Known Women Philanthropists Born During Colonial Times to 1822

Known Women Philanthropists Born During Colonial Times to 1822                               

                                                           

            Colonial women set patterns for aiding children and the aged, and supported what we call self-help by encouraging education and teaching marketable skills.  Succeeding generations of women continued these efforts and changed America with their notable, creative and often original contributions. Thousands of women from every economic level worked on a variety of humanitarian projects to aid those less fortunate than they.  They used their leadership and organizational skills; they led publicity drives; they investigated and documented conditions and then lobbied government officials for redress. 

            Some women also used their great good fortune of inheritance or personal wealth to fund these humanitarian efforts. These philanthropic endeavors have been recognized by later generations, but often without including the monetary investment which accompanied these deeds.  Many women felt it unseemly to allow the amount of their largesse to become public information, and this reticence has continued.  The real value of known gifts can be better understood when translated into today’s rough equivalents.  A dollar in 1800 would be worth almost $14 today; 1850’s dollar, more than $22 and 1900’s dollar, $20. These are the stories of some of those women, presented by their birth years.

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      Elizabeth Perkins  (1735/36-1807) was married to a successful Boston merchant and patriot.  Widowed in 1773 she established her own store and was able to give $1,000 to the Continental Army.  In 1800 she helped found the Boston Female Asylum, the first charitable institution established in Boston by a woman.  Her 5 daughters and 3 sons became leaders in many fields.  The Perkins School for the Blind was named for her benefactor son, Thomas.

      Isabella Graham (? – 1814) was born in Scotland and came to New York in 1789.  Although not wealthy, she set aside a tenth of her earnings to aid good causes.  In 1795 she received $1000 dollars from the sale of a lease and immediately set aside $100 to aid the poor.  She was the first directress of a society providing relief for poor widows and in 1806 helped found an orphan-asylum.  The embargo of 1807-1808 brought hardships to the poor who were unable to get the raw materials they needed.  Graham bought flax and lent spinning wheels with which the poor made linen tablecloths and towels.   She was also president of the board managing the Magdalen Asylum.

            Sophia Smith (1796-1870) received a large inheritance in 1861 when she was 65 years old.  After much advice and great deliberation she decided to provide the foundation of a woman’s college in Northampton, Massachusetts.  In her “Plan for a Woman’s College” she expressed her aim “to furnish women with means of usefulness, happiness, and honor now withheld from them.”  With her $393,105 gift, Smith College opened in 1875 with 14 students.

      Sarah Worthington King Peter (1800-1877) began her philanthropic work as one of the founders of the Cincinnati Protestant Orphan Asylum in 1833, now called the Children’s Convalescent Home.  Moving to Philadelphia with her second husband, Sarah Peter helped women gain marketable skills in art.  In 1848 she began the Philadelphia School of Design in her home.  This pioneer school for industrial art was praised by Sarah Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. (It joined the Franklin Institute in 1850 and in 1932 merged into the Moore Institute of Art, Science, and Industry.) Returning to Cincinnati, Peter fostered and was first president of the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts. During the Civil War she assisted at military prisons and nursed soldiers after the battle at Shiloh.  Well educated, she also translated French history and books on education into English.

            Not all philanthropists were well educated, well-to-do from birth or inherited wealth. Margaret Haughery (1813- Feb. 7, 1882) was an illiterate Irish woman who immigrated to Baltimore at age 5, married in 1835, moved to New Orleans and was soon widowed.  She worked as a hotel laundress, and soon was able to buy a few cows.  By 1840 she had 40 cows and became known for her generosity toward the poor and hungry.  She helped the Sisters of Charity build 11 orphanages and asylums for infants.  In 1858 she acquired a bakery in payment of a debt.  She established the first steam bakery in the South.  Her bakery and packaged crackers became the city’s largest export business.  During the Civil War she aided soldiers and their families from both sides.  In the 1870s she turned to the needs of the elderly.  A grateful New Orleans honors her work annually on February 9, designated “Margaret Haughery Day” by the mayor.

            Anna Uhl Ottendorfer (1815-1884), born in Bavaria, emigrated with her husband in 1836 to New York where they bought a German newspaper, the Staats-Zeitung.   Anna shared the typesetting and printing as well as the management.  Widowed in 1852, she continued the newspaper with her second husband, increasing its stature in the German settlements.  The paper supported the Union in the Civil War and opposed Tammany Hall.  In 1875 Ottendorfer founded the Isabella Home for aged German-Americans with $100,000.  It was named for a deceased daughter.  Another $100,000 set up the Herman Uhl Memorial in 1881 to promote the study of German in the schools.  Other gifts included $225,000 to the woman’s pavilion at New York’s German Hospital in 1882.  She supported the Children’s Aid Society and the States Charity Aid Association.  At her death city flags were lowered to half-staff as her cortege proceeded through the streets.  Her will provided $25,000 to be divided among the newspaper employees and $250,000 to various German-American institutions.

