Hilda Jones

 

First pages of Mary Ann Horneman's pamphlet,
The First Ladies of the White House (in miniature)

I can’t wait to get back to 1941 so that I can see Mary Ann Horneman at the annual convention of the South Dakota Federation of Women’s Clubs.

She’s been invited there to give a presentation about America’s First Ladies: sing old-time songs, tell stories, show off her collection of First Ladies dolls.

Each doll—Adams, Coolidge and the rest of the gang—is dressed in a copy of the gown worn by her corresponding mannequin in the First Ladies Hall at the Smithsonian Institution.

Mary Ann made the dolls and their costumes, painted their portrait faces, and stitched their satin skirts and lace bodices.

She launched her career as a lecturer and entertainer after publishing a small book, 5”x7”, that contains photographs of her dolls and a few paragraphs about each First Lady. Since then, she has been traveling around the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Kansas, visiting every women’s group that needs a speaker.

It’s real tea party stuff. Crowned with a headdress, swishing her own satin skirt, Mary Ann presents the First Ladies as the finest examples of American womanhood, each a study in courage and beauty. The audience clucks and nods.

Before Mary Ann introduces her dolls at the big meeting, Gertrude Null, president of the Federation, will speak about “The Importance of Being a Woman.” Miss Null is a music teacher who grew up in Huron, S.D. not too far from the Minnesota border. Incorporated in 1883, Huron rose on the banks of the James River, blessed by the Chicago and Northwestern Railway.

Huron is not unlike the city of Beloit in north central Kansas, where Mary Ann was born and would spend most of her life. Perched over the Solomon River, Beloit boomed after the Civil War thanks to the Missouri Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads, which passed through town carrying grain and passengers.  

Gertrude and Mary Ann were born, respectively, in 1889 and 1886. They were the daughters of wealthy men. Mr. Null practiced law and Mr. Horneman owned a furniture store that bulged with overstock.

Local and regional women’s organizations, like the South Dakota Federation, began to proliferate after the Civil War. Most of them sponsored pleasant social gatherings with performances and lectures by members. During the 1890s, however, the women’s club movement really took off. It grabbed thousands of white women like Mary Ann and Gertrude whose hometowns were scattered across the Great Plains.

Having imbibed the Victorian niceties of their mothers, Mary Ann and her peers tended toward the tinkly side of things. Yet they were very much a different generation, one that reached tentatively for new ideas. They wanted to learn about social issues like child welfare, took sides on Prohibition and women’s suffrage, and believed in reform, albeit incrementally. They agreed on “The Importance of Being a Woman,” but few met the definition of first wave feminist.

1916: Black professional women's club
(New York Public Library)

The women’s club movement was segregated, of course, so Black women began to form their own organizations around the turn of the twentieth century. Some grew out of sororities at historically Black colleges and universities and coalesced around the perennial campaign for anti-lynching legislation.

That fight was still going on, right in the middle of the New Deal in March 1936, when 18-year old Hilda Jones, a Black student at Girls Commercial High School in Brooklyn, won a contest to design a print for a dress to be worn by Eleanor Roosevelt.  

First prize was $75, a stunning amount of money for the daughter of immigrants from Barbados whose father worked  as a garage attendant. “I’ve liked to draw for as long as I can remember,” Hilda told a reporter. Her design was inspired one Brooklyn night by the mustard greens that her mother was preparing for dinner.

The story ran on the first page of The Voice of Colorado, a weekly with a largely Black readership, which had so little use for the Roosevelts that it endorsed Alf Landon for president that year. The bitter fight to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas, and the W.P.A.’s blind eye toward its own inequitable distribution of resources, dwarfed the story with the headline “Negro’s Design Bought by Mrs. Roosevelt.” 

Girls who entered the competition show off their designs.
Hilda is standing, second from right. 

Eleanor Roosevelt wore Hilda’s green and purple leaves, now imprinted on a chiffon dress, to a White House luncheon. Meanwhile, the young woman fervently hoped to become a commercial fabric designer.

By the time that Mary Ann Horneman started toting around her First Ladies show, Hilda had a factory job in one of the many manufacturing plants that once flourished in New York City. She never became a designer. After 1940 she disappears from record.  

