Last Friday, Hunter, Dr. Cole and I decided to make the trek to the Johns Hopkins University library in order to search the Baltimore Sun Historical Archive (which Loyola doesn’t have access to…) Both Hunter and I were assigned women in the Club to research that were some of the first female reporters for the Sun and we were very excited to see what we could find.
May Garretson Evans is accredited as being the first female reporter for the Baltimore Sun and there have been many articles written about her and her life. She has published two books about music and another book with her sister, Bessie Evans, about American Indian Dance Steps. I knew all of this going into the JHU library and was expecting to find an abundance of articles written by her. Unfortunately I was wrong.
I guess being the first female reporter in a rather large newspaper has its downsides. I was able to find one article stating Miss Evans as the writer. It was surprisingly about Edgar Allan Poe (these women are obsessed!) I believe that she wrote other stories or at least reported on other stories but because of her controversial employment was not given credit. In an article in the Sun written in 1947 she is quoted as saying,
My adventure into the newspaper field created a commotion. At first I was more interviewed then interviewing. I had to explain myself everywhere in that gaslight period. It was a perfect nuisance.
May Garretson Evans is just another example of some of the women in this Club that were venturing into territories previously unoccupied by women. Miss Evans along with Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin remind me that these women’s stories need to be told so they can get the recognition they deserve. I hope that over the course of this semester I will be able to find more of Miss Evan’s writing so that she can received the credit that is due.
Over the past week, our assignment for our class has been to find publications from the women in the Club. I was assigned Maud Early, Marguerite Easter, May Evans and (my personal favorite) Christine Ladd Franklin.
I was able to find published works for all of these women, but the one who sparked the most interest for me was Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin who is exclusively referred to as Mrs. Fabian Franklin in the minutes.
Marina touched on Mrs. Franklin in her most recent post, which was fascinating for me to read after all of her work I was able to find. Mrs. Franklin was born in 1847 and went to Vassar College. She then went on to study at Johns Hopkins and was the first woman to have finished the requirements for a Ph.D in math and logic. Unfortunately, she was not given this title until much later in her life because of Johns Hopkins’ policy on coeducation at the time.
All of Mrs. Franklin’s publications are focused on her studies of math, logic and psychology. Her ideas about color vision were revolutionary in the field of psychology and mathematics. She has published over 50 articles in various magazines and journals. That being said, on her Wikipedia page, there are only eight publications listed. Hopefully by the end of the semester I will be able to update that to include all of her works that were published.
Another issue that I have with Mrs. Franklin is that all of her work is under the name of Christine Ladd Franklin. I have even seen Ladd and Franklin hyphenated because Franklin is her married name. Yet in the meetings, she is only referred to as Mrs. Fabian Franklin. We talked about this in class and have decided that the Club was very strict with their procedures as one of their mottos is “consistency, thou art a jewel.” So maybe the Club wasn’t necessarily trying to stifle Mrs. Franklin and her accomplishments so much as they were trying to keep control over the small things that mattered to them. These small things were sometimes all women had control over and so I don’t blame them…that much.
For my blog post this week I decided to write about Edith Wharton’s short story, “Writing A War Story.” In this story, a young author and nurse, Ivy, is working in a hospital in Paris when she is asked to write a short story for a magazine that will be sent to soldiers. A quote that really stood out to me was,
But that very afternoon the ‘artistic’ photographer to whom she had posed for her portrait sent home the proofs; and she saw herself, exceedingly long, narrow and sinuous, robed in white and monastically veiled, holding out a refreshing beverage to an invisible sufferer with a gesture half way between Mélisande lowering her braid over the balcony and Florence Nightingale advancing with the lamp (Wharton, 253)
The mention of this picture is ironic because by the end of the story the only thing that the soldiers care about is the picture, no one cares about the story itself. I find this way of describing her picture and then making the soldiers only care about her picture a smart way for Wharton to comment on the participation of women in the war and also women as writers. WWI was the first time women and men, regardless of their marriage status were able to spend time together. Women were able to prove that they could handle being in difficult situations. However, women were also still objectified and it seems to me that Wharton is really trying to make sure that the reader understands that.
The soldiers want to remember Ivy as the “hot nurse”, not by her intelligence and ability to write. This piece sets up the mood for our class— women struggling to be taken seriously.
Over the past weeks, I have been looking at the members of the Club—who they are, where the lived—and finally I am able to say what some of them look like.