            Catharine Wolfe Bruce (1816-1900) inherited her fortune from her father who designed script types and was the country’s foremost typographer. In 1887 Catharine donated $50,000 to the George Bruce Branch of what became the New York Public Library. Always interested in astronomy, Catharine was appalled to hear a government astronomer suggest in 1889 that most significant discoveries in astronomy had already been made.  So at age 73, Bliss financed the construction of a powerful photographic telescope for the Harvard College Observatory.  Her donations included grants to students, salaries, and publications to continue investigations of the skies.  In 1897 she endowed a gold medal for distinguished service to astronomy.  Her donations here and in Europe amounted to about $175,000.

      Josephine Newcomb (1816-1901) inherited a small fortune when her husband died.  She turned her dispair when her daughter Harriott died at age 15 into running the business which prospered and gave her a huge fortune.  After donations to Washington and Lee University, a Confederate Orphan Home, a school for poor girls, a New York hospital and a New York City school for the deaf, a friend suggested establishing a college for women in connection with Tulane University.  She donated $100,000 to create the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College which opened in October, 1887, the country’s first “co-ordinate college.”  Over the years she gave funds for new buildings and other needs.

      Mary Hemenway (1820-1894) began her philanthropic work with funds from her husband’s business affairs and after the death of her eldest daughter in 1865.   Her main interests were to improve education for white and black children in the South and to spread knowledge of American history to all.  In 1871 she established the Tileston Normal School (named for her father) in Wilmington, North Carolina to educate poor white children; she supported it until it closed in1891.  She aided General Armstrong in Hampton and Booker Washington in Tuskegee.  She also established sewing and cooking classes in Boston and in 1887 founded the Boston Normal School of Cookery to train teachers.  She set up the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics to train physical education teachers.  This was later taken over by Wellesley.  Turning to the preservation of National Buildings, she contributed $100,000 in 1876 to save Old South Meeting House in Boston.  She supported lecture series on American history, publication of leaflets, and awards for student essays.  In 1886 she met a group of Zuni Indians and, impressed with their culture, financed a 7 -year study of Hopi and Zuni tribes.  Then she financed publication of the results of the study in 5 volumes of the Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology.

            Elizabeth Thompson (1821-1899) was widowed in 1869 with an annual income of more than $50,000 which enabled her to subsidize needy relatives and others.  She supported and contributed to the suffrage and temperance movements.  She bought Carpenter’s painting, “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln to His Cabinet” for $25,000 and presented it to Congress in 1878.  When Congress failed to vote funds to stop yellow fever in the Southern states, she gave $10,000 to establish a Yellow Fever Commission.  In 1879 she gave $1000 to Bronson Alcott’s Concord School of Philosophy.  The next year she gave $1000 to enable Susan Anthony to begin publication of the History of Woman Suffrage.  A great proponent of scientific research, about 1885 she set up a fund with Dr. Minot of Harvard – an early endowment for “the advancement and prosecution of scientific research in its broadest sense” – named the Elizabeth Thompson Science Fund. 

       Anna Jeanes (1822-1907) received a huge inheritance in 1894 and set to work distributing about $2,000,000 in the next decade.  She used $200,000 to help set up 8 homes for elderly Quakers and others.  In her final year she used $1,000,000 to establish the “Negro Rural School Fund, Anna T. Jeanes Foundation” to improve education in rural elementary schools in the South.  “Jeanes teachers” went from school to school to organize trade classes until 1937.  One item in her will established a 3 million dollar unit on the family estate at Fox Chase, Pennsylvania for treating a variety of illnesses.

I will continue to add more philanthropists from the 19^th century when I have completed my research on these great women.

Our Nig

Harriet Wilson.  Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black: In a Two Story While House, North.         Showing   That  Slavery’s  Shadows Fall Even There. Vintage Books, New York.  1983.  Original publication, 1859.

      My last blog subject was the 17^th century Elena Piscopia who was greatly honored at age 22  for her universal  knowledge, and was the first woman to win a PhD in Philosophy.

     Here is another first woman of achievement who authored in 1859 the first Afro-American novel, Our Nig.  Sadly she is virtuously unknown 175 years later.  Her novel was her sad story , laid in New England, of a free-born girl and woman who endured  virtual slavery  from age 6 to 18.  Her mother, a white woman, Meg Smith, was seduced by a scoundrel who deserted her.  Her baby died but her grief and shame were bottomless.  Her friends deserted her; she was despondent.  She was saved by a black freeman, Jim, who shared food and shelter with her, loved and married her.  They had two children,     Frieda and a boy.  Jim died of consumption; another man, Seth Shipley filled in.  Hard financial times led Mag and Seth to take the boy and seek employment in another area and leave Frieda , aged 6 to the  financially  upstanding  Belmont family whom they felt would take Frieda to their hearts. Meg said she had a washing job and needed a few hours and would take Frieda after that.  Meg  never came.

            And then began the unspeakable treatment of Frieda by Mrs. Belmont.  She worked the 6 year old from daybreak to dark.  First she cared for the chickens, the cows and sheep, and then housework from daybreak to dark.  These tasks were accompanied with whippings, slaps, very little food and no suitable clothes.  Her daughter Mary treaded her equally badly.  Mr. Belmont could not challenge the treatment by the women.  Only the sons, an invalid sister and an aunt tried to help her.  When Mr. Belmont insisted on sending her to school, the teacher recognized her potential and the students were friendly.  So it continued until Frieda was 18 years old.  Mrs. Belmont could not hold her any longer. 

