Grace Raymond Hebard

 “Hard work is the only formula for any achievement.” 

—Grace Raymond Hebard

Born this day in 1861: Grace Raymond Hebard (1861–1936), professor, historian, librarian, suffragist, biographer, and chronicler of the West and woman suffrage.

Hebard was a woman of many firsts: she was the first woman to receive a B.S. (civil engineering) from the State University of Iowa (1882), the first woman to be admitted to the Wyoming State Bar (1898) and the first woman to practice law before the Wyoming Supreme Court. She was also the first librarian of the University of Wyoming, creating it from books she personally collected (eventually expanding the collection to 42,000 books by the time she gave up the unpaid position) and was the first president of the state’s library association (which she helped establish). She was also Wyoming’s reigning tennis champion for a stretch.

Hebard began her working career as a draftsman for the U.S. Surveyor General in Wyoming. She continued her education, as well, earning a master’s degree and later a doctorate. In 1891 became a member of the University of Wyoming (Laramie) board of trustees and also served as secretary. She was a powerful member of the board, using her considerable drive to carve a university out of what she saw as the bleak Wyoming landscape. Hebard also began teaching political economy at this time and by the end of her career was head of the department of political economy and sociology. She was a popular speaker and prolific writer, most remembered for her histories of the American West.

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Gail Laughlin

Born this day in 1868: Gail Laughlin (1868–1952), first woman lawyer in Maine and long-time public servant

Laughlin graduated from Cornell Law School and became the first woman to practice law in Maine. She practiced law in several other states as well and held a judgeship in San Francisco. She served three terms in the Maine house of representatives (1927–1934) and three terms in the Maine senate (1937–1941). Laughlin was a suffragist and introduced various legislation to protect the rights of women and children; she was also a defender of animals, wildlife, and the environment.

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Phebe A. Coffin Hanaford

Born this day in 1829: Phebe A. Coffin Hanaford (1829–1921), minister, suffragist, feminist

Hanaford, a native of Nantucket, Massachusetts, was the first Universalist woman minister, first woman minister in New England, and third woman minister in the United States. Despite frequent opposition, she preached for more than 20 years. Rev. Hanaford believed that scripture “retarded the progress of woman for centuries, but not for all time." She was an active suffragist and worked closely with the leading feminists of the day. She was a charter member of the Equal Rights Association and the New England Woman’s Suffrage Association.

For a brief account of her life from the Nantucket Historical Society, go here. 

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Alice Bertha Kroeger

Born this day in 1864: Alice Bertha Kroeger (1864–1909), reference librarian. 

Creator (1902) of the Guide to the Study and Use of Reference Books: A Manual for Librarians, Teachers and Students, the reference librarian’s bible for more than 100 years. Librarians at the Columbia University Libraries have been updating the book on an ongoing basis since Kroeger’s death in 1909. She was also a suffragist. Yea!

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Marilla Marks Young Ricker

Born this day in 1840: Marilla Marks Young Ricker (1840–1920), lawyer, “the prisoner’s friend,” free-thinker, and suffragist

Ricker was born Marilla Marks Young in New Durham, New Hampshire. Her father was a free-thinker and supporter of equal rights for women. He educated her in politics and philosophy and taught her to follow her own convictions.

She became a school teacher at age 16. In 1863 she married John Ricker, a wealthy farmer and supporter of equal rights who was many years her senior. Mr. Ricker died just five years into the marriage.

Now a wealthy widow, Ricker went abroad, studying languages and developing a fluency in German. While overseas she continued to explore free thought, political equality, and birth control.

Upon returning home she took up the study of law, seeing it as a tool to help society’s disadvantaged. In 1882 she was admitted to the bar of the supreme court of the District of Columbia—outranking the 18 men with whom she took the exam. In her practice she offered her services to disadvantaged and destitute prisoners and successfully challenged the “poor convict” laws that kept debtors imprisoned indefinitely. In addition to legal aid, she offered material and financial aid to the District’s  prisoners and prostitutes. She was often referred to in the press as “the Prisoner’s Friend.”

In 1890 Ricker successfully petitioned New Hampshire (her home state, where she spent her summers) to admit women to the bar. She became the first woman admitted to the bar in New Hampshire. She also became the first woman to attempt to run for governor of that state in 1910, but her application was refused on grounds that without the right to vote, she did not have the right to run for office. A lifelong suffragist, Ricker protested her lack of representation every time she paid her taxes. She voted in 1871, in the town of Dover, declaring

“I come before you to declare that my sex is entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...I ask the right to pursue happiness by having a voice in that government to which I am accountable.”

Although her ballot was refused, she may have been the first woman to vote, however unsuccessfully, in  the U.S.

Ricker was a member of the Woman Suffrage Association, the New Hampshire Woman Suffrage Association, and was vice-president-at-large of the National Legislative League.

Ricker also authored several books on free thought, including The Four Gospels (1911), I Don’t Know, Do You? (1915), and I Am Not Afraid, Are You? (1917).

In honor of Ricker’s trailblazing efforts for women and in recognition that New Hampshire has the first all-woman delegation to the U.S. Congress, the New Hampshire state legislature has introduced a joint resolution to direct the joint legislative historical committee to acquire a portrait of Ricker and display it in a place of honor in the state house complex.

