A Vote of One’s Own: “Madame Momentum” and the Women’s Network of 1868

By Elizabeth Coons

This book presents a life unlike those of most advocates of women’s rights. Caroline Severance did not focus on a cause requiring primarily militant organization. Rather, she saw women’s first need as new opportunities to discover interests and potentials within themselves. In proposing and co-launching the New England Woman’s Club, Severance and her colleagues provided both a retreat from domestic pressures and a means of worldwide outreach. This club and its partner groups revived isolated minds, built organizing skills for business and politics, and introduced the leaders of the day to women as a constituency. The foundation of women’s rights, as Severance saw it, was helping women to cultivate self-awareness, latent individual abilities, and self-knowledge. That foundation, she thought, represented the most direct and durable route to corporate organization and sociopolitical influence. These ordered visions, to which Severance signally contributed, amplified the national conversation about women’s rights.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532089428

Elizabeth Coons

Elizabeth Coons is an independent scholar who seeks to find out whether “great” or enduring poetry endures in part because it performs cognitive services that we need both to survive and to be free. For the past ten years, her “day job” has entailed technical and medical writing. With added study, she qualified and works as an editor in the life sciences. Throughout her professional life, she has been a member and later an officer of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars and its local predecessor (the Alliance of Independent Scholars in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Elizabeth also belongs to the American Medical Writers Association, the Unitarian Universalist History Society (UUHS), the Union of Concerned Scientists, an active UU church, and the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences. She enjoys creative nonfiction, 18th-century rhetoric, running, swimming, choral singing, and running a household of busy people and two busy cats.

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Copyright © 2019 Elizabeth Coons.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Cover Credit: Day, Augustus, Artist. Silhouette of a woman wearing an Empire dress facing right . , None. [Between 1829 and 1833] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2004661810/.

Library of Congress (LCCN) Permalink https://lccn.loc.gov/2004661810

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-8943-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-8942-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019919386

iUniverse rev. date: 02/04/2020

CONTENTS

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Early Life

Marriage and Escape

Boston: Idea and Reality

The New England Woman’s Club

Emersonian Self-Reliance

The Traveling Lecturers Return

Conclusion

End Notes

Bibliography

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to Reverend David A. Johnson, who ministered to First Parish in Brookline Unitarian-Universalist from 2003 to 2013 and who avidly sought historical knowledge and social justice.

PREFACE

As an aspiring independent scholar, I sought an opportunity to contribute something new. I knew a local historian, the late Rev. David Johnson, who had a storied and encyclopedic knowledge of all topics touching New England transcendentalism. He enthusiastically recommended Caroline Severance as an under documented social contributor. I soon learned that she was also a reader of Emerson and an enthusiast of intellectual freedom. I located her speeches in the Schlesinger Library and made a close stylistic reading. These speeches, which appear in Ella Giles Ruddy’s Mother of Clubs (1912), suggested the best characterization of Severance would emerge through fully describing the formation of the New England Woman’s Club in 1867–8 and of its early life in Boston. This time and place contained many women who had served in the Women’s Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. Most of them, including Severance, were not willing to see these social and intellectual resources disappear once more behind domestic walls.

While I was working in this way, I found that a modern biography of Severance was published (Caroline Severance by Virginia Elwood-Akers, iUniverse, 2010). I credit Elwood-Ackers with a careful, detailed, and readable account of Severance’s social and political engagements and an excellent description of Severance’s childhood. However, there are aspects of Severance’s life, especially of the Boston period, that remain undocumented though wide and formative in their historical influence.

Unlike Rev. Johnson, I have neither encyclopedic historical knowledge nor formal training as a historian. However, my original field of English history and literature focused on the connection between history and literature. That experience brought forward the role that the impassioned writing of the earlier transcendentalist period must have had in the subsequent struggle over voting rights for women. In particular, the advent of idealism in Emerson’s sense was revolutionary for the many Americans who felt the impact of material and otherwise external forces on their lives. Emerson’s statement that today’s realities are informed also by yesterday’s ideas was an empowering influence. For Severance, who read all or most of Emerson’s essays, Emersonian idealism and self-reliance were especially important. These thought currents allowed her to maintain a focus on the changes that she wanted to make, at a time when most people were frequently buffeted by pragmatic doubts. To set transcendentalist literature in the context of other American currents, I also took a graduate course in American history and literature through the