Alice and Phoebe Carey [sic] (1850), a collection of previously printed verses. In the summer of 1850 they left Ohio for the first time to make a literary pilgrimage to New York and Boston, and to Amesbury, Mass., to visit Whittier, who became a lifelong friend and admirer. Soon after their return home, Alice decided to go to New York City and make her living as a writer, a decision possibly influenced by the unhappy experience of being jilted by a businessman in Ohio and by the strong attraction of Rufus Griswold, who gave her some reason to expect marriage until he finally decided to marry another (Joy Bayless, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, 1943, pp. 213-17, 223). Alice went to New York in November 1850; Phoebe joined her the following spring. By 1856, through stringent economies buttressed by their literary productions, the sisters had earned enough money to afford a pleasant house on 20th Street. There they established their famous Sunday evening receptions, attended over some fifteen years by a wide variety of distinguished people, many of whom became devoted friends of the Carys. Though sharing most of their interests and experiences, the two sisters differed in temperament and methods of work. Alice was quiet, sympathetic, tactful, and gentle; Phoebe, vivacious and spontaneously witty. Both women had olive skin, dark hair and eyes, and strong features, Alice's more aquiline, Phoebe's more rounded, Both were deeply religious, following the Universalist doctrine in which they had been brought up, and both believed in literal communication with the spirits of the dead. Alice wrote constantly, even after financial pressure had lightened and illness brought increasing weakness and pain, overstraining her slight lyric talent. As she was painfully aware, she lacked the cultivated literary taste and technical training to create poetry of lasting value. Yet her simple style and sincerity of feeling raised her poems above the general run of the pious, didactic, and mortuary verse of the time. Leading literary periodicals, as well as the popular press, were eager to publish her work; and her five volumes of verse were popular successes, despite critical attacks on her lugubriousness and weak prosody. Phoebe wrote less and somewhat better poetry, since she was selective in publishing and wrote only when she felt inspired. Like Alice, she composed nature poems, hymns, laments, and ballads; she also had a sprightliness and literalminded practicality that produced clever parodies and light verse.

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1950), pp. 322-26. Phoebe Cary's cause of death Of more lasting interest than the Carys' pofrom R.I. State Dept. of Health.] ems are the short stories and sketches Alice MARGARET WYMAN LANCWORTHY wrote about life in rural Ohio. Her first collection of fiction, Clovernook, or Recollections of Our Neighborhood in the West (1852), beCARY, Annie Louise (Oct. 22, 1841-Apr. 3, came a minor best seller, particularly in Eng1921), contralto, one of the first American land, where it went through five pirated edisingers to acquire an international reputation, tions and was recognized as authentic localwas born in Wayne, Kennebec County, Maine, color realism. Its success led to the publicathe third daughter and youngest of six chiltion of a second series in 1853, of The Cloverdren. Her father, Nelson Howard Cary, a phynook Children in 1855, and of Pictures of Counsician, was a native of Bridgewater, Mass., try Life in 1859. Taken together, these stories where his forebears had settled in 1634; her depicted lives of hard work, cultural deprivamother, Maria (Stockbridge) Cary of Yartion, and considerable feminine frustration in mouth, Maine, was also of early colonial stock. a society strongly patriarchal. Alice also wrote The parents of Ann Louisa, as the girl was three novels, Hagar, A Story of To-day (1852), named, were amateur singers, both having Married, Not Mated ( 1856 ), and The Bishop's some local reputation. Living in Yarmouth and Son (1867). Gorham, Maine, Annie attended the Gorham Firm abolitionists and sympathetic toward Seminary, where James G. Blaine is said to the woman's rights movement, both Alice and have heard her sing at the graduation exerPhoebe Cary cared deeply about the welfare of cises of 1860 and advised her to study music their fellow man, though this concern was rarely rather than to become a teacher. She began voexpressed in public or in organized activity. Alcal studies that winter in Boston while living ice Cary felt that woman's noblest and most with a brother, but the Civil War intervened, deeply satisfying role was that of wife and and she did not resume them until 1864. After mother, but she fervently believed in freeing studying for two years with Boston teachers this role from masculine oppression and in re- < and singing with the chorus of Boston's Handel moving all institutional barriers to the full deand Haydn Society and in church choirs, she velopment of the individual woman's talents. gave a special concert at the Boston Music More economic opportunity, she felt, would Hall to raise funds for study in Italy. Her year lead to a feminine self-respect that would be in Milan with Giovanni Corsi was unsatisfacbeneficial to both sexes. Her one public speech tory, however, because she sought a career exwas her inaugural address in 1869 as the first clusively in oratorio and concert while Corsi president of Sorosis, the pioneer New York was interested only in opera. Despite her obwomen's club, a position she very reluctantly jection—primarily moralistic—to an operatic caaccepted at the plea of J A N E C R O L Y . Phoebe too reer, a financial crisis led her to accept an enmade a brief foray into public life as assistant gagement at the opera in Copenhagen, where editor of the Revolution, SUSAN B . ANTHONY'S she made her debut, according to several acsuffrage paper. Alice spent the last years of counts, in January 1868 in The Masked Ball. her life as an invalid; she died of tuberculosis During the next two seasons she appeared in at the age of fifty in their 20th Street home. opera in Stockholm and Hamburg, devoting Phoebe, who had devoted herself to her sisher summers to further study with Mme. Pauter's care, died of hepatitis the following July line Viardot-Garcia in Baden-Baden and Gioin Newport, R.I. They were buried in Greenvanni Bottesini in Paris. wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. When in 1870 the German-American impresarios Max and Maurice Strakosch formed a [Mary Clemmer, A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe concert company headed by the famous SweCary, with Some of Their Later Poems ( 1873 ), dish soprano Christine Nilsson, they offered the memorial also being reprinted in The Poetical Miss Cary a contract. In the first of seventeen Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary ( 1 8 7 6 ) ; Phoebe Cary, "Alice Cary," Woman's Jour., Aug. 5, 1871; high-admission concerts in Steinway Hall, New Mrs. M. F. Armstrong, "Alice and Phoebe Cary— York, on Sept. 19, 1870, Miss Cary won praise A Remembrance," ibid., Sept. 9, 1871; Horace as "one of the most valuable members of the Greeley, "Alice and Phoebe Cary," in Eminent troupe" (New York Herald, Sept. 20, 1870), Women of the Age ( 1 8 6 9 ) , pp. 164-72; James C. and much of the public agreed with Anton RuDerby, Fifty Years among Authors, Books, and binstein's declaration that hers was the most Publishers ( 1 8 8 4 ) , pp. 245-70; William H. Venbeautiful voice he had ever heard. Miss Cary's able, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio voice was dramatic, with an extraordinary Valley ( 1 8 9 1 ) , chap, xvii; Margaret Wyman, range of over three octaves, rich in quality, and "Women in the Am. Realistic Novel, 1860-1893" produced with effortless ease. The following (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Radcliffe College,