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Kate Waller Barrett

Born this day in 1857: Kate Waller Barrett (1857–1925), physician, social reformer, and suffragist

Barrett was born Kate Harwood Waller in Falmouth, Virginia. In 1876 she married Robert South Barrett, an Episcopal minister. Barrett’s interest in the plight of so-called “fallen women” was aroused when an unmarried woman and her baby came to the rectory for help, and Barrett was surprised to discover that this supposedly disgraced woman was little different from herself. Barrett and her husband soon began ministering to local prostitutes. To aid their efforts, Barrett earned an M.D. from Women’s Medical College of Georgia (1892).

Barrett devoted herself to championing the cause of poor unwed mothers, who often lacked access to medical care and were considered social outcasts. She eventually became president of the Florence Crittenton Mission. The mission provided health care, education, and job training to unwed mothers, needy immigrant women, prostitutes, and women who had contracted venereal diseases. In time, more than 50 local missions were established across the nation. Because of her efforts, the plight of unwed mothers became an acceptable subject of philanthropy. In 1898 the National Florence Crittenton Mission became the first philanthropic institution chartered by Congress. It operates today as the Florence Crittenton National Foundation. 

Barrett was also vice-president of Virginia’s Equal Suffrage League from 1909 to 1920, a delegate to the National Democratic Convention of 1924, and sat on the Board of Visitors at William and Mary College.

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Helen Hamilton Gardener

Whoever differs with the multitude, especially with a led multitude…will find out from their leaders that he has committed an unpardonable sin. It is a crime to travel a road of your own, especially if you put up guide-boards for the information of others.

— Helen Hamilton Gardener

Born this day in 1853: Helen Hamilton Gardener (orig. Alice Chenoweth, 1853–1925), author, feminist, social reformer, and freethinker

Alice Chenoweth adopted the pseudonym Helen Hamilton Gardener after collecting a series of freethinking lectures she had delivered in 1884 into a volume titled Men, Women, and Gods, and Other Lectures (1885). She came to the attention of feminists, however, after writing “Sex in Brain,” a carefully researched refutation of the notion that the female brain is inferior to the male brain.

Gardner continually questioned the status quo, especially in regards to sexual equality. She decried the sexual double standard and the inferior position of women in marriage. She explored these themes in several novels. Is This Your Son, My Lord? (1890) won widespread attention and succeeded in its aim of using fiction to shine a light on fact. One topic of the novel was the age of consent for girls, which was exceedingly low in the nineteenth century—as low as 7 in one state.  (Please see below for an excerpt of the preface she wrote for the second edition. It’s a very stirring defense of her choice of topic for a novel and shows what insight feminists and freethinkers had—and needed to have to challenged entrenched notions.)

In 1913, after the Congressional Committee of the National American Women Suffrage Association defected to the more militant National Women’s Party, Gardner was invited to help organize a new Congressional Committee. She served as an unofficial lobbyist to President Wilson, with whom she was very close and on whom she was very influential. She worked quietly behind the scenes to effect passage of the 19th Amendment. 

In 1920 President Wilson appointed Gardener to the U.S. Civil Service Commission. At the time it was the highest federal position ever held by a woman.

From the author’s preface to the 1894 edition of Is This Your Son, My Lord?

 The double system of morals which has legal and therefore social support—which makes of man a free and dominant human being and of woman a dependent function only and always—is not understood one whit better than was physical slavery in 1853. Race ownership with its double code of moral obligation is now illegal, and therefore looked upon as immoral and wholly pernicious. Sex ownership is still legal, and for that reason, and for that only, is it recognized as less vicious that a double standard of moral obligation should exist between the sexes. There is but one depth of degradation below that which allowed men to hold in bondage their fellow men and make of them financial dependents, and legal and social and moral pensioners because they were black; and that is the depth which is touched when, by all legal, moral, social and financial conditions the marriage altar is but an auction block upon which, for the sake of the right to live, the purity and devotion and loyalty of womanhood are sold—not on equal terms—with no pretence of fair exchange—into a perpetual servitude of body and soul that knows no limit and can hope for no escape.

The black man had his food and clothes and code of morals and duties, in which he had no voice, served to him by a dominant race from which he could make no appeal. He was a dependent mentally, morally, and physically. That was the reason of his degradation. It was not that he suffered physical hardships. He was frequently better off in that regard, than was his free brother. It was the root of the system that degraded him. He was held as an inferior with no voice in his own control and no right to his own development.

Woman stands in that position to-day. She has no voice in her own government, nor in fixing the standards by which she is judged and controlled. She is a dependent morally, mentally, financially and physically.

It is all very well—and very silly—to say that women control society and make the moral standards that govern it. They do nothing of the kind. Financial dependents and political nonentities create no standards. They receive them ready made. The merest modicum of reason will supply the proof of this.

No subject class—no unrecognized, dependent class—ever yet made public opinion either for itself or for others. It always did, and it always must, simply reflect the sentiments and opinions of its rulers.