Hilda's connection to Mary Ann and Gertrude is a barely visible thread, but it exists.  

“The buried talent is the sunken rock on which most lives strike and founder.”—Frederick William Faber (1814-1863), British theologian and hymnist   

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2021/09/hilda-jones.html

Louise Suydam Noble & Her Mother (part 2)

There will be a big story for you some day – maybe in a month, maybe in a year. But when it comes it will be a first-page story with big headlines.

Those were the words of Louise Suydam Noble, speaking with an acquaintance in late January of 1912.  

“You’re just blue. Your mood will pass,” he replied.

Of course, the big story had been dancing in the headlines nationwide since Louise had left her millionaire husband to run away with Fred Noble, a younger man of a much lower socio-economic class four months earlier.

    

Louise’s mood did not pass, for she longed to be back inside the social whirl. Yet her former friends now shunned her, and it all became too much.

One evening she went uptown to spend the night at the apartment of her mother and sent a message to the landlord of the building where she and Fred, now her husband, lived. She asked the landlord to bring to her We-uns and Dixie, two of her beloved Pomeranian dogs. Pluffles, the third Pomeranian, stayed with the landlord. 

In the wee hours of the morning, Louise secretly returned to the apartment on Twelfth Street. She threw a kimono over her lace nightgown and Fred dressed in a silk shirt, trousers, and silk stockings. They turned on the oven and gas burners and bolted the windows in the apartment.

When Louise’s mother woke the next morning and found her daughter missing, she frantically called the landlord and Louise’s ex-husband Walter and headed downtown, arriving at the same time as Walter and Fred Noble’s father and a police captain with several lieutenants. 

The cops broke the lock, barreled through the furniture that blocked the entrance, and made their way to the kitchen where Louise and Fred lay dead in each other’s arms beside the open stove.   

The Nobles' double suicide joined a
lynching, a drowning, a murder, and a fire
in this newspaper report. 

***

Louise was the only daughter of Virginia Grace Hoffman White and John Jay White, Jr. Jack, as he was known, descended from Knickerbockers and listed his profession as a “broker” but lived largely off inherited wealth. 

Grace, as she called herself, was born in Cape Palmas, Liberia, where her father, the Episcopal Reverend Cadwallader Colden Hoffman and her mother Caroline devoted their lives to missionary work.

Reverend Cadwallader Colden Hoffman 

After marrying in 1885, Grace and Jack moved to a house on fashionable East Fifty-Seventh Street, and their daughter Louise came along in 1887. Years passed; then suddenly in 1908 the couple left New York City for Washington, D.C. When I discovered this detail, it struck me as an odd move.

But it suited Grace. Ensconced in a limestone mansion near Dupont Circle, she became involved in various charities and causes. After her daughter’s scandal and death in 1911-1912, Grace plunged headlong into the Progressive Era. She became active in the National Woman’s Party founded by suffragist Alice Paul. After the nineteenth amendment was ratified in 1920, the NWP kept pushing for an Equal Rights Amendment.   

Grace further burnished her reputation when the Chicago reformer Jane Addams, who established the social settlement Hull House in 1889, invited the worshipful Grace to join the board of the Woman’s Peace Party, established in 1915.

Evidently Grace gained a few enemies because of her indiscretion. Rosika Schwimmer, a Hungarian-born activist, wrote a blistering four-page letter to Grace after she became aware of catty gossip concerning her own appointment as the International Secretary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). 

Grace stands fourth from right at a WILPF meeting in Zurich in 1919.

“Before and after the organizing meeting in Washington,” Schwimmer wrote,

I received press cuttings from all over the country . . . representing me as a ‘person who had to leave England because she behaved so aggressively.’ I don’t know whose interest it was to publish such absolutely unfounded stories. I had to tell you all these things because we cannot work for peace and harmony on the basis of mistrust and discord.

In 1934 while serving as chair of the New York City branch of the WILPF, Grace was described as suffering from a “Mayflower complex” and probably better suited to the D.A.R. than the WILPF.

Grace is seated third from left in this 1934 photograph of NWP leadership.

In keeping with the ethos of the “New Woman,” Grace became a poet and published Up Ship, Wings to Dare, Christus, and other collections of verse.