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season she made her New York operatic debut with the Nilsson company at the Academy of Music, appearing first in Martha (Oct. 27, 1871 ). Thereafter she performed alternately in opera and concert. Of particular significance was her introduction to America of Amneris in Aïda, again with the Nilsson company, at the Academy of Music on Nov. 26, 1873, less than two years after its première in Cairo. The next year she became the first American woman to sing a Wagnerian role in the United States, performing Ortrud in Lohengrin. Perhaps her third most famous role was Leonora in La Favorita, which Col. James H. Mapleson revived for her when she toured with his company from 1879 to 1881. In 1876 and again in 1877 she sang in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the last of her foreign engagements. Among the busiest of singers, she appeared frequently in both concert and opera with the great of her day—ADELINA PATTI, Therese Tietjens, Pauline Lucca, CLARA LOUISE KELLOGG, and Italo Campanini; her repertory numbered more than forty roles in opera and oratorio. A relatively small portion of the American public heard opera, but thousands throughout the country regularly gathered to hear the great oratorios of such composers as Handel and Mendelssohn. While the opera was sometimes suspect, no moral qualifications attended the unfolding of Biblical dramas rendered by the combined choirs of resident citizenry with great artists of the day as their guests. Annie Louise Cary's youthful experience had often been in modest programs of this sort, and during her later career she regularly participated in the great festivals, of which the Boston (triennial), Cincinnati, and Worcester (Mass.) were foremost. She first sang at the Cincinnati Festival in 1873 under Theodore Thomas; at the end of her career she sang in the first large music festivals given in New York, under Leopold Damrosch in 1881 and Theodore Thomas in 1882. Quite as important as her operatic premières in this country was her participation in the first American performances of the Verdi Requiem (New York, Nov. 17, 1874), Bach's Christmas Oratorio (Boston, May 17, 1877), and Bach's Magnificat (Cincinnati, May 13, 1 8 7 5 ) . The works of Bach demanded a style unfamiliar to most singers of the day, but John Sullivan Dwight, Boston music critic and editor of Dwight's Journal of Music, wrote that Miss Cary and George Henschel "more than any realized the spirit and transcendental art of this unsurpassable religious music"; Miss Cary, he felt, was "one of the noblest contralto singers in the world." Henschel evidently concurred, for when he conducted the first con-

