Celestia Rice Colby | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | December 19, 1827 |
| Died | July 20, 1900 (aged 72) |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Children | June Rose Colby, Vine Cynthia Colby Foster, Branch Harris Colby, Montie Plummer Colby |
Celestia Rice Colby was an activist who promoted feminist and anti-slavery ideas through her writing. Reviewing her prose also illuminates the idea of separate spheres that was present in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Celestia was born on December 19, 1827. [1] Her parents were Joel and Flavia (Bradley) Rice, and they resided in Andover, Ohio. She was the fourth child followed by a younger brother a year and a half later. However, her mother died two months after his birth. Joel then married a woman named Evelina Johnson in November 1830, moving the whole family to Cherry Valley, Ohio two years later. [1]
This move accumulated great wealth for the Rice family, as Joel owned a dairy farm and a local business. [1] They were considered one of the richest families in Cherry Valley, which was a growing community. Celestia gained three step siblings born to Joel and Evelina. [1]
Per Celestia's diary entries, she was unhappy in her childhood and did not share a pleasant relationship with Evelina, contributing to her little writing about her step siblings. [1] She grieved her mother and thus did not adjust well to these changes. [1]
However, education was her primary outlet for happiness. [1] In her writing, she remarked that “’Some of the dearest memories of the past are linked with that spot, and the strongest ties of friendship which have blessed my path … were there bound in the sunny days of girlhood.’” [2] She first attended a common school in Cherry Valley, but then pursued further education at Grand River Institute, a private seminary school, in Austinburg, Ohio. [1] Achieving such levels of schooling was very rare for girls during the early 1840s, and Celestia arrived only soon after they permitted girls to attend the school. This was also especially rare considering their rural location and lifestyle. [1] For instance, Andover, her hometown, was a town of “just over 600 residents.” [2] The GRI offered the same courseload to both male and female students and assured those students held proper morals and sufficient intellect. [1]
Although it is unknown how long Celestia attended the school, it was recorded that she taught in the area within the same decade after her time there. [1]
Celestia would stop teaching in the summer of 1847 as she was then engaged to Lewis Colby, who was a longtime friend. [1] The two were married the following year in July. Celestia noted in her personal writings that she was unsatisfied with her marriage as a result of having to forego her independence (i.e., working) to spend her time as a housewife, while Lewis travelled away from home for his job. [1]
They bored their first child in April 1850, Montie Plummer Colby (a.k.a, “Plummer”). [1] The next child was born in September 1852, by the name of Vine Cynthia Colby. [1] Despite Plummer's good health, he passed away unexpectedly in November of the following year. This was also concurrent with Celestia's third pregnancy, who came to be Branch Harris Colby, born in July 1854. [1] Her last daughter was born in June 1856, named June Rose Colby. [1] Celestia birthed her fifth and final child in an undocumented year, but he was sadly stillborn. His name was alleged to be Thorn. [1]
Despite all the tragedy and dissatisfaction in Celestia's life, she maintained happiness through her children. [1] She ensured that her children were properly educated, particularly with June Rose, as she wanted them to positively contribute to society. Her surviving children were all successful, as Vine became a doctor, Branch worked for the St. Louis Sewer Department, and June was a prominent faculty member at Illinois State Normal University. [1] All three of them also attended college at the University of Michigan. [1]
The family often moved around as a result of Lewis's job prospects. [1] For instance, they moved to Freeport, Illinois, in 1866. [1] He had transitioned from agriculture to sales. Their next move was to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1890 for their children's attendance at the university. [1] Once they all graduated and moved to different areas in the Midwest, Celestia and Lewis did the same, eventually separating themselves at some point between 1881 and 1883. [1] It is unknown whether they officially divorced, however. [1]
During her time with Lewis, in addition to domestic work, she was preoccupied with labor on the farm. [1] The combination of these duties negatively impacted her happiness as she desired a different way of life, on top of her general unhappiness with Lewis. [1] In one of her articles, “Rainy Days,” published for The Dollar Newspaper in Philadelphia, she characterized male farmers as lazy, and that they should use their free time to learn as opposed to visiting taverns or sleeping. [3] This piece was certainly inspired by her observations of Lewis and the disdain she felt for being forced into farm labor.