During these years Jack White lived far away, having moved permanently to London in 1914.

Grace died in 1937 surrounded by servants at The Kedge, the White family home in Bar Harbor, Maine, overlooking Frenchman Bay off Mt. Desert Island.

 

 

Photos of WILPF and NWP courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection of Women's History at Smith College

 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/09/louise-suydam-noble-her-mother-continued.html

The Web

The "Spider Web" chart, created by the U.S. Dept. of Defense,
defamed Progressive-era women activists (1923-4).      

During this centennial year of women’s suffrage, charges of anarchy, socialism, and radicalism are being tossed around by the president, politicians, and pundits.

The name-calling echoes a propaganda war waged against women pacifists and proponents of welfare legislation, which began after World War I in the bowels of the U.S. Defense Department – nearly 100 years ago. 

It came about in this way.

Americans feared the creep of communism after the two Russian Revolutions of 1917: in February, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czarist government; in October, following months of provisional and coalition governments, the Bolsheviks seized power in a relatively bloodless coup.

Panic about wartime espionage infused the U.S. Congress and courts. In 1919, President Wilson appointed a new Attorney General, former congressman A. Mitchell Palmer, who drove the nascent Red Scare with raids, interrogations, and deportations. Palmer, whose own house was bombed by anarchists, whipped up anti-immigrant fervor. He also hired young J. Edgar Hoover.       

1920: Remarkably, U.S. Attorney General Palmer urged
President Wilson to pardon the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs,
jailed under the 1917 Espionage Act. Wilson refused. 

Meanwhile, American women finally won the vote. Some suffragists persisted in the quest for an equal rights amendment to the Constitution while a younger generation of activists turned its attention to an international anti-war movement as well as legislation that would provide social welfare and protections for families.   

While the Declaration of Sentiments had been signed in Seneca Falls, N.Y. in 1848, women’s wide-ranging involvement in the national arena did not begin until well after the Civil War. 

But it came on with brilliance and energy.

One of the major leaps forward was the establishment of Hull House, a Chicago settlement house for working-class men, many of them immigrants, by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. Four years later, nurse Lillian Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Addams, Starr, and Wald were among the leaders of organizations focused on the improvement of living and working conditions for immigrants and the destitute. Schooled in economics, social science research, public health, and the law, they would launch “a female dominion in American reform,” in the words of historian Robyn Muncy.

And they expected to wield political power. 

The most influential reformers included Grace Abbott, Edith Abbott and Sophinisba Breckinridge, University of Chicago professors who focused initially on the absence of data on maternal and infant mortality. Julia Lathrop, a Vassar graduate and colleague of Addams, the Abbotts, and Breckinridge, attacked patronage systems that allowed appointees to embezzle funds intended for needy families. Florence Kelley – divorced mother of three, Cornell University graduate; as ferocious as Lathrop was diplomatic – believed that unregulated capitalism destroyed families. She sought to abolish child labor and improve working conditions for women.  

Edith Abbott (left) and Grace Abbott, 1920s
(University of Chicago, Special Collections)

There were many more leaders, too many to name. Together they pushed for the creation of a Children’s Bureau in 1912, located within the Department of Commerce and Labor and directed by Julia Lathrop. It would address the exploitation of children by American industries.

Subsequently the women developed a vast lobbying network, grounded in Chicago and New York City, which encompassed the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the League of Women’s Voters, the National Association of University Women and other groups.

These coalesced in the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, established in 1920. The WJCC aimed at Congress, pushing legislation to provide financial and social support for women and children. Prior to the Social Security Act of 1935, men could abandon their families and evaporate into thin air. This problem loomed large in American society.

The WJCC scored its greatest victory in 1921 with passage of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Bill. The brainchild of Lathrop, who corralled Republicans and Democrats into a landslide vote, it funded welfare programs to be directed by the Children’s Bureau and enacted by the states.

Florence Kelley, Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop, 1920s  (Getty/Bettman Archive)

But during the fight to gain passage by the states, and in pursuit of a child labor amendment to the bill, the WJCC ran into resistance. As the nation grew increasingly conservative through the 1920s, The Woman Patriot, a widely read newspaper that had opposed women’s suffrage, recharged itself.