cert given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Oct. 22, 1881) Miss Cary was chosen as soloist. The singer's last appearance in opera was in a production of The Masked Ball in Philadelphia in April 1881, and in oratorio, at Thomas' New York music festival in May 1882. On June 29 of that year, at the age of forty, she was married to Charles Monson Raymond, a New York banker, and retired, except for occasional appearances on behalf of charity, to Norwalk, Conn. In her retirement she gave considerable time to the work of the New York Diet Kitchen for the poor. Considered "the greatest contralto of the decade in New York" (Odell, IX, 9 2 ) , Annie Louise Cary was unaffected and modest in manner, apparently free of the petty jealousies that marked the careers of many of her rivals. She died of cancer at her home in Norwalk at the age of seventy-nine and was buried in Norwalk. Her will left $50,000 to the People's Symphony Concerts of New York for the giving of chamber music recitals at nominal charge. [George T. Edwards, Music and Musicians of Maine (1928), pp. 204-19; Mary H. Flint, "A Biog. Sketch of Annie Louise Cary," in Hist, of the Tçwn of Wayne (1898), pp. 264-83, and "Reminiscences of an Am. Artist," in Anton Seidl, ed., Music of the Modern World, I (1895), sec. 5, pp. 133-37; clippings in Theatre Collection, Harvard Univ., including Eugenia Shepard in Pine Tree, Dec. 1906, pp. 403-12; and obituaries in N.Y. Times, Apr. 4 and 10 (sees. 3 and 6), 1921, and Boston Transcript, Apr. 4, 1921. Family information from Mrs. Lila Gale Lincoln, Town Clerk, Wayne, Maine; death record from Conn. State Dept. of Health. Miss Cary's N.Y. performances are recorded in George C. D. Odell, Annals of the N.Y. Stage, vols. IX-XI (1937-39). Both family records, as cited by Edwards, and her death certificate give her year of birth as 1841, rather than 1842, as sometimes found.] Η. E ARLE JOHNSON

CARY, Elisabeth Luther (May 18, 1867-July 13, 1936), author and art critic, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., the only child of Edward and Ellen Elisabeth (Luther) Cary, natives of Albany, N.Y. Her father, of Quaker parentage and old New England stock, was editor of the Brooklyn Union when she was bom. In 1871 he was called to the editorial staff of the New York Times, with which he remained until his death. His influential editorials championed the cause of tariff reduction and the civil service reform movement, in which he was an early and active leader. His chief interest outside his work was in art, an interest shared by his

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Cary daughter, whose education he conducted at home. Miss Cary also studied art for ten years under the painters Eleanor C. Bannister and Charles Melville Dewey. During her youth she spent much of her time in companionship with her invalid mother. She lived throughout her life in Brooklyn, where she attended the Episcopal church. Miss Cary's early aesthetic interests extended to literature as well as art. She began her career in her mid-twenties with three translations from the French, among them Recollections of Middle Life (1893), by the drama critic Francisque Sarcey, and Russian Portraits (1895), by Eugène Melchior de Vogüé. Her first original book, appropriately enough for this admirer of "refined beauty," dealt with the art and life of Tennyson (Tennyson: His Homes, His Friends, and His Work, 1898 ). By the time her second book, Browning, Poet and Man, was published in 1899, she had established a critical method, an interesting and flexible style, and a readership sufficient to support her through a series of informative volumes on English, American, and French figures prominent in the arts and literature. The book with perhaps the greatest verve was The Rossettis: Dante Gabriel and Christina (1900), which was principally concerned with the relation between Dante Gabriel's personality and the character of his art and poetry. His ethereal nature, the linear grace of his art, and the emotive poignance of his poetry appealed particularly to Miss Cary's imagination, and three years later she published an edition of his poems. There followed studies of William Morris (1902), relating his art to his social theories, and Emerson (1904), praising the union of the "thinker" and the "poet" within this nineteenth-century American and lauding "the firm morality and the gracious art with which he has made morality beautiful." Written for the general public and designed as gift books, often with many illustrations, these volumes nonetheless treated their subjects in depth, integrating the technical and stylistic elements of an artist's work with biographical and historical information. The alliance between art and morality preoccupied Miss Cary again in The Novels of Henry James ( 1905), in which she stressed the coupling in James of an "ability to represent life pictorially by a multiplicity of fine observations" with "a curiosity as to moral states and responsible affections." The three studies she published in 1907, dealing with the poetartist William Blake, the painter James McNeill Whistler, and the caricaturist Honoré Daumier, gave greater emphasis to aesthetic

