This year many of us are celebrating the centenary of the passage of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote. And so I’m doing some research on how the WLCB was–and was not–involved in the suffrage movement.
If you search for “suffrage” in the WLCB minutes, it appears very infrequently, giving one the impression that the Club members either didn’t care or opposed the franchise outright. We also noticed that the Club met while the National American Woman Suffrage Association was holding its 1906 convention less than a mile up the street–this particular convention was especially significant because Susan B. Anthony would give her last public address there–and no mention of the convention, or NAWSA, or anything relating to suffrage was included in the minutes for that entire year.
Further research, however, brought the WLCB suffragettes out of the woodwork. It’s become clear that the Club secretary, Lydia Crane, sought to minimize their influence by avoiding reference to them in the minutes whenever possible. The power of the secretary should never be underestimated!
We now believe that several members likely attended the NAWSA meeting in Baltimore; Club member Emily Lantz recounted details from the event 20 years after the fact in the Baltimore Sun. Others wrote in favor of suffrage, marched, and demonstrated.
One of the most interesting suffragist members of the Club was Corinne Robert Redgrave, who worked with producer Charles Frohman in NYC and also acted in and directed plays in Baltimore after moving here in the early 1900s. One of the plays in which she appeared, “How the Vote Was Won,” got a vivid (and not wholly positive) write-up in the Baltimore Evening Sun on Nov. 8, 1910.
The play was performed in the Belvedere ballroom and makes mention of “abandoned eggs and ill tomatoes” suffered by suffragettes on Court House Plaza. The writer seems to think women’s suffrage a rather silly conceit, but history tells the tale. Enjoy!
I am in the process of compiling the Club bibliography (more on this in a future post) and discovered that Lizette Woodworth Reese, the WLCB’s best-known poet and first woman poet laureate of Maryland, published several poems in the final years of her life in a magazine called Gardens, Houses, and People, which turned out to be the neighborhood newsletter of the up-and-coming development of Roland Park in North Baltimore.
Cover of the January 1936 issue of Gardens, Houses, and People, published by the Roland Park Company, Baltimore.
Reese did not live in Roland Park. Why would she have published her poems in this little fly-by-night publication? Initially, I assumed that the newsletter simply reprinted her poems, by way of adding some local flavor, seasonal interest, and cultural cachet to their pages. This seems to have been true for the poem “Hallowmas,” published in Gardens, Houses, and People in November, 1934. But several other poems appear to have appeared solely in this publication.
I still haven’t completely figured out why, but in looking up the poems in the pages of the magazine I encountered a fascinating story about the final poem published there, a sonnet with the intriguing title, “To an Indecent Novelist,” published in the January 1936 issue. Why would a poem critiquing the decadence and prurient inclinations of contemporary authors appear in a neighborhood newsletter, I wondered? And why would they publish it?
Well, it was because Reese had just passed away, on December 17, 1935, just a few weeks after having sent this poem, along with one titled “A Christmas Song” (appropriately, if tritely, published in the December 1935 issue of Gardens, Houses, & People), to the magazine’s editor, Warren Wilmer Brown. Thus, Brown concluded, it was highly likely that “To an Indecent Novelist” was “the last poem by Lizette Woodworth Reese.” He featured the poem on the first page of the issue, alongside a poignant depiction of Reese in her final days. I include a bit of it below. But first, the poem:
To an Indecent Novelist Lizette Woodworth Reese
You measure by a ditch, and not a height, Make life no deeper than a country bin One keeps for apples on a winter’s night, Thence prate the immaturities of sin. You weigh by littles, by some cracked emprise. Why not by that one thing a man has done, In some vast hour, beneath hot, hating eyes, When, hard against a wall, he fought and won? The spirit still outwits the lagging flesh: Cross but one lane, and you shall find again That righteousness is older still than lust; Strict loveliness of living find afresh, Sound women, too, and reasonable men, That not yet all the gentlefolk are dust.