              Frieda’s health was very fragile from 12 years of mistreatment but the elderly friends found work she was able to do. She met a man claiming to be an escaped slave, but he was really a charlatan from the West Indies; after marriage and a son, she discovered the truth.  She did find work making straw hats and then got involved in patent medicine to support herself.

           Our Nig appeared a year before Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s , swept the country and England.  The South desperately needed a market for its cotton and money to wage the Civil War. If Our Nig could have had the popular acclaim in England and America, telling the story of another side of black life,  could the English have supported the South and made the outcome of the Civil War and American history different?

Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia

Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia

              Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia was born in Venice on June 5, 1646 and died in Padua on July 26, 1684 at age 38, a very short life to have accomplished so much learning and honor.  Facts of her life are straight forward enough after we decide on her first name.  The commemorative volume edited in 1975 as the tercentenary of her life lists Elena as her given name but the Latin of the great stained glass window   in the library of Vassar College   ordered by the class of 1906 tells us her name is Helena.  I shall use Elena as her given name.  The addition of “Piscopia” many centuries earlier was in recognition of money given by the family to the Queen to win a war and she rewarded the Cornaro family with a castle called Piscopia, which was added to the name.

                  Now for the family of the 17^th century.  Elena’s father after a wild youth married a woman of no family background or good personal reputation.  She did mother 5 children, among them our hero Elena.  Elena’s father eventually bought a Procurator office in Venice, a city that appreciated learning.  And Elena loved to learn.  About 1672 – 16 years old, she wrote her father from Padua, “With the joy of my studies, the salubrity of the air, and the diligent care of the physicians, I feel much stronger; therefore, I hope that in the future  I may resume my studies and thus rescue the name of our House from extinction and oblivion.”

                 The parish priest of Saint Luke’s in Venice had discovered that Elena Lucrezia was truly a prodigy.  “At seven she had exhibited marvelous reasoning powers, an astonishing memory and a noble soul.”  She was tutored in grammar, music, Latin, Greek, English Spanish.  She had classes in mathematics, and became an expert musician, a charming soprano and played the harp, harpsichord, and violin and composed music.   She especially loved her theological studies; she learned Hebrew to augment her studies.

              In 1672 Elena Lucrezia moved from Venice to the Palazzo Cornaro in Padua to be closer to the University of Padua, one of the most famous centers of learning in Europe.  Her father readily consented to the move.  He seems to have relished the reflected fame as her parent when scientists, bishops, cardinals and princes from many countries came to Venice, and then Padua, to see and hear the phenomenal young woman.  She had mastered almost the entire body of knowledge of the 17^th century.  Furthermore, her mother’s ill-tempered influence had become intolerable.  He provided her in Padua with servants, tutors and female companions.  She continued to learn through celebrated theologians.  She wanted peace and an inner spiritual life as an oblate of the Benedictine Order.  Her father wanted public proof of the extensive and profound learning by defending a rigorous examination leading to a theology degree.  She prepared herself for the doctorate.  There was one problem.  The Ecclesiastical Authority said “No Way” would a female become a teacher of theology.  “Never!” replied the cardinal and that was that.  He told her father,  “Woman is made for motherhood, not for learning.  However. . . I am willing to modify the point and let his daughter become a Doctor of Philosophy.”

              Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia accepted the concession of the Cardinal; date set for June 5, 1678.  That was the date of pilgrims from all over the counties to celebrate the feast of Saint Anthony; another date, Saturday, June 25, 1678.  She hated the whole idea; her modesty deplored public display of her amazing learning.  Hundreds of scholars, government officials and others sought admission so the examination was transferred from Padua University to the Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin.  She answered question after question with brilliant replies.  Sometimes cheers and applause burst forth.  The audience refused to take a vote; they declared in a voice vote to raise her immediately to the dignity of Master and Doctor of Philosophy.  She was invested with an Ermine Cape and a Doctor’s Ring was placed on her finger.

Very, very sadly she did not enjoy a long life.  Over 30 years she had served the poor, the sick, the orphans and all those    in need.  At age 38, July 25, 1684 she died.   All in Venice and Padua mourned and sighed, “The saint is dead.”

              My information is contained in Elena Lucretia Cornaro Piscopia 1646-1684, by the United States Committee for the Elena Lucretia Cornaro Piscopia Tercentenary, University of Pittsburgh, 114p.  1000 copies printed.  Monsignor Nicola Fusco, P. A. wrote the chapters.  Again confusion reigns.  The inscription on the wall of the Italian Room of the University of Pittsburgh gives her name as Helena Lucretia!  Further confusion exists as on page 87 we read the “accepted English punctuation in the translation” of the record of questions and answers, printed in 1912 and 1975 by Abbess Matilda Pynsent identifies her subject as Helen Lucretia whose life spanned  from 1646 to 1684.

               The American Association of University Women has made a concerted effort since its beginning in the 19^th century to encourage learning and its members have provided many women with awards leading to advanced degrees, first in Europe and then in the United States.