Caroline Severance — L.A.’s Most Famous Suffragette
By Eva Slocum (SMHS ‘20)
In my Honors US History class, I learned much about the history of the American women’s suffrage movement. Specifically, I learned that the term “suffragette” refers to a woman who fought for the right of all women to vote in public elections. When done with this learning, my teacher encouraged me to search the internet for evidence of a suffragette who lived within 50 miles of the school. He then encouraged me to describe my findings in a Local-History Blog Post.
In the Local-History Blog Post that appears below, I describe the life of L.A.’s most famous suffragette: Caroline Severance. I close out my blog post by describing how in November 2019, my father and I went in search of Severance’s Los Angeles neighborhood.
Severance’s Los Angeles neighborhood is located 14 miles from the school.
__________
In my Honors U.S. History class this past year, we learned about the history of voting rights in the United States, and more specifically the women’s suffrage movement in the “Progressive Era” (approx. 1890–1920.) Despite women activists holding protests and demonstrations going back to the 1870s and beyond, it wasn’t until the very end of this period, on August 18, 1920, that women won the right to vote in all fifty states.
Our textbook recounts the decades-long fight for suffrage led by such women as Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and national authorities Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. These suffragists and “suffragettes” (a more specific term referring to the more actively demonstrative women’s suffrage community) garnered support for the nineteenth amendment through appealing to the government and public, pursuing court cases, and founding organizations, notably Anthony and Stanton’s National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869 and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. The foundation of clubs and societies was actually a central part of the suffrage movement, as the organizations formed by and for women not only gave the campaign the punch of wide appeal but provided support and resources to the women fighting for equal rights. The NACW, for example, ran nurseries and kindergartens for working women’s convenience while other organizations served to give supporters of women’s rights an opportunity to meet and plan marches and rallies. In all, it was the leadership of brilliant and committed women that made the women’s suffrage movement the success in bringing about such important social change in the U.S. that we know it as today.
Given what I had learned about these women proponents of suffrage (most of whom lived and worked from the East Coast to the Midwest, the developed parts of the country at the time of the Progressive Era), I haphazardly searched the Internet for an example of a local suffragist who organized and advocated in the Los Angeles area.
This was how I first stumbled upon the life and work of Caroline Severance, Southern California’s own front-runner in the women’s suffrage movement.
Caroline Severance’s Early Years
Born in New York in 1820, Caroline Seymour, a schoolteacher, married banker and abolitionist Theodoric Severance at the age of twenty. The pair moved to Cleveland, where they joined several reform movements. In 1853, Caroline Severance published an essay on women’s rights, which brought her so much attention that she was asked to speak before Cleveland’s all-male Mercantile Library Association. Later that year, Severance led the first annual meeting of the Ohio Women’s Rights Association, founded only a year before in the aftermath of New York’s Seneca Falls Convention. She met and became friends with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, for whom she once filled in at a convention where Stanton was scheduled to speak when the latter fell ill.
In 1855, Theodoric Severance was offered a job in Boston’s North Bank, and the family moved to the city famous for the likes of Bronson Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom stayed at the Severances’ home while touring and lecturing. In Boston, Caroline Severance joined organizations such as the Boston Anti-Slavery Society and served on the board of trustees for the New England Hospital for Women and Children in the years prior to the Civil War, with a growing reputation as an author and speaker among leading women’s rights activists and abolitionists. Severance believed that access to services and support for women and social justice in general was vital to the suffrage movement,and throughout her life one of her largest focuses was the maintenance of organizations ranging from clinics to childcare.
Severance, along with some friends, founded the New England Women’s Club in 1868, one of few women’s clubs in Boston at the time, and served as its first president until 1871. The Club became a place where men and women could meet to discuss literature and art, as well as learn about social issues and come together to organize committees and conferences. The Club’s initial success and increasing focus on suffrage issues led Severance to help found the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) a year later. The AWSA, I learned, differed from Anthony and Stanton’s National Women Suffrage Association in that it supported the Fifteenth Amendment, the right of African American men to vote.
Caroline Severance’s California Life
Due to Theodoric Severance’s failing health and the couple’s desire to be closer to their two adult sons on the West Coast, in 1875, the Severances moved to Los Angeles. They bought a home on West Adams Boulevard (around 20 miles from where I live and go to school) which they named “Red Roof.” In California, Caroline Severance continued her precedent of reform work and organization-founding.
Harking back to her beginnings as a teacher, Severance became president of Los Angeles’s Free Kindergarten Association and garnered support for free kindergartens in Los Angeles-area schools while running a training school for kindergarten teachers. She also helped to establish the Los Angeles Public Library.
Severance reaffirmed her belief in the power of organizations for community support and social change by founding the Los Angeles Women’s Club in 1878. Members of this group advocated for help for homeless children, which led to the 1883 founding of the Orphan’s Home Society. Living in the beautiful and historic West Adams neighborhood gave Severance an appreciation for historic preservation in Los Angeles. Efforts to conserve local historic sites became another focus of the Los Angeles Women’s Club’s civic activity.