Newly “Dedicated to the Defense of Womanhood, Motherhood, the Family and the State AGAINST Suffragism, Feminism and Socialism,” The Woman Patriot declared that the child labor amendment would eliminate the constitutional rights of parents and children. It rallied the Daughters of the American Revolution, the American Defense Society, and numerous citizens’ leagues to oppose the amendment.

The Woman Patriot, August 1924

It was the infamous “Spider Web Chart,” which came to light in 1923, that ultimately sabotaged the coalition of women’s organizations that had emerged from the suffrage triumph. The chart appeared first in Henry Ford’s reactionary Dearborn Independent. The work of Lucia Maxwell, a private intelligence officer under Brigadier General Amos A. Fries, head of the Chemical Warfare Department, it effectively linked more than a dozen organizations and at least 50 women to “International Socialism.”

The chart made the rounds of Capitol Hill, scaring off previously supportive politicians who now decried radicalism and a hidden agenda to take power away from the states.

Not even the tamest of women’s organizations escaped unscathed. And while sane, influential citizens denounced the chart, the child labor amendment did not pass, Sheppard-Towner was not renewed in 1929, and the WJCC’s influence waned.

Of the spider web chart, one newspaper editorialized in 1924:

Apparently, there are people in the country who really credit such stuff. Not to mention the incredible gullibility this presupposes on the part of hundreds of intelligent and patriotic women leaders in the United States, it is an amusing illustration of the Great Red Myth which regards the radical Muscovites as supermen in the realm of propaganda and underground influence.

Today, that’s a heap of irony.

*The chart singled out the WJCC and the National Council for Prevention of War and included the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom, National Federation of Business and Professional Women, National Consumers’ League, National Council of Jewish Women, Girls’ Friendly Society, American Home Economics Association, National Women’s Trade Union League, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the National PTA, and the National League of Women Voters.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/08/the-web.html

 

Dark Horse? The Tale of Midy Morgan

Maria "Midy" Morgan (undated photo)

Midy Morgan is young and energetic, six feet tall with kind blue eyes and a swinging gait.  Born in 1828, she has grown up on her family’s estate in County Cork. She is a superb horsewoman who loves to foxhunt. 

But now it’s 1865 and Midy’s down and out, having been banished from home because she isn’t a man.

Rallying, she sails off to Rome with her mother and sister, an aspiring artist.  “Clad in deepest mourning, with a heavy heart and an extremely light purse,” Midy would later describe herself. 

She already speaks French and now she learns Italian. Segueing into society, she takes up foxhunting “on the Campagna,” according to an American newspaper. Her fearless riding draws admiration.

Before long it’s 1868 and Midy’s accepting a gold hunting watch and diamond brooch from the king of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II.  The portly monarch with a ridiculous mustache is a horseman himself, and very grateful for her completion of a challenging mission.

He had asked her to purchase for him six fine mares, so she traveled back to Ireland and spent several months looking and negotiating.  Prizes in hand, she valiantly accompanied the horses across the Channel and led them over the Alps to their new home in the Royal Stables at Florence.

King Victor Emmanuel II

America was yet to come.  There Midy would become one of the nation’s first woman journalists, covering horse-racing, the stockyards, the market, husbandry, and the transportation of livestock for the New York Times for more than 25 years.

Midy’s life had the quality of a fairy-tale. After the death of her county squire father, she managed the farm while her older brother fought in the Crimean War.  Midy turned out to be a brilliant manager who coaxed large crops of wheat and vegetables from the brown soil and claimed high prices for her cattle and thoroughbred horses. She also studied veterinary medicine with one of the Queen’s surgeons who examined all domestic animals that arrived at the port of Cork.

It was fortuitous that her brother kicked her off the farm.  She got to see the world and succeed on her own terms.

Born Maria Morgan, Midy never boasted about her many triumphs.  Perpetually facing hostile men who felt threatened by her competence and knowledge, she won them over with her wit and honesty. She nearly always dressed in black, sported a felt hat, and strode around in brown brogans.   