qualities; the first was her own favorite among her books. Artists Past and Present: Random Studies followed in 1909. Miss Cary's journalistic career came about by chance. In 1905 she had begun her own art journal, the Scrip, a modest monthly which, in the spirit of William Morris, she owned, wrote, designed, and published herself. Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, noticed a copy while visiting the Cary home and in March 1908 invited Miss Cary to join the Times as art critic—the first staff member to be assigned exclusively to this field. For the next quarter-century she was a constant contributor, covering shows, openings, and museums. Conceiving of herself as a reviewer or commentator rather than as a critic, she sought conscientiously to bring before the public that art which she judged most worthy of its admiration and support. Her critical approach, as a Times editorial put it after her death, was marked by "unfailing kindliness"; she was happiest in "constructive enthusiasm." In 1927, at the age of sixty, she relinquished some of the growing burden of current reviewing and thereafter concerned herself principally with feature writing. Thus she was able to devote numerous columns to prints and printmaking, a lifelong interest and one which she had cultivated by acquiring many fine prints herself and by giving lectures to interested groups. Her co-workers described her as quiet, eventempered, and kind, with a lively sense of humor. While she spoke often of retiring from newspaper work during her later years, the moment never came, and she was still active up to her death at the age of sixty-nine. On July 12, 1936, she was taken from her apartment to a Brooklyn hospital, suffering from heat exhaustion; she died the following day, and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn. An "apostle of good taste," her critical standards shaped by those very Victorians about whom she wrote, Miss Cary sought to exhibit in her criticism the spiritual and moral values which underlay the subject matter and the formal elements of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. To her books she brought, in the best tradition of Arnold and Emerson, a lucid comprehension, a catholic sympathy, and a broad background of aesthetic experience. In her newspaper work, although not herself an innovator or theorist, she displayed an independent judgment and a sure touch. Rather conservative by inclination, she was nevertheless receptive to much of the best work of her contemporaries, and she endeavored to create in the minds of her readers a sense of the con-

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tinuity between the art of the past and that of the present. [N.Y. Times, July 14 (obituary), 15 (editorial), and 17 (funeral), 1936, and estimate by E . A. Jewell, July 19, 1936, sec. 10; obituaries in Am. Mag. of Art and Art Digest, Aug. 1936; Who Was Who in America, vol. I ( 1942 ). On her father, see Nat. Cyc. Am. Biog., X X V , 406, and Diet. Am. Biog.] A L B E R T F . M C LEAN,

JR.

CARY, Mary Ann Shadd (Oct. 9, 1823-June 5, 1893), Negro teacher, journalist, and lawyer, was born in Wilmington, Del., the oldest of the thirteen children of Abraham Doras Shadd and Harriet (Parnell) Shadd, free Negroes. Of her mother little is known except that she was a mulatto and was born in North Carolina in 1806. Her father, whose ancestors, it is said, were never slaves, was bom in 1801 in Delaware, the seventh son of Amelia and Jeremiah Shadd; the latter was the younger son of Hans Schad, a German soldier in Gen. Edward Braddock's army, and Elizabeth Jackson, a young free Negro woman of Pennsylvania whom he married in 1756. A shoemaker by trade, Abraham Shadd acquired real property valued at $5,000 and rose to prominence as a delegate to annual meetings of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1835, 1836), as president of the national Convention for the Improvement of Free People of Color in the United States (1833), and, in later years, as township councilman in Chatham, Ontario, Canada, to which he moved in the 1850's. His sustained efforts on behalf of his race moved his oldest daughter and several of her brothers and sisters to dedicate themselves to the cause of race elevation and freedom. Isaac D. Shadd, the oldest brother, was a newspaper publisher and served in the Mississippi legislature ( 187174 ), part of the time as speaker; another brother, Abraham W. Shadd, graduated from the law department of Howard University in Washington, D.C., and practiced in Mississippi and Arkansas; a sister, Eunice, a graduate of the normal department at Howard, was a teacher. Mary Shadd spent part of her childhood in West Chester, Pa., where her parents were living by 1836. At ten she entered a school there maintained by the Quakers for free Negro children, completing her studies in 1839. During the next twelve years she established or taught in schools for Negroes in Wilmington, Del., West Chester, Pa., New York City, and Norristown, Pa., and she continued to teach throughout much of her life. Her most prominent role came during the 1850's when she was a leader and spokesman among the Negro refugees who fled to Canada