Finally, in 1881, Severance formed the organization for which she would become best known: Los Angeles’s Friday Morning Club. Like some of Severance’s earlier groups on the East Coast, this institution, devoted to women’s suffrage, provided a place for discussion regarding civic, social, and cultural reform. The Friday Morning Club, which held its first meetings in the parlor of the Hollenbeck Hotel, actively promoted measures to put women’s suffrage on the California ballot. The Club started with 80+ members, eventually attracting around 3,800.
After her husband’s death in 1892, Severance started opening their home on West Adams (now called “El Nido,” or, “The Nest”) to members of the Friday Morning Club and local activists for weekly discussion sessions advocating women’s suffrage, Severance’s more recent involvement with the Christian Socialism movement in Los Angeles, and world peace. Severance’s influence led to the amendment for statewide California women’s suffrage being voted on in the 1896 election; however, the measure failed. The same amendment would eventually pass in 1911. At the age of ninety-one, Severance was among the first women to register to vote in California. Severance created controversy when she invited the wife of African-American educator Booker T. Washington to a meeting in her home, despite the racism prevalent even among the educated, socially concerned members of the club. In response, she said, “I am amazed at the illogical positions of… Americans of culture and broad views who can draw the line at color” (qtd. in Elwood-Akers 218).
It was in Los Angeles that Severance became known as the “Mother of Clubs,” a title recalling her lifelong crusade to provide support for women working for social change in the form of organizations. Ella Ruddy, one of Severance’s earliest biographers, wrote that “El Nido” was a “rendezvous for literary people visiting Los Angeles, for leaders in progressive thought… and for men and women interested also in local or municipal reforms and improvements. The title “Mother of Clubs” has been supplemented by that of the “Ethical Magnet of Southern California”” (Ruddy 182).
Caroline Severance said, “I am more than proud of California women today, and I am so thankful to be able to do my share. California women have thoroughly vindicated their right to the ballot; let us look forward to the time when over all the world men and women shall be equal and free.”
My Visit to Severance’s West Adams Neighborhood
In November, my dad and I went downtown to look for Severance’s Los Angeles neighborhood. I had read on Wikipedia that “El Nido” had been at 806 West Adams drive but that the house itself was no longer standing and that the lot was now the parking lot of the John Tracy Clinic. We found the address at the corner of Adams Street and the appropriately named Severance Street (I couldn’t find what the name of the street had been when the Severances lived there, or when the name had been changed).
In the neighborhood around the parking lot were a few Victorian and houses that looked to be from around the same time the Severances lived in West Adams.
We then visited the Angelus Rosedale Cemetery, a short drive from the “El Nido” lot, where we found Caroline Severance’s grave, marked with only her maiden and married surnames.
SOURCES
“Caroline Severance.” WAHA (West Adams Heritage Association), http://www.westadamsheritage.org/read/456.
“Caroline Severance: Suffragist and Organizer of Women’s Clubs.” History of American Women Blog, http://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2014/01/caroline-severance.html.
Cady, Kim. “Suffragist vs. Suffragette: What is the Difference?” The Frick Pittsburgh, 11 Oct 2018, https://www.thefrickpittsburgh.org/Story-Suffragist-vs-Suffragette-What-is-the-Difference.
Danzer, Gerald A., et al. The Americans: Reconstruction to the 21st century. McDougal Littell, 2006.
Elwood-Akers, Virginia. Caroline Severance. iUniverse, 2010.
Lange, Allison. “Suffragists Organize: American Woman Suffrage Association.” NWHM (National Women’s History Museum), 2015, http://www.crusadeforthevote.org/awsa-organize/.
Loper, Mary L. “Women’s Causes to Celebrate Clubs: The Friday Morning Club Looks Back on 100 Years of Work for Social and Political Change.” Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext), Apr 21, 1991, pp. 12. ProQuest, https://login.ezp.pasadena.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezp.pasadena.edu/docview/281413961?accountid=28371.
“Ohio Women’s Rights Association.” Ohio History Central, http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Ohio_Women%27s_Rights_Association.
Rasmussen, Cecilia. “L.A.’s Leading, Now Forgotten, Suffragette.” Los Angeles Times, 7 June 1998, http://articles.latimes.com/1998/jun/07/local/me-57469.
Ruddy, Ella Giles, and Caroline M. Seymour Severance. The Mother of Clubs: Caroline M. Seymour Severance; An Estimate and an Appreciation. Baumgardt Pub. Co., 1906.
ACADEMIC HONESTY STATEMENT
I declare that this work is my own work and that I have correctly acknowledged the work of others. I further declare that this work is in accordance with SMHS Academic Honesty Policy and its guidance on good academic conduct and how to avoid plagiarism and other assessment irregularities.
- Ava Slocum