Midy loved Italy, but the American consul – T.B. Lawrence, heir to a New England textile manufacturing fortune – persuaded her to move to the United States.  She arrived in 1869 armed with letters of introduction to Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times; Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Herald, and Leonard Jerome, a financier who built the Jerome Park Racetrack (with August Belmont, Sr., a banker who invested the Rothschild fortune and founded the Belmont Stakes).  Jerome would become the grandfather of Winston Churchill. 

Scandals and corruption swirled
around the business of transporting
cattle throughout the 19th century.

Unfortunately, Henry Raymond had died recently.  His replacement, the well-whiskered John Bigelow, told Midy that the only opening at the Times was for a cattle and livestock reporter.  Of course, she took it and never looked back.  She became a respected authority, especially about cruelty to animals.  Her writing inspired reforms.  And she never minded kicking back in a barroom along the road.

Over time, Midy became friendly with Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, former presidents Grant and Arthur, and longtime Senator Chauncey M. Depew.  They made her a member of the American Jockey Club. 

Newspaper Row, Manhattan, mid-1870s:  Times Building (left);
U.S. Post Office (center right)

Jerome Park Racetrack; first race, 1872
(www.1stdibs.com)

In 1873 the New York State Legislature invited Midy to speak about the need for skilled agricultural workers.  Advocating reformatory schools where vagrant girls and boys would receive an “agricultural education,” she said:

To me it matters not whether a man dies worth $5000 or $100,000, so that he has spent a useful, valuable life.  Better does it appear to me to own stock on the boundless prairies, to own flocks and herds, than to own stocks in Wall Street.  There is to me a woeful love of city excitement in young Americans; therefore, any system that would turn the current of youthful life into free and pure channels of agricultural pursuits would be a blessing to society at large.  

In fact, within two decades farming would start to lose its luster for young people.  In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt appointed the Country Life Commission to advise on how to stem the exodus from farms to cities.  Improved agricultural education was a centerpiece of the proposals, but the trend was never reversed.

Images of the Union Stockyards in Chicago, 1880s

Midy remained a reporter until her death in 1892.  She had been ill since falling on the ice at the Jersey City stockyards one year earlier.  Anxiety plagued her as well.  Having lost money in a real estate deal, she supplemented her reporter’s salary by working part-time as a station agent for the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In 1885, Midy launched her dream of a house in the Staten Island neighborhood of Livingston along its fashionable north shore.  Perversely, she worked with neither a contractor nor an architect.  Over a period of seven years arose a three-story brick building with a mansard roof.  A chimney ran through the center of each floor, which consisted of one large room, and an iron staircase led to the top.  The dining room walls were covered with painted seashells.  The bathrooms contained plunge baths, which were akin to small pools.

Midy’s sister, the artist, took charge of the decoration.  She lived in the house although Midy never did.  The house no longer exists but Midy endures somewhere, a daring rider of the Gilded Age.

"Cupid with a Dog," bracelet by Luigi Saulini,
parting gift from King Victor Emmanuel to 
Midy Morgan when she left Italy for the U.S. in 1869.
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2020/03/dark-horse-tale-of-midy-morgan.html

Betty Wales and J. J. Goldman

Ambitious and imaginative, J. J. Goldman filed
a patent for a button-detachment device in 1893.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Jacob J. Goldman and his brother Michael were chugging along in the garment business in New York City.  Their company, Gold Quality Skirts, manufactured skirts for women and girls. 

They were the sons of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before the Civil War and settled in Baltimore.  Their father Samuel had brought a trade from Poland:  he was a tailor who specialized in hoop skirts.

Therefore, it is not surprising that Samuel’s sons went into women’s apparel.  By 1880, Jacob had moved to New York to start his career.  Michael soon joined him.   

At that time, the “needle industries,” as some called the garment business, occupied large swaths of Manhattan.  As far north as Fiftieth Street all the way down through the Village and ending east of City Hall, women’s wear was manufactured in tenements and factory buildings where immigrants toiled over sewing machines and other equipment or worked by hand.  These places were known as sweatshops.*

This 1922 map shows how the garment industry
(red and blue) was eventually consolidated
below 34th Street in Manhattan.

Around 1900, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) began to demand better working conditions and humane treatment of workers.  In 1909 they scored success with 14-week strike in which 20,000 women participated.

