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Home : Quarterly Archives : Volume 33 |
Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society |
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Source: April 1995 Volume 33 Number 2, Pages 71–76 Planning a Museum Exhibit: Women and Reform in Chester County This year marks the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th amendment giving women across the United States the right to vote. My presentation today will be about an upcoming exhibit at the Chester County Historical Society in recognition of this anniversary. The name of the exhibition is "Do Everything: Women and Reform in Chester County". The exhibition will open at the end of September 1995 and will close at the end of May in 1996, and will be part of the Chester County Historical Society's observance of the 75th anniversary of woman suffrage. It is also part of the Pennsylvania Humanities Council's project called "Raising Our Sites", a project involving thirteen historical organizations across the state to increase the recognition of women's history in their exhibitions and public programs. The P.H.C. awarded us an outright grant of $6,000 for the exhibit, and the possiibility of an additional $6,000 if we can raise $10,000 towards it ourselves. We initially began planning the exhibition four or five years ago. At that time I mentioned to Katherine Krile, who is assistant curator for the Society, that the Historical Society really should do something on women's organizations for the anniversary of woman suffrage. We started out by looking at women's organizations in general in Chester County in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and it soon became obvious that there were so many organizations and so many different projects that we would have to narrow the focus of the exhibition. So we decided to zero in on the reform activities of women in Chester County: what the exhibition will do is show women's role in reform in Chester County from the mid-19th century to the Depression. There are three curators for the exhibition: myself, Katherine Krile, and William R. Meltzer, who is a doctoral candidate at Temple University and is working with us as our local scholar. The three of us are working together. We divided up the responsibilities. I am overseeing the project, administering the grants, and doing some of the research, Meltzer is doing most of the research, and Krile is working with the objects and artifacts from our collections. The title "Do Everything" stems from the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, or W.C.T.U. Frances Willard, who was a long-time leader of the National W.C.T.U., wanted to expand the organization's concerns from focusing solely on temperance to a greater variety of social causes. What she wanted to do, she said, was to expand the focus on temperance to a sweeping array of social concerns, what she called "women's mighty realm of philanthropy". We are going to start the exhibition by looking at the background of women's reform activities. This will include looking at abolition and the involvement of women in the anti-slavery movement, and also the Women's Rights Convention that was held in West Chester in 1852 at Horticultural Hall. (Horticultural Hall is now a part of The History Center of the Chester County Historical Society, and will be the location of the exhibit when it opens in September.) We will also look at the role of the Longwood Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends, and women's involvement there. The exhibition is going to focus on three reform movements, suffrage, temperance, and children's aid. There is a great deal of interaction and overlap among these three movements, between their activities, the types of approaches that they took, their rhetoric, and also in their membership. Many women were involved in two, or in all three, of these movements. Women were viewed as "a moral force", and by being able to vote, it was thought, they would improve society. An example of this is found in a writing on temperance that was published in Philadelphia in 1856. The author, Carolo Emilio, made these observations about the role played by women in the fight for temperance: "If the Almighty has given men a stronger intellect, he has gifted women with a purer mind. The heart of one is engrossed by the cares of material interest, that of the other is void of selfish thought; noble in her instinct, she does by impulse what the other does by reason; she sees nothing but the object to be accomplished. It is to her our appeal is made � to her noble soul; let her be the angel of mercy to spread joy in desolate homes, and the blessings of the mother will attend her path; in the inspirations of her heart, she may find the means to work to the end of salvation which the colder nature of man would neglect." There was a very common belief at that time that women would vote for reform. Much of the support for woman suffrage stemmed from the thought that women voters would lead the way to reform, that prohibition would follow automatically after women were granted the vote. (This belief, of course, also led to strong opposition to woman suffrage by the liquor interests. But as it worked out, prohibition was in fact enacted before woman suffrage, and once prohibition was enacted, the opposition of the liquor industry fell off sharply.) But at the same time, one of the things that we want to look at in the exhibition -- and one of the things we want to stress -- is to show that women were not a monolithic bloc. Not all women advocated prohibition, just as not all women advocated suffrage. The supporters of one movement did not automatically support the others, although, as I mentioned, for the most part there was a great deal of overlap. Some of the organizations that we will be taking a look at are the Chester County Equal Suffrage Society, which was formed in 1891, and its local affiliates; the Chester County Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which was formed in 1884, and its local affiliates; the Good Templars, which was an organization that pre-dated the W.C.T.U. and had a membership made up of both men and women; the non-partisan Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which came into being when the national W.C.T.U. endorsed political candidates; and also the No-License Committee, which was an organization made up primarily of men who favored prohibition but who distanced themselves from the suffrage issue for political reasons. We will also be looking at the Chester County Children's Aid Society, which was formed in 1884 and was a forerunner to the county department of Children, Youth, and Families. What the Children's