after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Desirous of helping these emigrants, Miss Shadd moved in 1851 to Windsor, Canada, across the river from Detroit. There she opened a school with the support of the American Missionary Association, a Protestant group of strong antislavery cast formed in 1846 for mission work among Negroes. Two years later, however, the association withdrew its support. Ostensibly this was because she was not an evangelical Christian. (Earlier a Roman Catholic, she had joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church, but in Canada, because the latter was wholly segregated, she became a Methodist.) The real reason, she herself believed, was her sharp criticism of an association-affiliated project, the Refugee Home Society, created to settle Negroes on low-cost land in western Ontario, a project she denounced as a "begging scheme" by which the society solicited funds to buy land and sell it to refugees at a time when the latter could purchase government land directly at a lower cost. The loss of funds for her school did not deter her from stating her opinions, a right, as she wrote the American Missionary Association, that she hoped "ever to have unrestricted . . . on all matters of general interest—never to allow interest to become the master of principle and always to act as God requires" (to George Whipple, Apr. 2, 1853, A.M.A. Archives, Fisk University). In March 1853 she took an important step toward advancing free speech by joining, as a member of the publication committee, in the founding of the Provincial Freeman, a nonsectarian, nonpartisan newspaper devoted to the interests of the colored people in Canada. Through this she continued her attack on the abortive Refugee Home Society. The Freeman began regular weekly publication in Toronto in 1854, and early that year Mary Shadd moved from Windsor to Chatham, Ontario, where she was the publishing agent; the Freeman itself shifted its place of publication to Chatham in mid-1855. During the four years of the newspaper's known existence the official editors were prominent individuals, but the publishing agent, Mary A. Shadd, was recognized as the real editor. Her contemporaries addressed her as "editress," praised her as "one of the best editors in the Province even if she did wear petticoats," and acclaimed her as "the first colored woman on the American continent to establish and edit a weekly newspaper" (Provincial Freeman, Aug. 22, Dec. 1, 1855). On Jan. 3, 1856, Mary Shadd was married to Thomas F. Cary of Toronto, a barber, who

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Cary moved to Chatham and was later associated with publishing the Freeman. Little is known of her married years, though during the period 1 8 5 9 - 6 4 she was operating a school in Chatham, for which she received aid on several occasions from the American Missionary Association. During the Civil War she helped recruit Negro soldiers in Indiana (under a commission from Gov. Levi Morton dated Aug. 15, 1864), and also in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. By 1869 she was a widow with a daughter, Sarah Elizabeth (later Mrs. Joseph Evans). In that year Mrs. Cary moved to Washington, D.C., where for the next fifteen years she taught in the public schools, serving for two years ( 1 8 7 2 - 7 4 ) as principal of a grammar school. A suffragist, she spoke in 1878 at the annual convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Meanwhile, from 1869 to 1871, she had begun the study of law at Howard University. Ten years later she resumed her study and was one of four women—the only Negro woman—in a class of five who received the LL.B. degree in June 1883. Though she gave up her teaching post in 1884 and presumably intended to practice law, no evidence has been found that she was admitted to the bar. By all indications, Mary Shadd Cary was a remarkable woman, intelligent, talented, and fearless. An antislavery contemporary described her as "tall and slim, with a fine head," an "intellectual countenance," and "bright, sharp eyes, that look right through you" (Brown, p. 5 3 9 ) . Though criticized for her unladylike conduct and charged with stirring up strife between the fugitives and white missionaries in Canada, she continued to express her convictions. During the 1870's she lectured in New York and in the South on problems of Negro education and race improvement. Her determination in later life to build a second career as a lawyer attests to her courage, will, and vitality. She died at her home in Washington, D.C., in her seventieth year, of a tumor presumed to be cancerous, and was buried in Harmony Cemetery. [Material from Shadd family records supplied by Mrs. Harriet Shadd Butcher, Washington, D.C., and David Shadd, Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa; data from West Chester ( Pa. ) tax lists, 1836, 1850, and from federal census schedules, West Chester, 1850; correspondence in Archives of Am. Missionary Assoc., Fisk Univ.; Annual Reports of Superintendent of Colored Schools of Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria, 1870-84; MS. Minutes of Board of Trustees of Public Schools of D.C., 1884-85; Mrs. Cary's will, in office of Register of Wills, D.C.; death record in Bureau of

Vital Statistics, Washington; Howard Univ. catalogues and records, 1869-83; files of Voice of the Fugitive (Windsor, Canada), 1852, and Provincial Freeman, Mar. 24, 1853, and 1854-58; Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), June 5, 6, 1893; Boyd:s Directory of Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria, 1870-93; Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., Hist, of Woman Suffrage, III (1886), 72. A biographical sketch of Mrs. Cary, inaccurate in some details, is included in Hallie Q. Brown, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction ( 1926), pp. 92-96; see also William Wells Brown, The Rising Son (1874), pp. 539-40. On the Refugee Home Soc., see William H. and Jane H. Pease, Black Utopia (1963).] ELSIE M.