That same year, the Goldman brothers met their own kind of success with the new Goldman Costume Company.  By 1910, J. J. was ensconced on Riverside Drive with his wife Lollie and their two children.  

Then J. J. had an idea. It may have arrived via his daughter, Bessie.  Perhaps she brought the Betty Wales books to his attention in the same way that Walt Disney’s daughters showed him Mary Poppins.

Edith Kellogg Dunton published Betty Wales, B.A. under her pseudonym, Margaret Warde, in 1908.

Either way, it made for an unlikely pair:  Jacob Josiah Goldman and Edith Kellogg Dunton – Smith College graduate and author of the bestselling girls’ series Betty Wales.

The daughter of a judge, Edith was born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1875.  At the age of 18, she entered Smith, where she flourished as a writer.  After graduating in 1897, she worked as an English teacher in Rutland.  She also managed publicity for Smith, and received praise for her clever public relations strategies.

Then inspiration struck.  Edith decided to write a series of books for girls, all starring a capable young woman named Betty Wales.  There would be eight books, from Betty Wales, Freshman (1904) to Betty Wales, Business Woman (1917), all published by the Penn Publishing Company in Philadelphia.  Edith used the pseudonym Margaret Warde although her fans soon uncovered her identity.

Edith Kellogg Dunton, 1900

Many aspects of the stories seem autobiographical as Betty makes her way through the fictional Harding College and out into the world, surrounded by a circle of devoted friends.  The books were promoted as “college stories” about modern young women.  They quickly became bestsellers.

Now here came J. J. Goldman with a proposal for Edith and the Penn Publishing Company.

J. J. wanted to create a clothing line for younger women featuring a stylish, contemporary look.  He planned to call the line “Betty Wales Dresses,” and hoped to harness the popularity of the books and its heroine.   

The deal was sealed in 1915.  Within a few years, J. J. renamed his company Betty Wales Dressmakers.  Eventually, after his brother Michael died, he manufactured only Betty Wales dresses.

Ever the innovator, dubbed “father of a great idea,” J. J. devised all sorts of gimmicks to build the brand. 

His opening gambit was that every woman who purchased a Betty Wales dress would receive one of the books.  In the early 1920s he staged a contest guaranteeing a free dress to booksellers who sold a certain number of Betty Wales books.  Another contest asked for slogans; yet another for essays on “Why customers buy Betty Wales dresses.” 

As sales rose, J. J. spent heavily on advertising, especially in women’s magazines.  No one had done that before.  Patent medicine and soap?  Those items had been advertised for years in the Ladies Home Journal. 

But never a women’s clothing brand.

J. J. decided to make Betty Wales dresses available exclusively at one store per city, and eventually, he started a chain of Betty Wales Dress Shops.  By the 1930s, a kind of fervor surrounded the dresses, as reported in The American Cloak and Suit Review:

Betty Wales is a practical Twentieth Century personification of an idea, with the power to materialize to the modern girl or young woman in the form of a dress, a smart, refined, wearable and original dress, more dear to the heart of a girl than any legendary Goddess.

The dresses were popular through World War II and lingered into the early 1960s, although J. J. had long since sold the business and moved to Florida.  He died in 1948.  Edith spent most of her life in Rutland, where she died in 1944.  Penn Publishing continued to turn out juvenile book series through the postwar era.

And Betty Wales – she lifted her lamp beside the golden door of merchandising.   

*The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire killed 145 young women who could not escape the sweatshop because the doors were locked.  That tragedy led to major reforms demanded by organized labor.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/09/betty-wales-and-j-j-goldman.html

Parting the Brooklyn Curtain: Imogene C. Fales

 Newspaper sketch of Imogene C. Fales, delegate to the 1896 Populist Party
Convention. The first women delegates to the Republican and Democratic
party conventions were seated in 1900.

One morning in September 1902, an auctioneer named P.H. McMahon arrived at 126 Macon Street, Brooklyn, to sell the contents of the home of Imogene Fales, who had died one month earlier.

Bric-a-Brac, Turkish Parlor Suite, Pier Mirrors, Cyl-desk, 
Library Dwarf Bookcases with volumes of books, Hair Mattresses,
Refrigerator, Crockery, Velvet Carpets. . .