Of this poem, Brown wrote:
“She sent it to us shortly before the inception of the illness that culminated, after a few weeks, in her death. . . . Whether it has appeared elsewhere in the meantime we do not know, but fancy it has not; the fact that she wanted it finally to reach the direct attention of our readers, many of whom were her warm friends, touched us very deeply and intensified the feeling of gratitude and honor that she had chosen these columns to the first appearance of a number of her later poems.
“That feeling was very keen, indeed, when we called upon her – it was Thanksgiving Day – shortly after she had been taken to the Church Home And Infirmary, where as Henry L. Megan pointed out in his fine memorial tribute in The Evening Sun, another great poet, Edgar Allan Poe, died.
“She was looking so pitifully pale and exhausted that it was not necessary to be told that the visit must be very short, but suffering and weak as she was her courage was superb, since her spirit knew no vanquishing. . . .
“Never was there a soul more impervious to the mercenary and otherwise debasing influences of modern times; never was there one that looked facts more valiantly in the face and took its stand once for all on its own high ground of idealism and faith in the fundamental decency and dignity of man.
“She saw loveliness wherever she turned and wrought the materials of her impressions into verse that often gleamed pure gold… She never was tempted even to change her own lyrics style, anymore than she was impelled to condone the license, to say nothing of the licentiousness, that so many contemporary poets and their readers indulged in complacently.
“She did not hesitate to express her opinion on such matters very freely and emphatically in conversation, but the only time, to our knowledge, she ever made it the subject of the poem was when she wrote ‘To an Indecent Novelist.’ Read the sonnet again, study it carefully, if you would find the dominant influence that shaped her moral outlook and kept the stream of her inspiration as a poet unsullied.”
The class has been busy researching the published authors of the WLCB. I’ve assigned each of them a group of texts for the Parole Femine anthology to annotate, and they are also doing research to flesh out the introductory headnotes for each author.
Researching annotations is a fascinating process. I think so, anyway! I realize that many people never look at annotations–members of the class have told me as much. But they can provide fascinating subtexts and suggest all kinds of ways to interpret literary texts. That said, researching and writing those annotations can feel a little bit like diving down the rabbit hole . . . over and over again.
One of my students, Alyssa Schilke, discovered just this when she tried to annotate the title of Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer’s poem, “St. Anthony.” Through her research, she was able to trace a complicated story of knights, crusaders, and saints, and how they got all thrown together in the Victorian imagination. Her research spurred us to dig deeper into the career of one of the Club’s most prolific authors. Read on.
Alyssa posted this to the course blog in March:
I spent time investigating “St. Anthony, A Christmas Eve Ballad” by Elizabeth Latimer. What bugged me the most is trying to solve which St. Anthony Latimer is writing about. She refers to him as Italian, which brings to mind St Anthony of Padua, a Franciscan monk from the 12th century.
But the poem features Latimer’s character recounting a tournament and the saint’s knightly duties, and the copy-text even features an image of a crusader resting against his horse. St. Anthony of Padua was a monk his whole life, entering the religious order at 15. [My note: So I guess he never went on a crusade.]
I came closer with a scene featuring St. Paul later in the poem. St. Anthony of Egypt is featured in a story with St. Paul of Thebes, where, as in Latimer’s poem, Anthony is present for the hermit saint’s death. But this Anthony was an early Christian ascetic from the 4th century, never a knight and too early for the Crusades. Although Latimer is using this story of a St. Anthony, this is not who she is discussing in the beginning.
Finally I found it. A reference to Anthony as “One of the world’s great Champions Seven” led me to a brief Wikipedia page, attributing the term to a Richard Johnson’s The Seven Champions of Christendom published in 1597.
Through some more searching and reading, I confirmed that Latimer’s St. Anthony is in fact, Johnson’s fictional character based off of St. Anthony of Padua. But in the style of Arthurian romances, St Anthony of Italy, decked out in blue, wins a tournament in front of the Byzantine Emperor in Chapter 12. This passage is exactly the piece Latimer references in her Christmas tale.