LEWIS

CASE, Adelaide Teague (Jan. 10, 1 8 8 7 - J u n e 19, 1948), Episcopal educator, was bom in St. Louis, Mo., she and her twin sister Mary Cushing being the fourth and fifth of six children of Charles Lyman Case, American manager of the London Assurance Company, and Lois Adelaide (Teague) Case. She was of New England background, her father having been bom in Chelsea, Mass., her mother in Turner, Maine. Her family moved when she was an infant to New York City, where she grew up under Anglican religious influences. After graduating from the Brearley School ( 1 9 0 4 ) and Bryn Mawr College (A.B., 1908), she taught for a year at St. Faith's, an Episcopal boarding school for girls in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. In 1910 she enrolled as a graduate student in history and sociology at Columbia University. But tuberculosis in one leg, present from childhood, compelled her to withdraw after one year for treatment; she spent nearly a year at Saranac Lake, N.Y., and then traveled with her parents in Europe as a semi-invalid. From 1914 to 1916 she was librarian in the national headquarters of the Episcopal Church in New York, at first as a volunteer but later on salary. In the fall of 1916 she began a series of often painful treatments in a Boston hospital, meanwhile traveling back and forth to the Cases' summer home at Paris Hill, Maine. A serious knee operation kept her there until the late spring of 1917. That fall, having chosen a life devoted to religious education, she began graduate study at Columbia University's Teachers College, at the same time teaching in the New York Training School for Deaconesses (1917—19). She received the A.M. degree in 1919 and the next year became an instructor in the religious education department of Teachers College. Upon receiving her doctor's degree in 1925 she advanced to assistant professor, and subsequently to associate professor (1929), professor

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(1935), and chairman of the department. In 1941 she was called to the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass., as professoi of Christian education, a post she held until her death. She was the first woman to be appointed to full professorial rank in any Episcopal or Anglican seminary. Two related concerns ran through all of Adelaide Case's professional and personal life: religiously oriented education by "progressive" methods, and Christian social ethics. In a critical paper based on research into existing curricula, she held that "education, when it becomes socially dangerous [to the status quo], is surely beginning to be socially useful" ( Temple, p. 113). Although opposed to the merely pragmatic aims of the movement inspired by John Dewey's educational philosophy, she accepted its project method and question-ratherthan-answer approach to learning ("lead, don't drive; think, don't dogmatize"). Her social goals were "radical" but always expressed in word and deed in distinctively Christian terms. In 1936 she declared: "To renounce capitalism . . . to achieve a new fellowship of various ages, races, creeds, political and industrial groups: this is a program of Christian education. It involves an international 'united front' of religious people, frontier educators and industrial workers" (Cavert and Van Dusen, p. 246). Her Liberal Christianity and Religious Education (1924), based on her doctoral thesis, was characterized in an introduction by her colleague George A. Coe as the only book that answered the question whether contemporary religious education in method and content helped children to be "liberal and socially consecrated" or "even intelligent conservatives"; her answer was negative. The liberalism she advocated was both intellectual and social, what in a later day was called open-endedness or pluralism. To these ends she served on the directing boards of the Religious Education Association, the Church League for Industrial Democracy (later the Episcopal League for Social Action), the Childhood Education Association, the Episcopal Pacifist Fellowship, the International Council of Religious Education, the American Jewish Congress and Beth Hayaled in New York City, the Federal Council of Churches, the Student Christian Movement, and the Riverside Colored Orphanage. Within the Episcopal Church she served on various commissions of the Women's Auxiliary and of the National Council and had the distinction, for her sex, of membership in the council itself (1946-48). Professor Case's personal religion was of a "liberal Catholic" kind, merging the sacramen-

tal discipline and viewpoint of the Anglo-Catholic faith with critical historical and Biblical scholarship and a socially radical "kingdom of God" ideal. The latter outlook, plus her progressive educational views, brought her into warm association with all Protestant Christians and also non-Christians. She abhorred the sectarian or party spirit in religion and politics. Her understanding of Biblical studies was "dated" by later standards, especially her opinion, as expressed in her As Modern Writers See Jesus: A Descriptive Bibliography (1927), that through such studies it was possible "to see Jesus as he actually was—a historic figure of convincing reality" (p. iii). In spite of her heavy weight and crippled leg she managed to move about a great deal, and her quiet, peaceful smile attracted young and old alike seeking counsel. Until her death in 1948 she regularly wrote more than a hundred letters a month replying to various inquiries. As long as she was physically able, she attended college Student Christian Movement conferences at Camp O-at-ka in Maine. She always favored Episcopal ordination for women but never pressed it as an issue, being content to support increasing vocational openings for women in the churches through such means as Windham House, an unofficial training center for women desiring to teach ( of which she was a board member), or social or secretarial work under church auspices. During her seven years as a professor at the Episcopal Theological School she took her regular turn on the faculty's preaching schedule. She died in a Boston hospital of Addison's disease, tuberculosis having reached the adrenal glands, at the age of sixty-one. Her ashes were buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge. [Besides her books and many articles, Professor Case published chapters in several symposia, among them : Walter M. Howlett, ed., Religion, the Dynamic of Education ( 1 9 2 9 ) ; Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Sidonie M. Gruenberg, eds., Our Children ( 1 9 3 2 ) ; Frank Gavin, ed., Liberal Catholicism and the Modern World ( 1934 ) ; and Samuel McC. Cavert and Henry P. Van Dusen, eds., The Church through Half a Century ( 1 9 3 6 ) . For biographical data see Sydney Temple, ed., Peace Is Possible: Essays Dedicated to the Memory of Adelaide T. Case ( 1 9 4 9 ) ; Religious Leaders of America, 1941-42, p. 198; James A. Muller, The Episcopal Theological School, 1867-1943 (1944), p. 212; Ν.Y. World-Telegram, June 14, 1941; Ν.Ύ. Times, June 20, 1948; Charles L. Taylor, Jr., in The Living Church, Aug. 8, 1948. Additional information was supplied by Miss Case's sister, Mary; death record from Mass. Registrar of Vital Statistics.]

