Founding mothers of social justice: The Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, 1877-1892

Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Summer 1999 by Harth, Erica

The NEWC's minutes for July 7, 1877, briefly mention that "Dr. Clisby had been allowed the use of the rooms one afternoon in June on business connected with the Sunday services."' Since 1872, Harriet Clisby, a graduate of the homeopathic New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, had been conducting "Sunday Meetings for Women," at her home. From these meetings she developed the WEIU. (The NEWC originated in the home of a much better known physician, Harriot Hunt.) Among the members of the Sunday discussion group were Caroline Severance, the NEWC's founding president, Julia Ward Howe and Howe's daughter, Julia Anagnos, both of whom were prominent in Severance's club. All would become members of the WEIU. Howe remained active in it for many years, although her first allegiance always remained the NEWC. Clisby's "business" of July 7th in the NEWC's quarters at 4 Park Street, which the Union would continue to use for three more years, seems to have been a financial committee meeting of the newly-formed WEIU, whose constitution had been adopted on June I th by a membership totaling some fifty-five women.

A "union" is not a club, a distinction of which Clisby was well aware. The NEWC mimicked the exclusive men's clubs to which many of the members' husbands belonged. Although its official historian, Julia Sprague (also a member of the WEI(U), somewhat defensively enumerates the association's good works, the NEWC was primarily a social club.8 Membership was by invitation only, and names proposed by current members had to be approved by the Board of Directors. It took only two opposing votes from the Board to blackball a candidate, resulting in what was decorously called "non-admission." The annual membership fee was $10 a year for the first year and $5 for every year thereafter; life membership cost $50.9 In contrast, membership in the WEIU was open to any woman who could pay the $1 annual fee; life membership was set at $25. Clisby saw the Union as a "union of all for the good of all," an expression that the WEIU adopted as its motto.lo Along with promoting spiritual solidarity among women, Clisby also set about consciously to democratize women's associations. The elite women who were her companions might fear admitting "any woman, high or low, rich or poor, moral or immoral," she said, but the doors of the Union, "must be wide open." She specified that in its egalitarian aspirations the WEIU was to be an organization appreciably different from the NEWC or the Boston YWCA, which had been organized in 1866. The Union, in its nonsectarian and cross-class aims, would serve to "break down barriers" among women."'

Clisby's concept of the Union was thus both practical and spiritual. As a self-described "working-woman" and a foreign-born resident, she was especially interested in improving the lives of women workers and immigrants. But she couched her goals in Transcendentalist language laced with the Swedenborgianism she had imbibed from her adolescence. The height of Transcendentalism as a social, intellectual, and cultural activity (its leaders resisted the label of "Transcendentalist" applied to them by the public) had passed before the Civil War and Clisby's arrival in the United States. But its influence continued to be felt, especially in Boston, where a number of WEIU members had personal ties to such leading lights as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, James Freeman Clarke, Theodore Parker, and Henry David Thoreau. Bronson Alcott's daughter, Louisa May Alcott, was for a time a member of the Union, as was the wife of James Freeman Clarke. Ednah Dow Cheney, an animating spirit of the early Union, had attended Margaret Fuller's "Conversations" during the 1840s, when she met Emerson, Parker and Bronson Alcott. In the 1870s and 1880s, she lectured at Alcott's Concord School of Philosophy. Abby Morton Diaz, the Union's second president, had lived and taught at Brook Farm from 1842 to 1847. "For many years," Clisby recalled in her "Reminiscences," speaking a little like a member of the Transcendentalist circle, "I had dreamed the ideal dream of seeing at work an Institution wherein the needs of all classes of women would be met, and which should be held together by the bonds of a love whose effects would be shown in mutual service and healthy co-operative activities." She wanted a "union -- a woman's rallying point." The democratic principle of open admission for all women would demonstrate that "our lesser lives hold the power of unconsciously merging themselves into a wider and grander and more universal life, a life that gives us a truer and firmer hold on humanity and that helps us to live.... more in harmony with that wondrous ineffable Life which is the Life of our Life."'2