"Hobart and theWomen's Suffrage Debate"

Elizabeth Smith Miller's scrapbooks help trace connections, at the turn of the century, between Geneva's vibrant women's-rights community and its neighboring liberal arts college.

By George Lowery and Dana Cooke

Late in February 1909, the Rev. Joseph Alexander Leighton, Hobart College's chaplain, pastor, and professor of philosophy and psychology, delivered an address on "The Inexpediency of Women's Suffrage" to the Geneva Political Equality Club.

"Universal manhood suffrage was established in this country under the influence of the mistaken theory of natural rights, and led to giving suffrage to the emancipated Negroes," Leighton told the club. "Both steps were mistakes."

A Canadian, Leighton recalled his naturalization in the company of two Italians "who did not know whether this republic was a monarchy or a republic, or who was king or president."

Women's legal rights, he said, were better protected today in the United States than almost anywhere else, and in this respect women had the advantage over men: A wife was not responsible for her husband's debts, but a husband was for his wife's.

Summing up, Leighton said, "I deem it inexpedient to admit all women to the suffrage because we are suffering now in this country from the indiscriminate exercise of the suffrage by all kinds of men, including criminals and vicious voters who can be bought. . . .

"I do not believe that to multiply the number of our voters by two, to admit all kinds of women to the franchise, will help deliver us from any of the evils from which we are suffering. I suppose there are not as many women criminals as men, but probably there are as many who could be bought, as many ignorant, many more who are indifferent. . . ."

Perhaps, in some sense, Leighton was correct that the ranks of women harbored as much ignorance and indifference as the ranks of men. Eventually, though, America saw fit to offer the vote to both genders, equally tolerant of a man's or a woman's capacity for ignorance and indifference.

Today, with the advantage of historic hindsight, we see Professor Leighton — esteemed member of the Hobart College faculty and ordained cleric of the Episcopalian faith — landing on the wrong side of the women's suffrage issue. Quaintly, charmingly, and tragically wrong.

It's important to remember the prejudices provided to Rev. Leighton by the times in which he lived. It may be unsympathetic to judge him for his short-sightedness. Or it may not. That depends on your perspective. But at least we can say this: Leighton weighed in. He joined the debate.

Accounts of Leighton's address appear in the personal scrapbooks of Elizabeth Smith Miller — noted women's rights advocate, long-time Genevan, and one of the people credited with shaping William Smith's plans for a women's college here. Miller's scrapbooks contain voluminous press clippings, programs from the Political Equality Club and national organizations, Miller's correspondence lobbying politicians from the local level to Theodore Roosevelt for suffrage, and artifacts such as women's rights conventions ribbons and buttons.

The scrapbooks have lain in the Library of Congress for almost 50 years, though it's not apparent that anyone at the Colleges knew of them until last year, when Jacqueline Coleburn '79, rare book specialist at the library, contacted Alumnae Relations.

We decided to explore the scrapbooks, not to fill out further the story of William Smith College's founding — a story that has been told — but instead for evidence of an earlier involvement by Hobart faculty members, such as Leighton, in the intellectual debate revolving around Miller. After all, by today's standards, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that Hobart's intellectual community intersected with the robust debates on social issues that Miller hosted?

Consulting the scrapbooks, as well as the relevant holdings of the Geneva Historical Society and Colleges archives, we discovered that such intersections were a little less common than we'd suspected. We also discovered that, on occasion, the presumably enlightened faculty of a reputedly progressive college was sometimes, but not always, forward-thinking where women's suffrage was concerned.

As most Americans know, the women's suffrage movement was launched by the first Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, a few miles down the road from Geneva, in 1848. Fifty years later, the ongoing attention paid to that topic in this region was due more directly to Geneva residents Elizabeth Smith Miller and her daughter, Anne Fitzhugh Miller. Wealthy, socially prominent residents of a lakefront estate called Lochland, the Millers took their responsibilities as leading citizens seriously. The elder Miller's father, Gerrit Smith, a prominent abolitionist landowner and Congressman, raised Elizabeth in a house that became a station on the Underground Railroad.

"Equality was a very meaningful word to the Millers," says Robert A. Huff, professor emeritus of history, who has studied the Millers and wrote the definitive study of their activities, published in October 1994 by the New York State Historical Association. "They had a very serious attitude toward life as people of means, a sort of noblesse oblige. They were serious in a very good sense."

Elizabeth Smith Miller and her daughter, Anne, were the guiding spirits of the Geneva Political Equality Club, which focused on various issues of the day, but women's suffrage chiefly. The Millers connections attracted Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Elizabeth's cousin), Susan B. Anthony, Woman's Journal editors Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell, Carrie Chapman Catt, the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, and the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Speakers traveled to Geneva from England (including the notoriously radical Pankhursts) and even from Chile.

"It was a period of increasing interest in women's suffrage and activities in favor of women's suffrage," says Professor Huff. "Across America, there was this kind of ferment. Few small cities of Geneva's size had such an active club, so Geneva was unusual in its capability to attract so many national leaders."