With the help of the Maryland Historical Society and their Portrait Vertical File Collection, I have been able to find some images of the women from this club. For this blog post I wanted to focus on one in particular, Henrietta Szold.
Miss Szold was a member of the Club from 1890-1894. The picture below was taken while she was still a member of the Club in 1893. Born in 1860 to Rabbi Benjamin Szold, Miss Szold was the only Jewish member of the club, making her, to our knowledge, one of the only—if not the only—member who was non-christian.
Miss Henrietta Szold. Image taken at the Maryland Historical Society.Miss Henrietta Szold. Image taken at the Maryland Historical Society.
Miss Szold’s wikipedia page (which I linked above) talks about her legacy as a Jewish Zionist and the founder of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. It also talks about the many different roles she played in the Jewish community from Jewish education and being the first editor for the Jewish Publication Society. In 1933 Miss Szold emigrated to Palestine and was a part of Youth Aliyah, an organization that helped to rescue more then 30,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany.
In 1945 Miss Szold passed away in one of the hospitals that she helped to found in Jerusalem. She is remembered around the world for the work that she did.
In the entire Wikipedia article about Miss Szold, it does not mention once that she was a member of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore. I think that because she was a member for such a short period of time, there was no mention of her membership. In general I think it is astounding that the ladies of the club let someone like Miss Szold in. These are women who have been known to hold discussions on why the Anglo-Saxon race is superior, as mentioned in Clara’s post. So the question must be posed, did Miss Szold leave once she realized the nature of the majority of the women in the Club, or was she asked to leave because of her religion?
Women like Miss Szold are few and far between in the Club, but it is important to try to find them and tell their story and also try to figure out their involvement in the Club. Miss Szold is remembered as a world renowned leader and activist but not as a member of the Woman’s Literary Club. We can only hope to bring recognition to the Club with the help of members such as Miss Szold.
As my last posts have shown, it has been quite the challenge to try to find who some of these women really are. Notably the married women. I was particularly surprised to find that Mrs. John C. Wrenshall, the long lasting president of the Club, was one of these people that was almost impossible to find.
Or so it seemed.
With the help of Hunter we were able to figure out that Mrs. John C. Wrenshall is ACTUALLY Mrs. Letitia Humphreys Yonge Wrenshall. It is definitely a mouthful but also really exciting to find out another lady’s real name.
Her husband, John C. Wrenshall was actually a captain in the Confederate army. John and Letitia were wed November 22, 1866 in Savannah, Georgia.
Another thing to add to the search is the information that we found while on our tour of the Green Mount Cemetery. All of the team was present for our search which we feared might be fruitless from the get-go. Fortunately we were able to find more than we thought. We were able to find the graves of Miss Caroline Barnett (1871-1957), Miss Virginia Woodword Cloud (d. 1938), Miss Eveline Early (1868-1933) and Mrs. John D. Early (otherwise known as Maud Graham Early 1842-1905), Mrs. Charles W. Lord (otherwise known as Alice Emma Lord 1848-1930), Mrs. William M. Powell (otherwise known as Emma B. Powell 1852-1952), and Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull (otherwise known as Francese Litchfield Turnbull 1844-1927).
Just being able to figure out a few more of these names and years keeps the search going. Another interesting thing that we found was that Sidney Lanier’s grave was in the same plot as the Turnbull’s plot. There was the grave for Sidney Lanier but not for Mrs. Sidney Lanier who was a honorary member of the club. We did not know of a connection between the Laniers and the Turnbulls, but we are aware that Mrs. Turnbull was always a big fan of Sidney Lanier and on her grave is a quote of his.
We also are fairly sure that we found the grave of Lydia Crane since we were able to find most of her family but were unable to determine which one was hers due to the weathering of the tombstones. But I know that Katie is going to want to do more hunting to find the truth.
Diving into discovering who the women of the Club are has come with some rewards, and many challenges. For the past few weeks now I have been in charge of figuring out who was in the Club when and where they lived. Thanks to the incredible record-keeping in the early years that is not a difficult task. Much of the same information overlaps in different notebooks. Essentially, from 1980 to 1916 we have an almost complete record of who the members in the Club and also who the board of management was. However, these are just names and nothing more. My next task was to try to figure who these women were or at least try to find some of their real names—not their husbands names.