Aid Society did was to take children who were viewed as poor or orphans or impoverished children and place them into private homes. (What we are talking about is an early version of foster care.) One of the documents we will be using in this connection is a letter that was written to Sallie P. Marshall in Hamorton, dated November 9th in 1883, from Fanny B. Ames, who was concerned that the women of Chester County would not handle the children's issues properly, and warned against hand- ling them in the same way Philadelphia had. As of 1884, the county directors of the poor were required "to separate children from the general population in the county poor house", and Ames wrote to Marshall, "...I hear that they [the directors of the poor] propose starting an institution at Kennett Square or elsewhere in which to put the destitute children that come to their care. Now, this is [sic] has been proved by the experience of New York & Mass. & here in Phila. to be so far from the best way of caring for children, having in fact only the effect of creating all the pauperizing & stultifying effect of the Almshouse itself, that I do hope you will not follow any such path in Chester Co. "What would be a good thing for you to do, would be to form a local committee of women of your county who would supervise the putting of these children into good families, & who would keep a visiting oversight of them when so placed. ..." So you can see that even in 1884 they were concerned about the idea that Chester County was establishing an orphanage. One of the other things we want to do in the exhibit is to highlight the work done by several individual women. We are going to be looking at the work of Elizabeth B. Passmore, Deborah Pennock, and Martha Thomas. These three women are just the ones we have selected so far. Looking at examples of some of the materials we are going to use, in addition to the letter to Sallie Marshall, we have banners, we have buttons, we have quilts -- we have a temperance quilt and, I believe, an abolition quilt in our collection -- we even have hair, a lock of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's hair that was collected by somebody at a suffrage convention. We are also going to be looking at the role music played in reform activities. There were a great number of suffrage songs, both for and against the ballot for women. Some samples that we will be using are taken from a W.C.T.U. publication, "Pennsylvania Suffrage Songs", that was distributed by the Equal Suffrage Association. (I am not going to sing them, although they are verses written to be sung to airs that were popular at that time and which everyone could sing.) GIVE THE BALLOT TO THE MOTHERS (Tune - "Battle Hymn of the Republic")
From the cottage and the palace comes a mighty moving throng; Chorus.
Give the ballot to the mothers,
The mothers rock the cradle and the mothers rule the world, Chorus. Or, LET THE LASSIES TRY (Tune - "Comin' Through the Rye")
If a lassie wants the ballot Chorus.
Every laddie has the franchise,
If a lassie works for wages, Chorus. Another thing we are going to be looking at are the memorabilia from the 1915 campaign, at which time Pennsylvania held a referendum on woman suffrage to see whether women in Pennsylvania should be given the vote. Although the referendum failed state-wide, it was supported by a majority of the all-male voters in Chester County. (It also passed in Tredyffrin, b a 281 to 234 vote, but was defeated in Easttown by two votes, 148 to 150. One of the interesting aspects of this campaign was the "Justice Bell". It was the brain-child of Katherine Ruschenberger, who was a woman from Strafford. She had a replica of the Liberty Bell forged, but the clapper was chained and the bell was not to be rung until women got the vote. The bell was taken on tour all over Pennsylvania, accompanied by suffrage speakers. I recently found out that the "Justice Bell" is now at Valley Forge Park, and we are hopeful that the League of Women Voters will be successful in its plan to take it out on tour again this summer to recreate the original tour and that we will have a stop in West Chester, which was the last stop in the tour in 1915. In the exhibition we will also be using letters and diaries, convention programs, and, as I mentioned, banners and buttons. We would also like to set up several tableaux with mannequins, perhaps showing women protesting outside of a saloon or in a suffrage march. Just to show that not everybody was totally engrossed or committed to the idea of reform, we are also going to come up with some "anti" material and some of the humorous attacks. For example, there was a booklet that came out in 1919 called "The Sweet Dry and Dry", which included this poem that was entitled "Reformers":
Reformers, they are noble men,
They never drink or smoke or cuss.
They never sing, they never smile, Finally, what we want to do is to bring some of these issues into the present, to show how some of the rhetoric and concepts used by these women and organizations are being continued still today. There are obvious parallels between the fight for and against woman suffrage and the fight for and against the equal rights amendment. In the anti-drug and drunk driving campaigns you can see carryovers from the temperance movement. (In some ways, there really are no new issues.) The same thing is true with regard to the care of dependent children. We will also be holding several public programs in conjunction with the exhibition. There will be a one-woman play about Sojourner Truth. We are also having Edith Mayo, who is a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, come up to give us a slide presentation on two exhibits that she worked on, one of them called "Parlor to Politics", which is on women and reform at the national level. She also revamped the gallery on First Ladies and made it more relevant. One of the things I'd like to ask you as members of the Tredyffrin Easttown History Club to do is to give us your ideas on what you hope will be included in the exhibit. Are there certain things you would like to see in the exhibition? Are there certain questions that you have about woman suffrage or other reform movements? Were there local activities that you are aware of, local women who were involved in the reform movement? What are the issues that you would like us to address? We are still in the formative stage of the exhibition. We are wrapping up the research work and will start developing the labels and working with the designer and our consultants over the next few months. But we would like some feedback. And we hope to see you all at The History Center in late September. |
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