Through this long journey, I grew in appreciation for annotated works. Reading this poem the first time through, I had no idea that there are 2 St. Anthonys, nor would I have ever connected the story to Johnson’s work.
In fact, I found that Johnson work was edited to a ‘modern tone’ in 1863 by W. H. G. Kingston and republished. Perhaps Latimer encountered Kingston’s edition and it inspired her poem published in 1891. Her audience would have better understood her reference as well because the tale had been recently republished and was not 200 years old.
Latimer clearly enjoyed this story of the Champions of Christendom. She even presented a piece on St. Patrick, another of Johnston’s characters, for St. Patrick’s Day in 1903 to the club.
Alyssa’s persistence helped her succeed in solving this riddle of a monk who rode a horse and acted like an Arthurian knight. My discovery at around the same time of the 1895 list of Club publications gave us new leads to pursue– it claimed that Latimer had published several poems about Seven Champions of Christendom in popular magazines.
Today, I found one of them– the aforementioned St. Patrick, which was published in Harper’s Monthly’s sister publication, Harper’s Weekly, 3 years before the publication of “St. Anthony.” And searching for this led to additional works by Latimer we hadn’t yet recovered. So her author’s page in the Virtual Library continues to grow … and grow. The output of some of these women is difficult to believe!
First page of “St. Patrick,” by Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer, published in Harper’s Weekly in 1888.
Page from “St. Anthony,” by Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer, published in Harper’s Monthly in 1891.
Latimer was clearly fond of these poems. The fact that she chose to read “St. Patrick” to the Club fifteen years after it was published shows that she was still proud of this work. Interestingly, the Club minutes from this meeting state that Latimer “prefaced her reading by saying that the poem was simply one of her own imagination not founded on fact.” Whether it was actually based on Johnson’s– or Kingston’s– text is another question to think about.
I’ve been trying to find out more about Louisa Courtauld Osburne Haughton, one of the original founders of the WLCB in 1890 and its final president—for twenty-three years (1918-1941). Very little about her remains in the “official” historical record: she is not included in biographical encyclopedias of Maryland society women and did not descend from or marry into any prominent Maryland families. Remaining single for her entire life, she left few traces of herself in ways that were considered worth documenting at the time.
She is referred to on occasion in newspaper accounts of the WLCB as a successful dressmaker, co-owner with her sister Maud (who, so far as I know, never belonged to the WLCB) of the firm Haughton & Haughton, So I went to the Baltimore Sun historical archive to see what I could find.
It turns out that by the early years of the twentieth century the two were in a shop at 713 N. Howard St., in the area now known as “Antique Row” (though to tell the truth, very few antique stores remain). By 1909 they were ensconced at 516 N. Charles St.—most recently, interestingly, the longtime home of the imported clothing and home furnishing store A People United.
Interior of A People United at 516 N. Charles St. It’s fascinating to imagine how the interior was configured when it was the Haughton & Haughton dressmaking establishment.
The Haughton “modistes,” as they were called, employed several dozen people at the height of their success, and frequently advertised for dressmakers, apprentices, “waist drapers,” “skirt helpers,” and “finishers,” sometimes in as many as three different ads in a single issue of the Sun. For the most part, the workers they sought were women, but in one Oct. 1909 ad, they placed an ad for a male “first-class ladies’ tailor.”
For two women to run a successful clothing business would not be unprecedented at the time. Edith Wharton’s hapless character Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (1905) even entertains the thought of establishing her own millinery business, though she—predictably—fails to succeed, having been brought up to be adorned by hats rather than to be able to adorn them.
Nevertheless, I find it striking that the Haughton sisters were able so clearly to succeed in the socially conservative world of turn-of-the-century Baltimore. Here’s a great article from the 1948 Sun, written just a few years before Haughton’s death and decades after Haughton & Haughton shut its doors in the mid-1910s,which gives a sense of how Miss L. C. O Haughton— as she preferred to be called— remembered the atmosphere and clientele of the shop.
