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

From the outset, the Union aimed to meet the needs of both middleclass and poor women. Clisby remarked on the number of "sad and solitary" women whom she had met both in New York and Boston, not only "in the poorer and hard-toiling ranks of life," but also "among women living in affluence and ease," where "there was equally a dearth in their lives that raised in their minds a discontent, a restlessness of purpose, with a stolid indifference that, in many cases led to serious nervous and other maladies which the Doctor was supposed .... to cure."20 The first annual report (1890) of New York's College Settlement, run by college women, expresses a similar idea of mutual aid: "We do not look upon our work as done by one class of society for another class of society; not as up-town residents, nor from the height of proud superiority to our fellowmen in any regard do we go down to labor in the tenement-house district. All sorts and conditions of men are brought into contact in the Neighborhood Guild. All both give and receive; all are both teachers and taught; and the lesson for all is the brotherhood of man."21

In seeking the "educational, industrial and social advancement of women," as its Constitution specified, the Union distanced itself from both men's and women's benevolent associations. Its founding generation perceived that middle-class women, excluded by their gender from the control of finances and other prerogatives of power, were not positioned to support programs of moral uplift such as those instituted by male philanthropists. All women - middle-class and poor alike -- they reasoned, needed to be trained to meet men on an equal basis. Clisby put it in Swedenborgian terms:

The Heavenly Father has entrusted the laws of His creation to both objects of His love, the man and the woman, demanding of them no one-sided man rule, but a conjoint application of man and woman working together in all those offices, and under those laws that He Himself has created for the perfection of the race through the individual and the family. Women, far from being indifferent to what is going on around them like so many sticks and stones, should feel that they have an interest in everything in the world equally with men.... 22

In the early WEIU, then, the project of self-improvement was closely bound up with that of community-improvement. 23 The founders wanted to give middle-class members the opportunity both to develop their own talents and capabilities and in the process to make their contribution to the community at large. The leaders' eagerness to promote the interests of women can make them sound like radical separatists of the 1960s. Replaced in their own time, they speak a language that derives in part from the Union's desire to train women for participation and leadership in civic life, in part from Clisby's spiritual vision.

The Union, unlike the NEWC, began by excluding men from participation. In the NEWC, men were from the beginning admitted as associate members; although the WEIU gave honorary membership to male donors from its founding, men could not become associate members until 1903. In the early days of Clisby's "Sunday Meetings for Women," both men and women were invited as speakers. In 1874, the members decided that meetings should be restricted to women. When the meetings were incorporated into the Union's agenda under the auspices of the Committee on Moral and Spiritual Development, the question of male participation again came up. The committee members unanimously decided to continue to exclude men. "They felt that woman, by her organization, comes into near relation to the Infinite, and is receptive, through her spirituality, of divine truth; that she was well calculated to be the teacher to lead her sisters into that spiritual unfolding that comes to all from true seeking." By excluding men, moreover, the committee did not risk running out of speakers. Its roster for 1880 reads like a roll call of the nation's leading women lecturers: Kate Gannett Wells, Ednah Dow Cheney, Lucia Peabody, Julia Ward Howe, and Mary A. Livermore, all of whom were both NEWC and WEIU members.24