Regardless of one's politics, few refused invitations to significant occasions at Lochland. It is a measure of the highly civilized level of discourse and open-minded political climate of the era that the Rev. Leighton was invited to address an organization that also brought virtually every leader of the national women's rights movement to town.

"The present-day perception of college faculties being very liberal does not necessarily apply to the Hobart faculty at that time," says Huff. "There was a good deal of conservatism here."

Before Leighton, before the Political Equality Club, and, in fact, before the Miller scrapbooks first entries, another Hobart "anti" was President Eliphalet Nott Potter, who tangled with Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the Millers Lochland estate in 1893. (Record of this can be found at the Geneva Historical Society.) Noting that most Genevans she encountered were enthusiastically pro-suffrage, Stanton discussed Potter with the New York Sun. "He did not believe in woman suffrage," she said, "and he didn't want others to believe in it."

After witnessing Potter arguing against the right to vote with a woman guest, Stanton quickly converted the woman to her side.

In fairness, many of the faculty members who addressed the Geneva Political Equality Club in later years seem to have supported the idea of women's rights generally, if not the issue of women's suffrage specifically. In their official dealings with the Club, they wer more likely to take an academician's apolitical tack on the topic, offering up the perspectives of history, theology, and ancient philosophy on the place of women in society.

The scrapbooks themselves pick up in 1897, when the Millers arranged for the New York StateWoman Suffrage Association to hold its convention in Geneva. They record the invocation offered to this convention by Potter's successor, President Rev. Robert Ellis Jones. In the prayer, Jones proves himself a more forward-looking clergyman:

"As Lord Jesus Christ, who hanging upon the cross didst say to thy Disciple, Behold thy mother, we pray thee to bless all efforts for the realization of full and perfect womanhood.

"Encourage all those who lead the way in needful reforms. Beat down bigotry, ignorance and prejudice. Make even-handed justice to prevail between man and woman. Give us thy compassion for the fallen, and thy faith that right shall triumph at the last. Hasten the time when male and female, bond and free, shall be coequal in thy established kingdom.

"In thine own name we ask it. Amen."

The Geneva Political Equality Club was formed (by Anne Miller) less than one month after this convention, "with fifty charter members, men and women of public spirit and progressive principles." The elder Miller was honorary president, her daughter president. Dues were 50 cents per year. The club held monthly meetings, at which typically a guest gave an address.

The Hobart faculty of the era was not large; in 1905-06, for example, it numbered 16. Between 1897 and 1911, at least six of Hobart's professors addressed Political Equality Club meetings.

Francis Philip Nash, Hobart professor of Latin language and literature, spoke on "The True Basis of Political Representation." "In pure theory," he noted, "every human being is equally entitled to choose the government by which he or she is to be ruled." Employing a variety of classical references, he noted that this was a maxim laid down as early as the 3rd or 4th century B.C., by Zeno, founder of the Stoic school of philosophy.

John Muirheid, assistant professor of rhetoric, elocution, and English, spoke in March 1907 on "Women in Shakespeare," drawing parallels between Shakespeare's treatment of "all classes of women, the best and the worst," and the suffrage movement.

Joseph Hetherington McDaniels, professor of Greek language and literature, spoke on "The Countrywomen of Sappho and Her Role in Social Progress and the History of Romantic Sentiment." According to the newspaper report, he dwelled at length on women's influence on their husbands, illustrated by an account of the domestic life of Greek women, 44 B.C. to present.

What opinions on the suffrage debate did these faculty members harbor? The loftily academic nature of the titles gives little indication and, sadly, the scrapbooks contain no detail on the nature of the professors remarks.

It may be, in fact, that the faculty members had no take on the political debate, and that an academic perspective was the only one they brought. Whereas faculty members today often seek to connect timeless knowledge to current affairs, the academic ethos of a century ago was quite different. Perhaps classical knowledge, and those expert in it, were seen as somehow above the ephemeral events of the day.

The only other evidence we have is a memorial tribute to Elizabeth Smith Miller that Professor McDaniels made in 1911, following her death. In this tribute (found in the Colleges archives), McDaniels, who socialized with the Millers for years, noted "she not only tolerated but she approved when I declined to sign a petition, full of signatures, which embodied her aspirations. She respected my convictions, although she did not share them."

The third Hobart president to emerge in the history of the Political Equality Club was the Rev. Langdon C. Stewardson, who succeeded Jones in 1902. Clara H. Stewardson, the president's wife, was the only member of the College community with ongoing involvement in the club; her name is evident throughout the scrapbooks. For several years, she chaired the club's standing Industrial Committee. A few of the club's monthly meetings were held at the Stewardsons home.

President Stewardson himself expressed reservations about whether or not women would significantly enhance their position in society by winning the right to vote. Nonetheless, he is listed as an associate member in Political Equality Club programs.

