Advocate for women’s education

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The information I could find on William Graham Brooke (without paying for access to articles) indicates that he was an advocate for education, particularly for education and university access for girls and women. A barrister, he worked on the reorganization of Anglican education for the Lord Chancellor’s office.

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Today I am thankful for women’s education…

For a little more than five years of my life, I supported myself, something I could not have achieved without the education I was able to receive. The past sometimes seems so distant that it is hard to remember that, had I been born just a century earlier in the same place, my sex might have prevented me from receiving any more than a rudimentary education. It is exceedingly unlikely that I would have been able to obtain a college education, let alone a master’s degree.

I stand on the shoulders of educators like Helen Peabody, Emily Jessup, and Caroline D. White, women who not only fought for their own right to be educated, but then taught the next generation after them. They lived in a time when women’s very capacity for learning was questioned. They inhabited a society that accused educated women of neglecting their natural destiny and damaging the reproductive systems merely by learning.

these women made what were probably in some case hard choices, choices that aligned them to their academic institution more closely that most women are today.  They paved the way for myself and countless other women. This post is but a small token of my gratitude.

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Emily Jessup

In Oxford Cemetery in Oxford, Ohio, you can find this monument to Professor Emily Jessup. The light is a little unusual in the photograph, so below I have typed for you the information on the tombstone:

Emily, daughter of William and Nancy O’Dell Jessup,
Born Wilton, Conn., Sept 3, 1824,
Died Oxford, Ohio, Sept 25, 1893.
Pupil, Teacher, Associate Principal, Mount Holyoke Seminary, 1843-1862
Teacher, Western Female Seminary, 1862-1893

Mount Holyoke Seminary, Jessup’s alma mater, exists today as the women’s institution Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Mary Lyon founded Mount Holyoke in 1837 to provide access to higher education for young women, against whom the doors of universities were generally closed. The seminary was the first college for women in the United States, and provided inspiration and practical guidance for other women’s colleges to follow. Mount Holyoke counts itself the first of the Seven Sisters: Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, and Radcliffe colleges; all institutions for the education of women.

According to Mount Holyoke’s records, Emily Jessup graduated with the class of 1847 and then taught at the institution for approximately fifteen more years. She, like many of her colleagues, then took that experience to Western Female Seminary, another women’s college.  Considering she graduated a year ahead of Helen Peabody (the first principal of Western Female Seminary) and then would have been her teaching colleague for about four years, it seems reasonable to assume that Peabody had a hand in convincing Jessup to move westward. We know what Professor Jessup looked like thanks to archival photographs on the web.  Despite health issues that necessitated the use of a wheelchair, Jessup instructed for 30 years at Western Female Seminary, until her death in 1893.

As we leave Emily Jessup today, I want you to look one more time at her tombstone, and reflect on the uniqueness and daring of her life.  In an era where women’s rights were severely circumscribed and American society prescribed a very rigid role for women of Jessup’s race and class, she defined herself by educational and professional accomplishments.

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A day late…

Yesterday marked the 90th anniversary of Tennessee’s ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing women’s right to vote in the United States.

A likely grave marker for today’s post would be for Susan B. Anthony, one of the most prominent leaders of the women’s suffrage movement, but I’ve written about her before. Instead I want to introduce you to someone whose contributions to women’s suffrage are less well known, even for those who know his name: Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass rests in the same cemetery as Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, New York. Born into slavery in about 1818, Douglass engineered an escape and freed himself by fleeing northward. He married his first wife and settled in Massachusetts. His self-education brought him in contact with abolitionists, and he began to speak about his experiences as a slave and joined the abolitionists’ number. He wrote Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself. He received acclaim as an orator and writer.

Although Douglass is best known for his role as an abolitionist and proponent of black civil rights, he had a much broader perspective on social reform. He supported equal rights for all, including immigrants, Native Americans, and women. He gave speeches in support of the home rule movement in Ireland. And, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, he supported women’s suffrage. In 1848, Douglass was the only African-American in attendance at the first women’s rights convention in the nation, in Seneca Falls, New York. He wrote and spoke in favor of women’s suffrage, not as a separate issue from black civil rights, but as one piece of the whole of social justice. He argued that with the franchise, African-American women in particular would be given a new tool to continue the struggle for equality. He died in 1895, still engaged in his social justice work.

Douglass is represented in these statues at Seneca Fall’s National Women’s Rights Historic Park. (Sorry for the blurriness – look at the third figure from the right.)

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The Anthonys of Rochester

As part of yet another roadtrip summer course on American Women’s History that looped through the New England and Mid-Atlantic states, we traveled to Susan B. Anthony’s home and gravesite in Rochester, New York.

Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) was one of the most famous and influential 19th century women’s rights activists. Although she is most famous for her advocacy for women’s suffrage, Anthony was also involved in the abolition, temperance, labor, and education reform movements as well. Her family moved to Rochester, New York, when she was a young women, and she lived in the family home until her death. Her sister Mary Anthony, also an activist, remained in the house until her death in 1907.

The Anthony family plot is in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester. Although Susan B. Anthony is the most famous resident, her entire family was active in the progressive movements of the 19th century.

Lucy Read Anthony and Daniel Anthony attended a women’s rights convention in 1848 in Rochester, just weeks after the Seneca Falls Convention. Daniel Anthony was active in the temperance and abolitionist movements. All four of the Anthony sisters (Susan, Guelma, Hannah, and Mary) voted in 1872. Susan B. Anthony, as the leader, was arrested, convicted and fined for illegal voting. Mary Anthony, most of all, was an activist in her own right and instrumental to Susan’s ability to devote herself so entirely to her activism.

Although the world remembers Susan B. Anthony, her grave appropriately sits within the family fold, surrounded by those who loved and supported her so that she could become the activist she so desired to be.

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