Quietly Moving the Earth-Women in the Garden-Caroline Seymour Severance (1820-1914)
Women's History Month
Looking back on this series, I could have called it Movers and Shakers, Women Shift the Plants, oh, wait, the Planets. Yes, there are the gardens, created and preserved but the gardens become the metaphor for blooming in life, a metaphor for working toward the greater common good, making change, making "good trouble," as John Lewis would say.
I first heard about Caroline Seymour Severance when my business partner of 20 years and dear friend received a family tree. We were in the
Bel Aire Hotel in Beverly Hills having a something in that wonderful, pre-restored, vintage, swanky bar. We were discussing her ancestors. One side of her family usually got more chatter...Mayflower travelers, Boston then Martha's Vineyard then Princeton...the first settlers of New England with legion stories told by legion story tellers. But the other side of the family seemed not less, just quieter.
There is a moment when the 100 year span of relations who come before us become an integral part of our bone marrow. 100 years before my pal was born, her triple great granny was doing some radical earth shaking that would 1) create a space for women to discuss issues of social justice 2) organize groups of women in "clubs" that worked and continue to work for the greater common good in light of race, children's rights, women's shelter, early education and food insecurity and 3) secure the Women's Vote in California before 1919, in fact, in 1911. She was and will always be, Triple Great.
Triple great granny is none other than Caroline Maria Seymour Severance and yes, that would be a drum roll, to say the least. I step ahead to mention that much of Caroline's work was achieved in Los Angeles, California, my home town, but that will come later.
She married into a family of abolitionists in 1840, at the age of 20. Slavery is legal. It is 20 long years before the Civil War, longer, if you are working in the cotton fields of the South. Serverance and her husband lived in Cleveland, Ohio, above the Mason-Dixon line. (Consider the Missouri Compromise in 1820. This legislation admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a non-slave state at the same time, so as not to upset the balance between slave and free states in the nation. It also outlawed slavery above the 36º 30' latitude line in the remainder of the Louisiana Territory. Ohio became a free state.) She is in the middle of the middle of the United States in the heart of turbulent times.
She became an abolitionist and suffragist. She founded the first club in New England and the first womens' club in Los Angeles. She viewed these organizations as vehicles for social reform and a bridge from the home to the public arena, she brought political awareness and support of suffrage to the club movement.
A club of women can be many things. It can be about good works and charities or gardening or guest speakers exploring the domestic frontier or civil rights. Clubs can be an ingenious mask and in the days of paternalism, the broader the range of activities in a club, the better. Out of these clubs, came women who "Moved the Earth."
When she married Theodoric C. Severance in 1840, they settled in Cleveland, Ohio. She quickly developed an interest in temperance, abolition, women’s rights, and other reform movements of the day, and she and her husband helped form the liberal Independent Christian Church. Severance also attended various women’s rights conventions, and in 1853 she presided over the first convention of the Ohio Woman’s Rights Association.
The Ohio Women's Convention at Salem met on April 19–20, 1850 in Salem, Ohio. About five hundred people attended. It met at the Second Baptist Church and the Friends (Quaker) Meeting House. Caroline was a part of their number.
I am awe struck to think that Caroline was in a central position, in the midst of the discussions on slavery, ten years before the Civil War. It is at this time, she met Sojourner Truth.
"While raising 5 children, Orson (who died in his first year,) James, Julia, Mark (my darling friend's ancestor,) and Pierre, she pondered the inferior legal status of women and became the first woman to lecture in Cleveland on women's suffrage. In 1851 she heard Sojourner Truth at a women's-rights convention in Akron." Caroline was seasoned and skilled by the time she and TC moved to the West....but not yet.
In 1855 Severance and her husband moved to Boston, where she found an intellectual atmosphere more to her liking. She became a frequent lecturer on abolitionism. In 1866 Severance joined Susan B. Anthony in organizing the American Equal Rights Association, and in 1867 she joined Lucretia Mott and others in forming the Free Religious Association.
Members of the New England Woman's Club, ca. 1870-1880. (Credit: Notman Photographic Co., Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University) I do not have the cast of characters for this photo but if you look carefully, I believe that Caroline is dead center in a white shawl.