In his 1907 address to the club on its tenth anniversary, Stewardson invoked the memory of the College's most famous alumna.

"In the year 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell received a degree of Doctor of Medicine from Hobart College, Geneva, being the first woman to achieve the distinction of this degree. It is, therefore, fitting that as a representative of Hobart College I should be present on this platform tonight and add my welcome felicitations to those of my fellow townsmen."

The women's movement, Stewardson noted, "has produced lawyers and physicians and professors and investigators. It has built . . . Radcliffe and Barnard, Bryn Mawr and Wells and is building now the walls of the William Smith College in connection with Hobart. . . . Women have the same intellectual and moral powers as men and naturally these powers and capabilities claim for themselves a theatre of action. . . .

"The suppression of these faculties or what is the same thing — the confinement of them within certain prescribed and conventional areas — means dissatisfaction, pain, distress, ineffectiveness. . . It is man's part, therefore, to welcome and further this awakening consciousness of power and function which the women of the world are displaying. The constituted order of conventional society has too long helped her to bury her talent in a napkin."

This is the only evidence we have of Stewardson's interaction with the Political Equality Club. Any student of Colleges history knows, however, that the connection proved providential.

Sometime around the turn of the century, William Smith, a wealthy Geneva nurseryman of advanced years, also became part of the Millers hospitable high culture. The Millers gatherings brought William Smith into contact with people keenly interested in ideas and improving the common weal. He saw in Elizabeth Smith Miller "a model of what the ideal woman might be: active, intelligent, contributing to the community," Professor Huff has written. " — and an excellent cook to boot!"

Smith also shared the Millers interests in spiritualism and improving the status of women. He lent his opera house for suffragist meetings — the 1897 state convention was headquartered there — was the patient of a female doctor, and began to focus on the idea of putting his considerable resources to good use by founding a college for women. Ultimately, of course, that was William Smith College. In a letter informing Hobart alumni of this development, Stewardson explained, "The educational plan adopted by the Trustees is . . . that of the co-ordinate instruction of men and women and is to be clearly distinguished from what is commonly called co-education."

And so, out of the otherwise sporadic, nebulous legacy of Hobart College's involvement in the Geneva Political Equality Club and the intellectual community of Elizabeth Smith Miller grew this most important of legacies.

Curiously, the scrapbooks contain sparse notice of the College's founding. The elder Miller, advanced in years, seems to have decreased her involvement in local activities; the later scrapbooks emphasize national news.

But there are a few relevant artifacts: For Emmeline Pankhurst's 1909 address to the Political Equality Club, held at the Smith Opera House, Elizabeth Smith Miller bought tickets for the young women of William Smith College. The Geneva paper noted, "The college girls are very enthusiastic over the meeting and have signiied their intention of decorating their loges with their college colors, green and white."

And at the 1909 cornerstone-laying of William Smith College's Miller House, named in honor of Elizabeth Smith Miller, the work, values, and ideals of a community of women and men found permanent expression. On that occasion Anne Miller wrote a note to Stewardson, preserved in the scrapbooks:

"My mother . . . is full of sympathy with the ideals, concerning the education of women, held by her friend and townsman Mr. Wm. Smith, and is confident that the institution which he has founded will prove its great value in developing the individual capabilities of its students . . . she believes that the young women of the Wm. Smith College will make their training in social science of noble use in social service and thus render a lasting benefit to the whole community."

The larger Geneva community never fell into lockstep acceptance of the Millers ideas by dint of their social position. Most Genevans voted against New York's state suffrage amendment in 1915.

Rev. Leighton's 1909 talk to the Political Equality Club inspired the formation of an anti-suffrage league in Geneva, consisting entirely of women. The local papers, whose tone was largely pro-suffrage, pre-dicted "lively debates next winter, and we know they will all be conducted in the proper spirit, to show the greatest good to the greatest number, nothing acrimonious."

Women's right to vote would be won with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Neither of the Millers lived to see it. Elizabeth died in 1911, daughter Anne only a few months later.

But their scrapbooks leave a record of the vigorous intellectual engagement that surrounded them. And there is record, too, of the involvement of nearby Hobart College in that tradition — occasionally opinionated, more often reserved, usually academic in nature. If it was not the custom of the era for scholars to enter into social debate, it is nonetheless intriguing today to imagine those instances on which a 19th-century scholar of classical philosophy or rhetoric stood before a roomful of progressive 20th-century reformers, determined to usher society out of that past and into a different era.

George Lowery is a writer and editor in Camillus, N.Y. Dana Cooke is editor of The Pulteney St. Survey.

This article originally appeared in the Summer '97 issue of The Pulteney St. Survey. To request a copy, e-mail Susan Murad at cooke@hws.edu.

Also of Interest

Jackie Coleburn
The William Smith alumna who works at the Library of Congress describes how the Elizabeth Smith Miller scrapbooks came to our attention.

History
More about the Colleges' history, including the founding of William Smith College, growing out of the women's rights legacy.