“From neck to hem line, [Haughton related,] dresses of that period were heavy with passementerie jets that gleamed like trappings of circus horses; or else were loaded with bows of satin ribbon or loops of velvet ribbon. It was not unusual to use on one dress several bolts of ribbon, each bolt carrying about a dozen yards. In the trade we facetiously called such decorations ‘soup-dippers,’ because they frequently dangled into dishes on the table.
“Bands of fur, even costly ermine, were used as trimming on dresses, sometimes 8-inch bands around the bottom of a skirt, and narrower bands for waist or sleeves” . . . Miss Haughton explained that these elaborate dresses belonged to settings of the period: large town houses of the wealthy; in drawing rooms the walls of which were covered with satin brocades; to the ballrooms of these homes, gleaming with crystal chandeliers, draped with yards upon yards of amilax, and with a string orchestra concealed behind palms, ferns and banks of roses or other flowers from hothouses on the country estates of the hosts. . . .
When the Misses Haughton were in business, gowns, except in emergencies, had to be ordered far in advance. Many and minute were the measurements taken of the customer, and the dress was designed to suit just her and no one else, to accentuate her good features and to conceal imperfect ones.
The foundations for the costumes constituted first a drafting problem in which a tight-fitted waist with standing high collar, skin and sleeve linings were cut to exact measurements. Nothing was haphazard, A fitting was then given, and alterations, if necessary, were made in the lining which was usually was of taffeta.
The many basted seams then were stitched, bound with narrow binding ribbon or pinked on a pinking iron of that day. Down the front of the waist lining were sewed numerous hooks and eyes. At least six sturdy covered whalebones were sewed into the waist, giving the foundation a rigid support. The high collar was lined with canvas and wired with “collar bones.”
From the many adjustable wire “Marias,” or dress forms, in the workroom one was selected that approximated the proportions of the customer’s figure. The foundation was placed on it and any gaps were filled in with cotton wadding or rags for padding. . .
All the foregoing preparations were in a way equivalent to the preparation of canvas for a painting. At this point the real creative work started. The modiste, either verbally or by drawing (if she could draw) communicated the special design that had been germinating in her mind. Highly specialized sewing women, including foreladies, fitters, drapers and others were called into play to execute the design.
Materials were brought from a stockroom and necessary lengths to drape on the foundation were cut with shears . . . Walls were whitewashed at the end of each season. Floors were bare. Into the cracks between the wide planks dressmaker pins fell and formed a thin line of silver. In addition to the “wire Marias,” sewing machines, tables, chairs (their legs sawed off to make them low), a large cabinet stocked with spools of sewing silk, and a clock completed the furnishings of the room, or rooms as the case may be, dependent upon the size of the establishment.
On the low seats sat the sewing women. They were usually slight of build and stoop-shouldered because of their occupation . . . Under their long slender fingers, which were pricked from needles and pins. fell their dreams, translated in a perky bow, the flow of beautiful drapery. They were articulate as poets in satins, linens, silks.
Jon Kucskar, who now lives in Dr. Ladd-Franklin’s former abode, wrote me this week to say that the “Blue Plaque” commemorating 1507 Park Ave. has been installed.
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Jon and his wife Emily learned of this illustrious former resident of their home through the work of Aperio seminar students Sydney Johnson, who was assigned to research and collect publications by Ladd-Franklin, and Marina Fazio, who ran across one of Ladd-Franklin’s scientific contributions to a meeting of the WLCB which she transcribed as part of an assignment. Both students became fascinated by the hard-nosed, iconoclastic “lady scientist” who studied mathematics and psychology, taught courses at Johns Hopkins and (eventually) Columbia universities, yet nevertheless was referred to in Club minutes as “Mrs. Fabian Franklin” rather than as Christine Ladd-Franklin, the name she used in print.
It took some research before we even realized they were the same person! Such is the power of names, and the ease with which they can be effaced.
I collaborated with Sydney and Marina to write an article about Ladd-Franklin for Women’s History Month last March; our piece was published in the Bolton Hill Bulletin, a newsletter for residents of Ladd-Franklin’s former neighborhood. And that’s where Jon and Emily first learned that they lived in the house of someone famous–or, perhaps more accurately, someone who ought to be famous. As it turned out, the Bolton Hill neighborhood was in the middle of selecting a new round of honorees for their “Blue Plaque” program, and Jon and Emily succeeded in getting Ladd-Franklin added to the list.