Instead of trying to find information about over a hundred women, we thought it would be best to start small, and higher up, with the board of management. This board includes an average of twelve women. One president, two vice presidents, a recording secretary, a corresponding secretary, a treasurer, and six members of the board. These are the women that help run and decide the direction of the club. Having the lists of the board from year to year all in one place can also help explain changes in the dynamic of the club. For example, Hunter has been transcribing the minutes for Fall of 1903 where Lydia Crane was recording the minutes. In the middle of a meeting the hand-writing changes indicating that Miss Crane is not writing anymore. Looking at the board of management for 1903-1904 we can see that Miss Crane is not actually the recording secretary, but she was for 1901-1902 and then comes back in 1906-1907. These are the tiny shifts that we are beginning to pick up the longer we read what these ladies were doing. We are able to piece together to try to get a more three dimensional image of the Club.
So the board of management seemed like a good place to start, since these are the women that the club revolves around, and we picked the year 1903-1904. Here is where the difficulty lies, as I have mentioned in my previous posts: many of the women are referred to by their husbands names, which makes it hard to find out their real names. However, I have been able to use different resources such as ancestry.com and findagrave.com to be able to locate the names of the men, and then many times they have the names of the women as well.
When doing these searches it is hard to determine if the information that I have found is really for the same person that I am searching for. Without knowing the birth and death information about a person before I search for them, a slew of people can come into the found list and I am unsure of if it is who I am looking for. Another thing that I am finding more relevant and difficult in my search is the cemeteries where these people are buried. Many of the ones that I have been able to find are in either Green Mount Cemetery or in Loudon Park Cemetery, with private church cemeteries thrown in throughout. Green Mount is the place where many people of prestige were buried. While I have not found out much information about Loudon Park Cemetery, there is a large portion of the cemetery which was dedicated to the burial of Union soldiers which might have had an impact on who wanted to be buried there depending on their sympathies during the war. Another piece of information is where the two cemeteries are located. Green Mount being located in Greenmount Ave, a couple of blocks south of North Ave. This is located close to where most of the members of the Club lived, therefore making it convenient for them to go to Green Mount. Loudon Park on the other hand, is a 30 minute drive from Green Mount when I put the directions into Google. On horse that would take much longer, let along a slow moving burial procession would be about two days.
The top middle of the map is a small green square which is Green Mount, Loudon Park is not pictured on the map but would be south west of the bottom left edge of the map.
Aside from the interesting information about the cemeteries I have been somewhat successful with finding information about the women. Out of the twelve members of the board of management for 1903-1904, I was able to find birth and death years for six of the members and was able to determine the names of two of the women that had gone by their husbands names. In 1903 Mrs. Jordan Stabler, or Jennie Stabler (although I am not positive that this is her) was 35; Mrs. Philip Uhler, or Julia Pearl Uhler, was 44; Miss Lydia Crane was 70; Miss Ellen Duvall was 62; Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese was 47; and Miss Eveline Early was 35. I was really disappointed that I could not find anything on Mrs. John Wrenshall, who is the president for many years of the Club. Thanks to findagrave.com I was able to find a picture of Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese.
This image was uploaded to findagrave.com. Unfortunately we have no ability to double-check if it is really her, but hopefully it is.
It is a sad realization that many of the women in the Club are only recognized by a name that is not really theirs. Thankfully there are tools out there that help make it possible to learn about Julia Pearl Uhler instead of just Philip Uhler.
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I have been spending a lot of time working on who was in the Club and where these women lived. Going through all of the names can be overwhelming but also extremely interesting.
Just looking at where women who are non-residents and honorary members is interesting in itself. There are women from California and even England and Paris who are a part of this club.
Something that I have found very helpful if I cannot figure out the spelling of a name is to Google search what I think the name is and then this also sometimes leads to help me learn more about who the women are. The biggest difficulty that I am coming up with is that there are many women who went by their husband’s name, as was customary of the time. I have been able to find some interesting information about some of the men and also some women too.
One woman, Miss Octavia Bates, is originally from Detroit and graduated from Ann Arbor University which is quite a feet for a woman from this time. She was mentioned speaking at many different events in different magazine articles. From addressing the fact that Universities are not academically rigorous enough for women, to being a founding member of a Suffrage Club in Michigan. Bates seems like the type of woman that could potentially make up the minority of the Club, but there is much more to find out.
The past week we were also able to get ahold of some maps that Dr. Cole found at the Maryland Historical Society. These maps were made for insurance pricing purposes and therefore are very detailed and have the numbers of on the street for certain blocks of a neighborhood. Being able to look at a physical map instead of just online and in the time period that we are working with is really cool to try to figure out who is living where.
