L.A.’s Leading, Now Forgotten, Suffragette

Of all the fabled 19th century women on whose shoulders the suffrage movement can stand, perhaps none was more famous in her own time and place--nor more quickly forgotten--than Caroline Severance.

Abolitionist, socialist, outspoken agitator and quiet instigator, Severance achieved a string of “firsts” that include founding the Friday Morning Club, L.A.’s first women’s political club; the city’s first Unitarian Church, city library and juvenile court; and California’s first kindergarten.

She came to adulthood at a time when the washtub, water pump and cooking stove were the center of most women’s lives. She worked with all those things, married a successful banker and had five children.

But she also led a voter registration drive that made Angeleno women a surprisingly influential force in the post-Victorian era. Her efforts prompted the men of California to give women the vote in regional and state elections nine years before nationwide suffrage was instituted in 1920.

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And although she did not cast a ballot until she was 91, she could look back on a life of service to her community and her gender.

When she invited the wife of renowned black scientist Booker T. Washington to a club meeting, she challenged even her friends and fellow suffragists--asking why they invited Mexican women into their homes but not black women.

In turn-of-the-century Los Angeles, when women were excluded from politics and policymaking, they generally crusaded for equality through such genteel means as clubs and church groups.

But Severance, driven by a street-level sense of right and wrong reinforced by her religious faith, organized her band of crusaders and formed the nucleus of the Friday Morning Club, whose pursuits included political issues, primarily women’s rights.

For this, she was jeered at in the streets and prayed for in the pulpit. A newspaper editorial ridiculed her, claiming that “virtue and intellect are incompatible in women.”

Among her friends were women who, shockingly, wore bloomers and rode astride. Nothing stopped this remarkable pioneer woman of Irish-Dutch descent; she was a natural-born leader who believed that all things were possible for women if they organized.

Caroline Seymour was born in New York in 1820, the oldest of five children whose family believed strongly in education. At 20, after her grades earned her valedictorian honors from Miss Record’s Female Seminary, she began teaching and married Theodoric Severance. Staunch abolitionists, they later moved to Boston and devoted themselves to many reform movements.

In 1853, after writing a paper on women’s rights, she not only gained the attention of the press, but was invited to speak before the all-male Cleveland Mercantile Library Assn. and the Ohio state Senate. Refined women of the time did not speak in public, and the boldness of her words--combined with the diplomatic graciousness of her delivery--was both outrageously untraditional and captivating, especially in front of men.

Her reputation became such that she once filled in for an ailing Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the nation’s leading suffragists, speaking to a crowd of several hundred. Her reputation grew when in 1868 Severance organized what would become the International Federation of Women’s Clubs.

After arriving in Los Angeles in 1875, intending to raise oranges with their son, the Severances bought 10 acres along West Adams Boulevard and built their home, El Nido, the nest, where a decade later members of the Unitarian Church would first worship.

At age 55, Severance opened the door for the women’s suffrage movement in Los Angeles.

She had already drafted an equal rights resolution, which Susan B. Anthony proposed to the U.S. Senate in 1878. Almost 20 years later, in 1896, women’s statewide suffrage was placed on the California ballot, but the amendment failed. Women would have to wait 15 years more, until the same measure passed in 1911.

So at 91, the grande dame of clubs, who had spent a lifetime goading and irritating in the name of social justice, was finally carried “in a queenly procession,” according to newspaper accounts, to the county registrar’s office. According to some records, she was among the city’s first registered female voters. (Charlotte Carlin, a deputy clerk in the county probate department in Long Beach, was the first to register, according to Cal State Northridge librarian Virginia Elwood-Akers.)

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Severance and her colleagues weren’t tight-lipped Victorian women who only cared about proper social credentials; these women waged a hard-nosed struggle for social change with a no-nonsense spirit and ability to cope. They opened club doors for more than the tinkling of teacups and parlor chatter. They leveraged the club into an arena of power, establishing a model kindergarten, juvenile hall, mental health clinic, cooking classes for the daughters of working mothers and a book club that became the city’s first traveling library, along with launching a drive for the preservation of landmarks.

Severance had twice failed to get such a club to thrive, but in 1891 she finally succeeded, with a determined band of 87 women who had “the time, wealth, brains and culture--plus the ability to use them to the last inch of value.”

Taking techniques from women’s businessmen-spouses, the club formed a corporation and issued stock, becoming the first women’s group to finance and build its own clubhouse. In 1899, they purchased two lots at 9th and Figueroa streets and built a two-story, Mission-style clubhouse graced with arches and patios. A quarter-century later, a newer, five-story clubhouse would rise on the same spot with the club’s staunch motto engraved over the entrance: “In Essentials Unity . . . In Nonessentials Liberty . . . In All Things Charity.”

Shortly before her death in 1914, Severance was asked to describe the perfect man: “The ideal man would use a Chinese paper hankie [an old term for what became paper tissue], accept women as equals, and not wear a hat because it created too much heat in his head.”

Bulldozers razed the Severance family home in 1950, providing land for the John Tracy Clinic, a free nonprofit educational institution for deaf children founded by Louise Tracy, the wife of actor Spencer Tracy, and named for their son. The Morton Bay fig tree and garden that Severance planted more than a century ago remain, along with a plaque marking the historical site that pays tribute to the “Mother of Clubs.”

In 1977, escalating costs and fewer members forced the Friday Morning Club to sell its cherished landmark building, where poet William Butler Yeats once read and novelist Hugh Walpole spoke. Today, about 20 active members instead meet twice a month at the Wilshire Country Club. The Friday Morning Club’s original home, an Italian Renaissance structure that is now the Variety Arts Center, stands alone on the Figueroa Street block.