Celestia eventually moved in with June to Normal, Illinois in the 1890s. [1] Upon her arrival, the all-female Normal History Club was formed, where she found joy in discussing ideas with other women. [1] Thankfully, this was not her only form of fulfillment in regard to interacting with like-minded women, as she was known to form bonds with other women in the later 1850s to discuss ideas and garner inspiration as well. [2] One person who contributed to this was her sister-in-law, Annie Colby. Despite their different circumstances, their views brought them together. [2] However, their bond was only temporary as Annie eventually moved to Illinois. [2]
Amidst her family life and unsatisfactory marriage, Celestia heavily relied on her writing for fulfillment, which was ultimately the main contribution to her legacy. [1] Her diary entries ranged to about six hundred pages, likely more. [4] Additionally, her published works constituted over two hundred essays and stories. [4] Her writing permitted her to explore her “inner self” that she was not afforded in the “real world,” as she wrote “'I am a strange incomprehensible being, and live in a hidden world. My outward and inner life are not the same, they have no points of resemblance. Like two vast continents, they are separated by an ocean of mystery.'” [1] This was a recurring theme in her diaries, describing her discontent as a housewife and farm laborer, when her aspirations rested elsewhere. [1]
Beyond her personal diaries, her publishing allowed her to openly express her social justice alignments, particularly regarding temperance and abolition. [1] She was exposed to the American Anti-Slavery Society in the late 1850s upon their tour of northeast Ohio, which inspired her writing and allowed her to communicate with like-minded activists. [2] Her women's rights inspirations, in part, were also fueled by the visits of Lydia Maria Child and Lucy Coleman to Ashtabula County in 1857, as mentioned in her diary.
Celestia's first published writing was her essay entitled “Flowers,” which was distributed by the Ladies’ Repository . [1] This occurred shortly after the birth of Plummer, so thus her writing endeavors and passions were put on hold. [1]
The Anti-Slavery Bugle published one of her works in January 1858, with arguably radical undertones. [1] In this work, she essentially condemned both the North and South for their inaction and advocated for immediate abolition. While this was a publishing focused on abolition, they also included Celestia's writing about women's rights and against the “separate spheres.” [1]
She was also consistently writing in various journals related to temperance and abolition. [1] One journal in particular was The Woman’s Journal , organized by her old classmate Lucy Stone, who was a woman's suffragist. [1] Celestia's pieces on abolition mainly focused on the idea of universal human equality, while her work regarding temperance emphasized the dangers of alcohol in the home. While her ideas were considered progressive, she still upheld society's expectations for women, in that she brought many of her ideas back to the traditional family. [1] However, in terms of women's rights, she also expressed thoughts about universal equality and rejected the stereotype of women's subordinance to men, both in a physical and intellectual sense. [1] In one journal, The Mayflower, she proposed an unfinished essay where she indicated that women did not simply seek change in legislation, but also change in the way they were treated in everyday life. [5]
Not only did Celestia write for various journals, but she also helped produce one. This journal was called The Ladies Volunteer. [6] In one article dated from 1862, she compared the oppression of women to “bondage,” which was a common sentiment among white, female abolitionists as an attempt to combine the two movements. [6]
Celestia's unfulfilling day-to-day life eventually caused a period of hopelessness in her writing. [7] Rather than her typical, somewhat paradoxical optimism for change demonstrated in her work, she shifted to a more lamenting approach. [7] For instance, in 1863, The Mayflower published a few of her works that grieved lost loved ones, such as Plummer and Annie. [7] The arrival of the Civil War was one of the main causes for this shift in mood. [7]
While Celestia also published children's stories and poems throughout her writing career, around this same time she changed her messaging in those as well. [7] Little Pilgrim was a children's publishing for which she wrote, where she told young girls they did not have to live up to society's expectations and they could achieve their dreams. [7] However, the same year as her sentimental essays in The Mayflower, she instead created nostalgic stories that were fixed on the past, instead of looking toward a brighter future. [7]
Once again, her writing conflicted with the life she led in the physical world. [1] While she advocated for a society in which she would be able to pursue her dreams freely and without the constraints of domesticity, she nevertheless adhered to those standards. Her work inspired future feminists and activists to push beyond societally accepted efforts. [1]
Celestia is remembered for her elegant, honest writing that often juxtaposed the life into which she was forced. While her ideas were not necessarily unpopular at the time she expressed them, she was able to capture them into eloquent words that were consumed by the public at large. [8] The vast collection of her writing at Dr. Jo Ann Rayfield Archives with Illinois State University helps preserve her messages. [9]
She died from illness in Normal on July 28, 1900. [1] Her death occurred in the home she shared with June. [1] Celestia's grave is located at the Evergreen Memorial Cemetery in Bloomington, Illinois, same as June. [1]
The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women's rights convention. It advertised itself as "a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman". Held in the Wesleyan Chapel of the town of Seneca Falls, New York, it spanned two days over July 19–20, 1848. Attracting widespread attention, it was soon followed by other women's rights conventions, including the Rochester Women's Rights Convention in Rochester, New York, two weeks later. In 1850 the first in a series of annual National Women's Rights Conventions met in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post as "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina (1778), was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded. Most of her plays were not performed in her lifetime. She wrote a memoir of her father (1832) and many letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1889.
Frances Wright, widely known as Fanny Wright, was a Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, utopian socialist, abolitionist, social reformer, and Epicurean philosopher, who became a US citizen in 1825. The same year, she founded the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee as a utopian community to demonstrate how to prepare slaves for eventual emancipation, but the project lasted only five years.
Sarah Moore Grimké was an American abolitionist, widely held to be the mother of the women's suffrage movement. Born and reared in South Carolina to a prominent, wealthy planter family, she moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the 1820s and became a Quaker, as did her younger sister Angelina. The sisters began to speak on the abolitionist lecture circuit, joining a tradition of women who had been speaking in public on political issues since colonial days, including Susanna Wright, Hannah Griffitts, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Anna Dickinson. They recounted their knowledge of slavery firsthand, urged abolition, and also became activists for women's rights.