When Jon wrote to tell me about the installation of Ladd-Franklin’s plaque, he wrote, “We are honored to have Christine recognized on our house.” We are, too.
To add to the WLCB team publications list, I recently published “The Celebrities of John Street” as the inaugural installment of a new column, Long Ago and Right Here, which will be appearing in the Bolton Hill Bulletin. The piece focuses on a looooong newspaper article that Club member Emily Lantz wrote when she was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, on the supposed “celebrities” living on a quiet little street in my neighborhood (which we briefly visited while on our WLCB writers’ walking tour in April).
Katharine Pearson Woods, whose picture appeared in a 1906 Baltimore Sun piece about writers, artists, and intellectuals living on John Street in Baltimore.
Featured in the article—withhold your astonishment–are several Club members, including Lucy Meacham Thruston (who didn’t actually live on John Street), and Katharine Pearson Woods (who wasn’t living there at the time).
Clearly, Lantz was using her post at the Sun to help make the work of women writers visible and found creative ways of doing so. She continued to feature women writers, artists, and professionals throughout her long career. You can read many of her pieces in the Virtual Library section of the site.
Rereading this piece, I realized that it included a picture of one of the authors we had not been able to locate during the semester: Katharine Pearson Woods. It’s a terrible reproduction (scanned from microfilm, it looks like) but at least we get a glimpse of her. I’ve now included it in her bio on the WLCB website.
Meanwhile, Marina has been working on collecting all the publication information for the Parole Femine anthology into a provenance list which we’ll be including in the book. She also has found a whole bunch of publications from a newly discovered published Club member, Mary (Marian V.) Dorsey, sister of Hester Dorsey Richardson, which I’ll eventually be including in the Virtual Library. Mary Dorsey published recipes and pieces on home decor and entertaining, as well as some pieces on Maryland history and folklore, in newspapers and magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Harper’s Bazar.
And Cynthia is finishing up the transcriptions of the meeting minutes held at the Maryland Historical Society, which Marina will be proofreading to correct the numerous names and titles that may were incorrectly transcribed.
All this is to say, work on the project continues. More anon.
Over the weekend I took a trip to Frederick, MD for the day. The beautiful town lies northwest of Baltimore, close to the Virginia border. Among the mountains the town boasts colorful buildings and shops, as well as rich history. I had visited with Dr. Cole two years ago for a class trip to the Civil War Medicine Museum, but I hadn’t expected my second visit to tie in with our current class.
As I was walking through the town absorbing the old buildings, I came across a sign that read “Trail Mansion”. This rang a bell in my head, but I couldn’t remember why that name held significance. “Trail” I kept repeating; “Why do I know the name ‘Trail’?” Suddenly it dawned on me–I was thinking of Florence Trail, member of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore. I realize this could’ve been a common Maryland name or merely a coincidence, but I snapped a few photos anyways, determined to do a little research.
It turns out the mansion belonged to the wealthy Frederick resident Charles Edward Trail, Florence’s father. To double-check this information, I turned to Marina’s blog post about Florence Trail. Yep, she grew up in Frederick; this must have been her childhood home. The red brick building stands tall, with a unique face in comparison to the other dwellings on the street. Nonetheless, it lies tucked away. The mansion serves as a landmark which marks a specific time in history, and today it functions as a funeral home.
As I was walking through the town absorbing the old buildings, I came across a sign that read “Trail Mansion”. This rang a bell in my head, but I couldn’t remember why that name held significance. “Trail” I kept repeating; “Why do I know the name ‘Trail’?” Suddenly it dawned on me–I was thinking of Florence Trail, member of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore. I realize this could’ve been a common Maryland name or merely a coincidence, but I snapped a few photos anyways, determined to do a little research.
To double-check this information, I turned to