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 interlocking familial and social connections among the WEIU members helped to energize the organization and to move it forward. Mary Morton Kehew's maternal uncle, Marcus Morton (1819-91), a chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, was a distant relation of Abby Morton Diaz. Kehew's family tree of Mortons and Kimballs reached back to the seventeenth century. Her maternal grandfather, another Marcus Morton, had been a governor of Massachusetts. One of the benefits of this elite social background for both Kehew and Diaz was that each in her own way could break social rules and get away with it.4 Kehew, along with her sister, Hannah Parker Kimball, became involved in the labor movement. Abby Morton Diaz was introduced at an early age to anti-slavery meetings by her father. By the time she was twenty, she was living and teaching at Brook Farm, where she made a distinctly unconventional marriage to Manuel Diaz, variously described as Spanish or Cuban. The marriage seems to have broken up while Abby Morton Diaz was still young, for she was left to raise two young sons on her own. As an enormously popular writer, mainly of children's books, she seems to have supported herself and her family in somewhat straitened circumstances. The last year of her life, 1904, finds her still advertising a course of lectures in The Woman's Journal.41 At Brook Farm, Diaz met a young Englishwoman named Georgiana Bruce (later Kirby), who had worked as a governess in the home of the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett, Kate Gannett Wells' father. Two of Kate's cousins were also living at Brook Farm.42 Clisby entered this web of social and family ties as a complete outsider. Only a handful of activist Union women had a background that might approach hers in unconventionality. Mary Livermore, for example, had overridden the objections of her father to take a position as a tutor with a family in Virginia in 1839 and had worked for the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. But Livermore, Howe, Diaz, Ednah Dow Cheney and the other WEIU members who were prominent in abolitionist circles were nonetheless solidly rooted in the social milieu of elite Boston. Clisby, with her years in the Australian bush, her travels, her Swedenborgian faith and her career, brought to "organized womanhood," in the clubwomen's phrase, a trailblazing spirit that helped to shape an association with distinctly activist leanings and yet which did not fit neatly into a descriptive category.

Clisby's fragmentary "Reminiscences," are just about all that she left in the way of a personal record. We do not know the causes or nature of the illness that led her, in October 1878, to resign her position as president of the WEIU. The Annual Report of 1879 says only that her physicians advised her to "suspend all mental labor for the winter." The Board, however, was reluctant to accept her resignation, which its members succeeded in changing, instead, to a leave of absence. Under Clisby's leadership, the WEIU, at the end of its first year, could boast a membership that had grown to four hundred, public quarters that housed a reading room and library, a program of instruction, an Employment Bureau and other services for working women.