In 1904, the presidency of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs was thrust on Sarah Platt Decker as a direct outcome of her moving, pro-woman suffrage speech to the delegates at the biennial convention. The new president seized the moment to make her famous pronouncement:

Ladies, you have chosen me your leader. Well, I have an important piece of news to give you. Dante is dead. He has been dead for several centuries, and I think it is time that we dropped the study of his Inferno and turned our attention to our own.¹

Decker’s call to action underlined a trend in the woman’s club movement that was well underway. As early as 1892, the president of the Chicago Woman’s Club pointed to the work of the members who had “. . . invaded jails, asylums, hospitals, court rooms, county boards, and common councils….” ² Middle class women had emerged from their clubs’ parlor discussions to fund and support the Women’s Trade Union League, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the settlement houses, and the Consumers League. What had started as an attempt by women to improve themselves through the formation of literary or culture clubs had emerged into a social movement of significance that paved the way for woman suffrage. This seemingly innocuous activity of continuing education had released the civic energies of thousands of women who had taken the unconventional step of leaving their housekeeping closets to join women’s clubs, the first organizations to be formed by women “…purely for their own recreation and improvement.” ³

The notion of study and discussion flouted the Victorian concepts of true womanhood. Furthermore, by establishing a personal goal for themselves, the development of their knowledge, the clubwomen were beginning to define themselves as individuals and not solely as wives, sisters, mothers, daughters, or widows of the men in their lives. (In the nineteenth century, even the term, “woman” had fallen into disfavor.)

One of the prime founders of the Iowa woman’s club movement was Mary Newbury Adams. Her story can lead to a fuller understanding of why the women of her day were receptive to organization and how their involvement resulted in the development of Victorian political women and the “new women” of the early twentieth century.

Like many feminists, Adams came from a family with a history of activity in reform movements. Her parents were abolitionist and missionaries who established churches, schools, and colleges in the Middle West; they also were strong supporters of equal educational opportunities for women. Adams’ father, a Presbyterian minister, had views of coeducation that conflicted with members in his churches, forcing the family to move frequently.

On one occasion, their Michigan home served as a station for runaway slaves on their way to Canada. One of the earliest memories Adams had of her mother related to her involvement in the underground railway. A mob of pro-slavery men attacked their home while the father was away, tore down the picket fence and demanded the release of the fugitive. While the frightened children huddled in one room, their mother comforted them with, ‘…Don’t fear for we are in the right.’⁴ She dispersed the attackers and thus saved the runaway who remained in a secret cistern kept for this purpose. An agent for the underground railway, her mother had many opportunities to demonstrate that women could not be submissive when they held firm convictions.

Adams’ mother was fond of reciting the poetry of her ancestor, Anne Dudley Bradstreet, probably the first American woman poet, and reminiscing about her famous cousin, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, an author and organizer of benevolent societies. Among her descendants was William Pynchon, Anne Hutchison’s defender.

In 1853, the family settled in Dubuque. The following year, her future husband, Austin Adams, a lawyer who had attended Harvard Law School, also came to Dubuque from the East. He immediately became active in civic and political affairs, helping to establish a public-school system and a library. A staunch supporter of his wife’s interests, especially women’s equal educational opportunities, he was the first chief justice to admit women to practice before the court. As a professor at the University of Iowa law school, he welcomed female students to his classes. After Adams graduated from Troy Female Seminary, the first endowed institution for women started by Emma Willard, the two were married. The following year, a child was born, the first of five children born in a seven-year period.

Apparently, her position as wife and mother did not interfere with her entertaining such literary celebrities as A. Bronson Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom she audaciously invited to Dubuque. Later, Emerson called her ‘the most inspiring woman I ever met.’¹ By 1873, she was able to “open every door”² in Iowa for Alcott, a lecturer or conductor of parlor conversations. She had gained in her own right a reputation for encouraging and supporting the growth of study clubs.

Her first attempt began in Dubuque where she founded the Conversational Club in 1868. Club meetings were held in the parlors of members, an arrangement allowing women with small children to participate. Adams conceived of the clubs as a form of higher education which was accessible to women within the walls of their own homes. Adams’ desire to learn more about what women had achieved was shared by others; in fact, this interest often prompted their first organizing efforts. The club movement shared a characteristic common to the ideology of other social movements. In legitimizing their claims on society, members of emerging social groups dig deeply into the past in searching for their historic worth and identity.

A recurrent theme in Adams’ writings was the concept of power which she defined as the end-product of the learning process—the ability to “direct your action.”⁵ She characterized the clubs as “nurseries of power.”⁶ In light of her belief, she proposed a state association in 1884 which materialized eight years later and the Iowa Federation of Women’s Clubs one year later. Within the first two years, the Iowa Federation was successful in petitioning the state legislature for a change in the age of consent. By 1915, the members had lobbied for passage of laws relating to mental institutions, orphanages, child labor, and woman suffrage. The club experience had moved Iowa women out of their parlors.

Adams carried her networking efforts beyond Iowa by involvement in the Association for the Advancement of Women. The association linked separate strands of committed individuals and clubs, to create a web of support, the fabric of a social movement leading to the inevitable enfranchisement of women. In 1887, Susan B. Anthony called upon Adams for assistance in organizing the National Council of Women, a coalition of national groups formed to make a unified attack on discrimination against women. Again, Anthony asked Adams to eulogize Elizabeth Stanton on her eightieth birthday held at the Metropolitan Opera House. Adams also had a position “to stir up the ladies”³ at the 1893 Columbian Exposition that encouraged Carrie Chapman Catt to lead the successful battle for woman suffrage in Colorado.

After the fair, Adams spent the eight remaining years of her life traveling, speaking at national meetings, writing, and working on the family genealogy. At her funeral, in 1901, the minister took special note of the Bible Adams’ father had given her in 1848. In the book of Esther, Adams had written, “Courage to open a new way.” ⁴ Unknowingly, she had described herself.

Endnotes

1. Quoted by Rheta Childe Door in Anne Firor Scott, ed, The American Woman: Who Was She? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971) 106.

2. J. C. Croly. The History of the General Federation of the Woman’s Club Movement in America (New York: Henry G. Allen & Co. 1898) 117.

3. Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, ed, The History of Woman Suffrage, 6 volumes (Indianapolis, Ind.: The Hollenbeck Press, 1902) 4:1043.

4. Mary Newbury Adams, a personal account, Austin Adams Family Papers, Iowa State University Library, Department of Special Collections, MS 10, 2-3.

5. San Francisco Chronicle, April 1, 1894, MS 10, 4-4.

6. Letter from A. Bronson Alcott to Ednah Dow Cheney, September 19, 1873, in Herrnstadt, ed., 607.

7. Letter from Mary Newbury Adams to Frances Newbury Bagley, undated, MS 10, 2-2.

8. Bible of Mary Newbury Adams, MS 10, 3-7.