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Cassati CASS ATT, Mary (May 22, 1844-June 14, 1926), painter, was born in Allegheny City, Pa., the third daughter and fifth of seven children of Robert Simpson Cassatt, banker and broker, and Katherine Kelso (Johnston) Cassatt. Her middle name, which she never used, was Stevenson. Although descended from the French Huguenot Jacques Cossart (the original spelling of the name) who settled in New Amsterdam in 1662, she had less French blood than has been generally supposed, as both her paternal grandmother and her mother were Scotch-Irish. She was baptized in Trinity Church (Episcopal) in Pittsburgh, and when she was four the family moved to that city; but a year later they acquired a country place near Lancaster and established their town residence in Philadelphia. Never committed to a business career, Robert Cassatt in 1851 decided to take his entire family for an extended trip abroad, and during the next four years they lived in Paris, Heidelberg, and Darmstadt. They returned to Pennsylvania, first to West Chester, then to Philadelphia, and finally to a farm in Chester County. Having been greatly impressed by the art museums she had seen abroad, Mary Cassatt determined to embark on a career as a painter. In 1861 she enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, but she found their course of instruction dry and uninspiring, consisting mainly of drawing from plaster casts or copying paintings in the academy's collection, and on her graduation decided that she must study abroad. With her father's reluctant consent, she went in 1866 to Paris, where she lived with friends of the family. She studied briefly in the atelier of Charles Chaplin but soon realized that his suave and luxuriant style was not to her taste and concluded that her future development lay in working on her own; she augmented her winter studio work with summer sketch trips. In 1870 her family, concerned over the uneasy political situation foreshadowing the Franco-Prussian War, insisted that she return to Philadelphia. While there she painted a portrait of her brother Alexander's small son, Eddie. The ineptness of this work makes it evident that at the age of twenty-seven Mary Cassatt had not yet achieved great proficiency. In the spring of 1872, eager to get back to her work, she sailed for Italy, spent some time in Rome, and then settled down for eight months in Parma, where she made an intensive study of the work of Correggio. Her paintings from this period, although still academic in style, begin to show considerable spirit and vigor. From Italy she went to Spain, and in Seville did the first truly mature paintings of her

career. One, "Pendant le Carnaval," was sent to the Paris Salon of 1872 and accepted, her first exhibition piece. Of far greater distinction were two paintings of bullfighters—one of which was shown in the Salon of 1873— which are executed in broad brush strokes with a fresh and lively approach, rich in color and firm in modeling. Greatly interested in the paintings by Rubens in the Prado, she next went to Antwerp to see other examples and to Holland to study the work of Frans Hals. By now she felt that her apprentice years were over, that she had achieved professional status, and was ready to settle in Paris. Although she was included in the Salon for five successive years, she did not find its exhibitions of great interest, much preferring the spasmodic showings of the Impressionists, a new group of independent artists led by Edgar Degas. Degas had noticed a portrait by Miss Cassatt at the Salon of 1874; at length he came to call upon her and invited her to join his group. Impressed by her intelligence and taste, her forthright manner combined with an elegance of dress and an aristocratic bearing, he inaugurated a firm friendship that lasted until his death. Mary Cassatt exhibited in four of the eight exhibitions held by the Impressionists. "The Cup of Tea," a delightful portrait of her sister Lydia in a shell-pink dress, long gloves, and pink bonnet, exhibited in 1881, is an exquisite tonal study conceived very much in the Impressionist manner. She received favorable notices in the press, and her work was much admired by her fellow artists Degas, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Gauguin. She began exhibiting in America in 1876, and in 1879 she accepted the invitation of the American painter J. Alden Weir to show her works with the newly formed Society of American Artists. Her early exhibition pieces were no doubt the first Impressionist pictures seen in America. In the fall of 1877 the elder Cassatts and Lydia had moved to Paris, where they joined Mary; Lydia was Mary's frequent and willing model until her death in 1882. Although Mary Cassatt is generally regarded as coming from a family of considerable wealth, her father was actually no more than modestly well-to-do. She sold enough of her work to pay her studio expenses, buy her clothes, and keep a riding horse; and through the generosity of her brother Alexander, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, she and her parents were able to keep a pony and cart and later a horse and carriage. The pony cart figured in one of her most ambitious works, "Woman and Child Driving," showing Lydia, a niece of Degas, the groom, and the pony Bichette; luminous in color, solid