Imagine those volumes of books – sociology, religion, politics, philosophy – for their owner had been a 19^th century reformer.

Imogene Corinne Franciscus Fales (1830[?]-1902) worked closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the suffrage movement. She helped lead the U.S. co-operative movement, which promoted shared production and profits; as she put it, “public ownership of public necessities.”

She wrote about utopia and industrialization and lectured on Darwin and the cosmos. An adherent of New Age ideas and editor of a brief-lived journal called New Commonwealth, she participated in numerous organizations including the Association for the Advancement of Women, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the Brooklyn Metaphysical League, the Women’s National Progressive Political League, and perhaps the most prestigious women’s club of the nineteenth century, Sorosis.*

In 1894, a New York Times story titled “Open-Air Meeting a Fizzle” counted Imogene Fales among the speakers:

“All the old agitators who have been denouncing capitalists in Union Square for years.”

(I love that!)

The last house she occupied still stands with its carved oak front door and filigree iron fence and gate bordering the sidewalk, in the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. From here and other homes in Brooklyn, Imogene Fales conducted the business of her life.

She flourished within a large circle of vibrant women who lived in New York City during the second half of the nineteenth century. In Brooklyn, these included the author Laura Holloway Langford; businesswoman & children’s advocate Rebecca Talbot-Perkins; “suffrage hiker” & educator “Colonel” Ida Craft; and Girls High School principal Catherine B. Le Row.**

These ladies were good company, impassioned about achieving influence and power for women. Their interests often converged; for example, Imogene lectured on “The Value of Industrial Art to Women” at the School of Industrial Art for Women, founded by educator and carpet designer, Florence E. Cory. Each did not necessarily embrace all of her friends’ causes, however.

 From the Light of Truth Album, Photographs of Prominent
Workers in the Cause of Spiritualism (1897)

When Imogene was a little girl, her family moved from Baltimore to New York City where she was educated privately. In 1850 she married Edward Spaulding Fales and moved to New Bedford.

Her husband had been born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1833. He came to the U.S. as a child. The well-liked Fales spoke nine languages and became editor of the New Bedford Mercury at age 17. He studied law and traveled through Mexico and Central America before settling in Rio de Janeiro where he represented the firm Lanman & Kemp, wholesale druggists known for their beauty products.***

              In between Edward’s voyages, he and Imogene moved to Brooklyn with their two sons. Edward died prematurely in 1875. After that, Imogene sprang into action, laying plans for the Sociologic Society of America. Formally organized in 1882 with Imogene as its president, the society issued a statement:  

What is needed is, not so much an advance in wages, as the concession of the right of Labor to share in profits. In other words, to introduce a new industrial system, where Capital is restricted to a fixed rate of interest, and Labor, over and above the market rate of wages, is allowed a share in the profits of the business.

Imogene called it Industrial Partnership or Co-operation. The cause would preoccupy her for the rest of her life. But there was more – suffrage and the arts and her three children. 

The eldest, William E. S. Fales, a bon vivant, lawyer, editor, poet, diplomat, and occasional poser, fully inhabited a Gilded Age life. In the middle, Harrison Colby Fales became a fur merchant. Daughter Ethel, reportedly a gifted singer on the verge of a great career, died at age 21 in 1889.

After Ethel’s death, Imogene fled to a cottage in York Harbor, Maine, where she grieved deeply. A year later, she returned to Brooklyn, picking up where she left off.

Elected a delegate to the National Populist Convention in 1896, Imogene traveled to St. Louis where the People’s Party ensured its own demise by endorsing William Jennings Bryan as the Democratic candidate. That was 120 years ago this summer.

Imogene C. Fales delivered a paper at an 1884 meeting
of Sorosis. (Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College)

See post about William E. S. Fales, 1/25/17

*Sorosis was the first U.S. women’s professional study club, founded in 1868 by journalist Jennie June Croly, who also established the Woman’s Press Club and General Federation of Women’s Clubs.

**Ida Craft, a militant member of the Suffrage Pilgrim Party, routinely walked from city to city leading an army of suffragists.

***Now known as Lanman & Kemp-Barclay, the firm still manufactures its famous Florida Water. 

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/05/parting-brooklyn-curtain-imogene-c-fales.html