It is true that many a woman treats with scorn the “fallen” of her sex while receiving the companion in crime as a suitable son or husband. Who makes that sentiment? Who decides what woman is “fit to be a wife and mother”? Who makes the laws that give divorce to a husband for the least fault of the wife, but places another standard upon the loyalty of the husband?

Who talks about “making an honest woman” of his companion in guilt? Who makes him “honest”? Who enacted the legal standards upon which all these social sentiments rest? A man is valued of men for many things, least of which is his chastity. A woman is valued of men for few things, chief of which is her chastity. This double code can by no sane or reasonable person be claimed as woman made. Woman has had no voice whatever in its establishment. She has the same voice and power possessed by all financial and legally dependent creatures in its continuation and reflection. She is a very good mirror; but she cannot be accused of being the creator of the original of the reflection.

The willingness to accept a degraded and subordinate status in the world, and the assertion that they like it, are the lowest depths of human degradation to which human beings can be reduced. A system which produces willing legal, moral, financial and social dependents and inferiors is one that cannot fail, as all history shows, to breed crime and vice, poverty and insanity, imbecility and moral obliquity enough to make of a beautiful world a mere den of discomfort, discord, and despair.

This lesson has been taught and learned with classes and with races; but it is yet to bear but withered fruit while the mother of these classes and races is beneath justice and outside of freedom, while she is a financial dependent (which is always a slave ) a political non-existent, (which is always a creature without defence) a moral beggar at the feet of her companion in degradation and a social echo of the opinions, expressed or insinuated, of those who hold over her not only all physical, financial, and social power, but who also sway her through the tenderest and holiest ties, and scruple not, alas, to make her the victim of her own virtue.

Freedom of religion had its novelists long ago and, in its newer, broader phase, has them to-day. Freedom of political choice and action has numbered many a romancer and poet as its champion. Labor has not failed to dramatize its cause in literature and on the stage. The cause of manhood as against kingcraft, priestcraft, or slave driver, was exploited by many a gifted soul who with the dash of a poet’s or novelist’s pen showed more people the hideousness of the old and the hope in the newer thought than could have been induced to read or made to understand dry legal argument or sociological treatise.

Shall not woman have her novelists also ?

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Martha Coffin Pelham Wright

Born this day in 1806: Martha Coffin Pelham Wright (1806–1875), founding feminist, abolitionist

Martha Coffin Wright was the sister of Lucretia Coffin Mott. Like her sister, she was both an abolitionist and suffragist. She was part of the group of women’s rights activists, including Lucretia and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who planned the first women’s rights convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. She was active in women’s rights organizations at both the state and national level. She served as secretary of the 1852 and 1856 National Women’s Rights Conventions, an officer at the 1853 and 1854 National Women’s Rights Conventions, and president of three other conventions. She also helped found the American Equal Rights Association in 1866 and the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. She was president of the NWSA in 1874.

Wright and her husband, David Wright, were both active in the American Anti-Slavery Society. They were agents in the Underground Railroad and harbored fugitives in their Auburn, New York, home. 

Wright was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2007.

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Maud Nathan

Maud Nathan in 1913

Born this day in 1862: Maud Nathan (1862–1946), suffragist, cofounder of the National Consumers League

Maud Nathan was born into a prominent Jewish family in New York City in 1862. At age 17 she married her cousin Frederick Nathan and enjoyed the life of a socialite. She was very active in community service. A gifted linguist, she taught English to Jewish immigrants at the Hebrew Free School Association. She also sat on the association’s board of directors.

Nathan became interested in the role consumers could play in improving the working conditions of New York’s retail workers, or shopgirls. She helped found the New York City Consumers League in 1890. In 1897 she became president of the state’s Consumers League. She held the post for 21 years, and the League honored her by naming her honorary president for life. In 1898 a National Consumers League born of the New York league, and Nathan served on its executive board.

The New York league informally investigated working conditions in retail establishments. Shopgirls worked as much as 60 hours per week for as little as two or three dollars and were often sexually harassed. The League published “white lists” of stores that treated their shopgirls fairly and encouraged consumers to patronize those establishments. Nathan worked close to the ground, talking with employers, newspapers, and reform groups on behalf of shopgirls.

Nathan found that directly lobbying politicians was less fruitful, since politicians had no motivation to attend to the needs of citizens who could not vote for them. She therefore turned much of her attention to woman suffrage.

A witty and talented speaker, she traveled the state to drum up support for women’s rights. Her family publicly opposed her views, but her husband was by her side. During her speaking tours he drove her around the state in a car, which was decked out with flags to attract attention. Nathan was the first vice president of the New York Equal Suffrage League and a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. On the national level, she headed a women’s suffrage committee for Teddy Roosevelt’s National Progressive Party. Overseas she addressed international conferences on women’s suffrage and put her linguistic skills to use as translator for German and French speakers.

In her later years Nathan put down her experiences in two works. The Story of an Epoch-Making Movement, published in 1926, chronicles the Consumer League. Her autobiography, Once Upon a Time and To-day, was published in 1933.

Just for fun: Check out this "Live-Blog" of an 1893 hearing on the working conditions at New York City's dry goods stores.