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Cassatt

Cassati

in modeling, the painting decidedly reflects the influence of Degas. In 1880 the Alexander Cassatts went abroad, thus affording Mary Cassatt the welcome opportunity of using her lively young nephews and nieces as models for both drypoints and paintings. Some of her finest work was done that summer at their rented villa in Marly; a group portrait of Mrs. Cassatt reading fairy tales to three of her grandchildren was shown the following spring at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition. In the late 1870's Mary Cassatt also became active in advising her brother Alexander and various American friends on purchases of paintings, interesting them in the work of the Impressionists and thus arousing in the United States an enduring enthusiasm for French Impressionist art. Her major efforts were directed toward helping the H. O. Havemeyers build up their extraordinary collection; at her instigation LOUISINE WALDHON ELDER H A V E M E Y E R had bought her first picture, a Degas pastel, in 1873. A quarrel among the Impressionists in 1882 led to Degas' refusal to exhibit with them, and Mary Cassatt withdrew out of sympathy. Although she continued to some extent her ass6ciation with the group, her own style now changed. Her portrait of Mrs. Robert M. Riddle, "Lady at the Tea Table" (1883), which shows the figure in silhouette, rather thinly painted, with emphasis on line rather than mass, marks the turning point. Thereafter her work tended toward smoother textures with more emphasis on the linear aspect of the design, and in subject matter the maternal theme began to dominate. A further influence was an exhibition of Japanese prints held in Paris during the spring of 1890. Profoundly impressed, Mary Cassatt did a set of ten color acquatinte with the lines in drypoint and soft ground etching. Although her graphic work had begun about 1879, these prints of 1891 mark the climax of her often distinguished work in this field. In 1891 Mrs. Potter Palmer ( B E R T H A HONORÉ P A L M E R ) , the Chicago social leader (and an early collector of Impressionist paintings), while visiting Europe as president of the Board of Lady Managers of the forthcoming World's Columbian Exposition, invited Miss Cassatt to paint a mural for the Woman's Building at the exposition. Working hard at Château Bachivillers, a country place which she and her mother occupied for two seasons after her father's death in 1891, she produced perhaps one of her least notable efforts. Exhausted, in the summer of 1893 she moved into Château de Beaufresne at Mesnil-Theribus, Oise. There she established an organized household, in-

volved herself in local affairs, lived and entertained graciously, yet continued to work eight hours a day in her studio and to spend many evenings at drawing. As a friend, the painter George Biddle, put it: "She drew that almost impossible line between her social life and her art, and never sacrificed an iota to either." Her mother's death in October 1895 left Mary Cassatt alone, but at the same time ended an eighteen-year period during which her activities had been restricted by the demands of a semi-invalid family. During the winter of 1898-99 she visited America for the first time since the Franco-Prussian War, going to Boston, where she painted the children of Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner Greene Hammond; to Naugatuck, Conn., to paint members of the Whittemore family; and then to New York and Philadelphia, where she visited the Havemeyers and relatives. In 1901 she accompanied the Havemeyers on an extended picture-buying trip through Italy and Spain. Her circle of family and friends (which never embraced American artists and writers in Europe) continued to dwindle, however, with her brother Alexander's death in 1906 and Mr. Havemeyers a year later, and her own vitality was diminishing. In the fall of 1908 she made her last trip to America, deciding that the pleasures of extended ocean travel were not worth the agony of violent seasickness. She developed new acquaintances in Paris, including Mrs. J. Montgomery Sears, who purchased her pictures and interested her in spiritualism, and James Stillman, the New York banker, whose taste in art Mary Cassatt tried to direct away from the sentimentality of Jean Baptiste Greuze to an interest in the Impressionists. She herself nevei advanced beyond Cézanne in her taste for the modem and had no use for the avant-garde oi the early twentieth century. Increasing eye trouble forced her by 1910 to give up printmaking and resulted in a coarsening of her work in oil and pastel. By 1912 she had developed cataracts on both eyes; twc pastels done of her nephews, who were visiting her at Beaufresne at the outbreak of World War I, show the extent to which her work had deteriorated. Forced to abandon her château she spent most of the war years in Grasse where she was unable to have the attention ol good eye doctors. By 1920 she had resumec her usual manner of living, but she was nearly blind and unable to paint, and friends fron America found her querulous and vindictive An eye operation in 1921 brought only slight improvement. Seriously ill with diabetes, sh< died at Château de Beaufresne shortly aftei celebrating her eighty-second birthday. Sh