(HOST) Commentator Edith Hunter got her summer reading underway recently. She was enjoying an old book about notable Bostonians in the late eighteen hundreds until it suddenly occurred to her to wonder: where were all the women?
(HUNTER) In the mid-nineteenth century, the “Saturday Club” met at the Parker House in Boston, one Saturday evening a month. The story of the men who were in that club between 1855 and 1870 is the subject of a book The Early Years of The Saturday Club written by Edward Waldo Emerson, son of Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1918.
The book begins with a history of the formation of the club, and then gives a brief biography of the first eleven members. This included scientist Louis Agassiz, writers Richard Henry Dana, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, and historian John Lothrop Motley.
The author then details the biographies of members as they were added. Among these were writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Sr., and the artist, William Morris Hunt.
Quite a distinguished gathering, and not a woman in the group!
The only mention of women is as wives, mothers, sisters or daughters. One woman who actually received almost a paragraph was Jane Leavitt Hunt, the mother of William Morris Hunt. The author had this to say about her: “Born in Brattleboro, and [William’s] father dying when his children were all very young, their mother, a superior woman…determined to give her five [sons] every opportunity. She moved to New Haven, found an Italian artist, and she and all [five] of them took lessons of him. “
I am familiar with Jane Hunt because, one of those five sons, Leavitt, married Katherine Jarvis, daughter of William Jarvis, US Consul to Portugal. Katherine and Leavitt Hunt inherited the Consul’s home here in Weathersfield. Our historical society owns several of Jane Hunt’s scrapbooks.
Just think of other “superior women”, all contemporaries of the Saturday Club members: Louisa May Alcott; Sarah Josephine Hale, editor of the Ladies’s Magazine; Lucy Stone Blackwell, leader of the New England Woman’s Suffrage Association; and Dorothea Dix, prison reformer.
Samuel Gridley Howe, famous for his work with the blind was a member of the Saturday Club. But, apparently, he couldn’t bring along his wife, Julia Ward Howe, even though her “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862, a magazine that played a major role in the lives of the male club members.
These were all high-minded men eager to see the emancipation and enfranchisement of the slaves. What about the emancipation and enfranchisement of women?
Writer and historian Edith Hunter lives in Weathersfield Center.