The Women's Club would be involved in all issues, not excluding politics, but not with an exclusively political agenda. When Lucy Stone chided Caroline for abandoning the cause of women's suffrage, she replied that her new club would serve the cause of suffrage in the end. She had a game plan and, my, she did have game.
But, perhaps tired of the squabbling in the East, and happy that her New England Women's Club was on firm footing, she left New England behind her.
In 1875, following the lead of their two older sons, T C and Caroline moved to California. They settled in the dusty frontier town of Los Angeles, where T C retired from banking to be a gentleman farmer on a few acres of land on the "outskirts of the city." Strange to think that at this time, Adams Blvd. was considered to be the outskirts.
Together, they founded the Unitarian Church of Los Angeles in 1877, which continues to this day to fight for social justice and provide sanctuary for the dispossessed. It remains an important spiritual center in the city.
"The church was founded by Los Angeles’s famous suffragette, Caroline Severance, in 1877. The Los Angeles Times described Severance as an “abolitionist, socialist, outspoken agitator and quiet instigator.” She founded the Friday Morning Club, L.A.’s first women’s political club; the LA public library, and California’s first city's Free Kindergarten Association.
In the photo below, you will find, from left to right...
Charlotte Wills, Caroline Severance, Susan B. Anthony and Rebecca Spring, taken in Los Angeles in 1905
Her home is referred to as "El Nido", or, The Nest. The house is all but obscured by the trees and ivy.
Streetscape. Horizontal photography.
The following photos of Adams, later West Adams Blvd gives 19th century central Los Angeles a context that is hard to imagine.
It was in this atmosphere that the Severance family opened their home meetings addressing social justice. Known as the “Mother of Clubs,” Caroline founded numerous organizations to advance women’s rights and civic engagement. By 1905, you have to imagine that these ladies came in carriages or in Model A's, the proto-type invention of Henry Ford. The ladies would be driven to the residence, along a drive of the robust landscape plantings that graced Caroline's gardens on 806 Adams Boulevard, Los Angeles.
(Left) Portrait of Madame Caroline Severance, founder and first president of the Friday Morning Club. (Right) Exterior view of the Friday Morning Club building at 940 Figueroa Street.
In 1878 Caroline founded the city's first Women's Club, the Friday Morning Club, one of the most successful of the American Women's Clubs. In 1885 the Women's Club.
Group laying the cornerstone of the Friday Morning Club building at 940 South Figueroa Street on September 14, 1899. Mrs. Caroline Severance
From the beginning, the Friday Morning Club, under the leadership of Mrs. Severance, was in the forefront of the battle for women's suffrage. The Club library contains correspondence between Mrs. Severance and Susan B. Anthony, dated 1900 and 1901. The letters were found in the house shortly before it was demolished.
Over the years Caroline Severance was active in virtually every social justice organization in Los Angeles, culminating in her involvement in Christian Socialism and the Union Reform League, which advocated many Progressive reforms. But she never lost interest in the cause of woman suffrage. She was active in the first attempt to pass a California Suffrage Amendment in 1895, which ended in defeat. Undeterred, California suffragists regrouped, and in a dazzling example of grass roots political power, mounted a new campaign which ended in the passage of the California Woman Suffrage Amendment on October 11, 1911. Drop the mike.
In her 90's by this time, Caroline Severance had not campaigned actively, but contributed speeches and other writing, and was honored by the suffragists as a heroine of the cause. She was quoted widely in the papers and honored by a personal delegation of registrars who came to her home on October 18 to register her as a voter.
When suffrage was achieved in California in 1911, Mrs. Severance, at the age of 91, was honored by being the first woman to register in Los Angeles. This stirred my heart. States adapted suffrage at different times. California was a forerunner in 1911, due to the tireless work of Katherine Young's Triple Great Granny. On November 5, 1912, at 92 years of age, Severance voted in the 1912 Presidential election between Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, after fighting for the right to vote for more than 60 years. Quoted in the newspaper, she said that the experience had made her “feel like a girl again!.” Here is to you, Triple Great Granny...100 years later, an African American President was re-elected to office. 104 years later, the first woman would run for President. Caroline Severance's life was a radiant constant, a North star, with a message as current and relevant today as it was on the day she voted for the first time.
What a woman!!!