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

Such separatism as the members instituted was part of Clisby's larger plan to bring women into the fold of a universal humanity. "The ideal of an association is that in which all true elements meet and find their place in the uses to which they subserve. Just so far as these fail to meet, just so far is there a lack of the perfect unitary idea, and just so far do we fall short of the divine ideal. In a complete association both men and women would be equally represented, now the twain are acting apart... Our present apartness, not separateness is the indispensable earnest of our future indissoluble union."25

It is interesting that a novel based remarkably closely on Clisby's life omits the Swedenborgian connection altogether and presents the Union's founder as something of a socialist feminist (although a churchgoer). The Australian novelist and journalist Shirley Darbyshire (pseudonym of Shirly Ruth Meynell) knew Clisby's last companion, Alice Callow, and may have known Clisby herself.26 The Henrietta (Harriet) of her Henrietta Condon,M.D. (1936) is a woman-identified woman who, inspired by the example of Brook Farm, organizes a commune in Melbourne, steadfastly refuses repeated proposals of marriage from a faithful suitor, and consistently opts for female companionship instead. She cuts her hair unfashionably short and dons mannish clothing.27 In her "Reminiscences," however, Clisby writes disapprovingly of defiant women, women hating society, living lives to shock this society; not immoral nor unmoral nor unrespectable women, but . living among themselves as they would, solitary or not solitary, married or single, dressing as they would, speaking and thinking as it pleased them, acting independently, holding on to personal rights without regard to their neighbor. I used to see many of these same women, young and old, in churches and meetings, invariably accompanied by papers which they opened loudly and read when anything was uttered that was not to their taste. They acted on the theory that they were sufficient to themselves and all else might go by them.28

Clisby may be alluding to suffragists or to militant dress reformers, or both. (Her fictional counterpart is an anti-suffragist. The real Clisby's views on suffrage are not known. The Union as an organization never got actively involved in the campaign for women's suffrage.) In any event, there were limits to Clisby's farsightedness and unconventionality.

The protagonist of Henrietta Condon, MD. is by and large a woman of the author's own time rather than of the nineteenth century. The nineteenth-century Clisby may have chosen women companions, but she was not a militant separatist. Clisby's Union depended heavily on men for its activities, and not only for financial backing.29 Men were on the advisory board from the beginning.

The Union's networking of necessity extended to both men and women. Alice Goldmark Brandeis was a Union member; her husband, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, already on his way to being one of the nation's foremost legal minds, gave a lecture in the series of "Talks on Law" which the WEIU held during 1882-83. Samuel Wells, the husband of Kate Gannett Wells, was the son of a Maine Supreme Court justice and state governor. Kate Gannett Wells, who had been a vice-president of the NEWC, served from 1879 to 1900 as head of the Union's Protective Committee. As early as 1878, this committee had begun to organize free legal consultations for women workers who had been defrauded of their wages, a service modeled on New York's Protective Union. Through her husband's connections, Kate Gannett Wells had access to the best legal advice. In 1897, Elizabeth Glendower Evans, known primarily for her championing of Sacco and Vanzetti, was chairing the Committee on Domestic Reform. Her committee supervised a placement bureau for domestic workers, and through its Domestic Reform League, organized the year before, attempted to regulate relations between employees and employers in domestic service. (In part, the Committee was attempting to recruit domestic workers away from the factory, which would help to solve the "servant problem" -- not one of the Union's more successful efforts.)3 Because of the friendship of Evans and her husband with Brandeis and his wife, it is not surprising to find Alice Brandeis on Evans's committee.