Myra Colby Bradwell was an American publisher and political activist. She attempted in 1869 to become the first woman to be admitted to the Illinois bar to practice law, but was denied admission by the Illinois Supreme Court in 1870 and the United States Supreme Court in 1873, in rulings upholding a separate women's sphere. Bradwell had founded and published Chicago Legal News from 1868, reporting on the law and continued that work. Meanwhile, influenced by her case, in 1872 the Illinois legislature passed a state law prohibiting gender discrimination in admission to any occupation or profession.
Ann Plato was a 19th-century Black educator and author. She was the second woman of color to publish a book in the United States and the first to publish a book of essays and poems. As a young Black girl writing in the 19th century, Plato has been described as an heir to Phillis Wheatley, who wrote her first published poem at the age of 13 in 1766. There is little biographical information on Plato, and most of her life is known from her only published work, Essays; including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry, which included the preface written by Reverend James W. C. Pennington, an abolitionist leader in Hartford, Connecticut, and a pastor.
The institution of slavery in North America existed from the earliest years of the colonial history of the United States until 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment permanently abolished slavery throughout the entire United States. It was also abolished among the sovereign Indian tribes in Indian Territory by new peace treaties which the US required after the Civil War.
Abby Hadassah Smith was an early American suffragist who campaigned for property and voting rights from Glastonbury, Connecticut. She was a subject of the book Abby Smith and Her Cows in which her sister Julia Evelina Smith told the story of a tax resistance struggle they undertook in the suffrage cause.
Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of slaves to increase their profits. It included coerced sexual relations between male slaves and women or girls, forced pregnancies of female slaves, and favoring women or young girls who could produce a relatively large number of children. The objective was to increase the number of slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
Julia Evelina Smith was an American women's suffrage activist who was the first woman to translate the Bible from its original languages into English. She was also the author of the book Abby Smith and Her Cows, which told the story of her and her sister Abby Hadassah Smith's tax resistance struggle in the suffrage cause while the two were living at Kimberly Mansion in Connecticut.
The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS) was founded in December 1833 and dissolved in March 1870 following the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It was founded by eighteen women, including Mary Ann M'Clintock, Margaretta Forten, her mother Charlotte, and Forten's sisters Sarah and Harriet.
Naomi Bowman Talbert Anderson was an African American suffragist, temperance leader, civil rights activist, and writer who advocated for equal rights for all genders and races in the 1870s. She wrote poetry and gave speeches highlighting the experience of African American women who were still enslaved by their inability to vote, receiving considerable praise from other suffragists for her contributions to the movement.
Ninetta May "Nettie" Runnals was an American academic and college administrator. She served as Dean of Women at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, her alma mater, for 27 years, advocating for gender equality for women students and faculty members. She also helped raise significant funding for a Women's Union on the Mayflower Hill campus, which was renamed Runnals Union in her honor in 1959. She was inducted into the Maine Women's Hall of Fame in 1992.
The Ohio Women's Convention at Salem in 1850 met on April 19–20, 1850 in Salem, Ohio, a center for reform activity. It was the third in a series of women's rights conventions that began with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. It was the first of these conventions to be organized on a statewide basis. About five hundred people attended. All of the convention's officers were women. Men were not allowed to vote, sit on the platform or speak during the convention. The convention sent a memorial to the convention that was preparing a new Ohio state constitution, asking it to provide for women's right to vote.
Vine Colby McCasland was an American essayist and poet for The Potters artistic group in St. Louis, Missouri, in the early 20th century. After the Potters disbanded, she became a journalist and writer of short stories, and engaged in a career of sociological and economy study.
Vine Cynthia Colby (1852–1878) was one of the pioneering women in medicine.
June Rose Colby was an American professor of literature. She was the first female faculty member and third woman hired as an instructor at Illinois State Normal University, and was a supporter of the Suffragist movement.
Emily S. Bouton was an American educator, journalist, author and editor. She was educated to become a teacher and took the highest position awarded to any woman as teacher in high school at Toledo, Ohio and Chicago, Illinois, but resigned them to engage on journalistic work on the Toledo Blade, position which she held for many years. She also wrote works on health and beauty for women and one on etiquette, beside pamphlets. She published books, wrote for the newspaper press and served as editor of the "Household", the "Saturday Salad" and the "Home Talk" columns of the Toledo Daily Blade. She was the author of Social Etiquette, Health and Beauty and other works more or less directly relating to women. Bouton died in 1927.
Josephine Cushman Bateham was an American social reformer, editor, and writer in the temperance movement. The Sabbath Observance Department of the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was organized at the St. Louis (National) Convention in 1884, and Bateham, then of Painesville, Ohio, was appointed its first Superintendent, continuing in charge of the Department until compelled by failing health to resign in 1896. In addition, Bateham was a supporter of social reform for women.
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Other | |
