Georgiana Bruce Kirby

Last updated

Georgiana Bruce Kirby (7 December 1818 - 27 January 1887) was an American teacher and writer noted for her work in women's suffrage in the late 19th century. [1] [2] She founded the Santa Cruz Society of Suffragists in 1869. [3]

Contents

Life and career

Early life

Georgiana Bruce was born on December 7, 1818, in Bristol, England. [4] Lack of financial resources meant that she only had two years of formal schooling before taking positions with other families. At fourteen, she became a governess to an English family, taking her to Paris and then Melbourne, Canada, where she became a school teacher and taught farming fundamentals. She returned to London in 1837 and within a year was working for the American Unitarian minister Ezra Stiles Gannett, who brought her to Boston at the age of twenty.

Life in the USA

Georgiana joined the Transcendentalist community of Brook Farm at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, with her brother where they lived cooperatively. She studied at the school, ran the nursery, and participated in academic discussions with various Brook Farm literary members and visitors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and Margaret Fuller. These authors and the spirit of transcendentalism had a major influence on her and she began writing during this period.

By February 1844, Kirby had supported Brook Farm’s conversion to the French utopian social doctrines of Charles Fourier. She, however, thought the community had lost its spontaneity and she left to live in New York City. There, she networked with her friend Margaret Fuller, landing a job as assistant to Eliza Farnham, newly-appointed matron of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. [5] She worked at Sing Sing for a year, then left New York to teach at schools in Illinois and Missouri, before returning east to serve as a public school teacher and governess in Pennsylvania and New York.

With funds borrowed from Horace Greeley, Bruce travelled West in 1850 to join Farnham in Santa Cruz, California, where Farnham's late husband Thomas J. Farnham had been given a piece of land by Isaac Graham. Eliza Farnham had been ridiculed for her plan to bring a large group of single women to California, and eventually decided to travel there alone. Farnham and Bruce worked the farm for two years, producing poultry, potatoes, and fruit; [6] [7] at the same time, Bruce continued her involvement in furthering women’s rights, the Temperance movement, and the anti-slavery movement.

In 1852, Bruce married Richard Kirby, a local tanner, and subsequently had five children. She continued to write fiction and short stories. She kept a journal from 1852 to 1860. [8]

Women's Rights

The abolitionist movement and the Civil War fuelled Bruce’s belief that women were enslaved. After the Civil War, she joined the women’s rights movement to secure the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. By 1869, she raised enough money to fund California’s first local woman's suffrage society. [9] In 1870, she served as vice-president of the San Francisco Women’s Rights Convention. She reported on local lectures by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the Santa Cruz Sentinel and criticized a California judge's decision that prevented women from voting and debated woman suffrage critics. In 1874, at the age of 56, she organized the Santa Cruz Temperance Union, [10] which became affiliated with the WCTU, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, that successfully encouraged the prohibition movement later in the 1920s.

Death

Georgiana Bruce Kirby died at the age of 68 on January 27, 1887. In the same year, her memoir up to 1850 was published, Years of Experience: An Autobiographical Narrative, [11] alongside her diary.

Georgiana Bruce Kirby Preparatory School, in Santa Cruz, California, was named after her, and supports her ideals. [12]

Bibliography

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "Kirby, Georgiana Bruce | Encyclopedia.com". www.encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2023-03-10.
  2. ↑ JStor website, Julie Meloni Fiction worth more than a Summary Statement
  3. ↑ "Georgiana Bruce Kirby Historical Marker". www.hmdb.org. Retrieved 2023-03-10.
  4. ↑ Kirby, Georgiana Bruce (1887). Years of Experience: An Autobiographical Narrative. G. P. Putnam's sons.
  5. ↑ Donovan, Lynn Bonfield (1977). "Day-by-Day Records: Diaries from the CHS Library. Part II". California Historical Quarterly. 56 (1): 72–81. doi:10.2307/25157685. ISSN   0097-6059. JSTOR   25157685.
  6. ↑ New Brook Farm, G B Kirby page
  7. ↑ Women History Blog, G B Kirby page
  8. ↑ Kirby 1987, p.59-108
  9. ↑ "Georgiana Bruce Kirby". History of American Women. 2012-12-26. Retrieved 2023-05-11.
  10. ↑ "Biographical Sketch of Georgiana Bruce Kirby | Alexander Street Documents". documents.alexanderstreet.com. Retrieved 2023-05-11.
  11. ↑ Available online through Hathitrust
  12. ↑ Kirby School website
  13. ↑ Project Gutenberg
  14. ↑ Goodreads website

Related Research Articles

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) is an international temperance organization. It was among the first organizations of women devoted to social reform with a program that "linked the religious and the secular through concerted and far-reaching reform strategies based on applied Christianity." It plays an influential role in the temperance movement. Originating among women in the United States Prohibition movement, the organization supported the 18th Amendment and was also influential in social reform issues that came to prominence in the progressive era.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frances Willard</span> American temperance activist and suffragist

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist. Willard became the national president of Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1879 and remained president until her death in 1898. Her influence continued in the next decades, as the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution were adopted. Willard developed the slogan "Do Everything" for the WCTU and encouraged members to engage in a broad array of social reforms by lobbying, petitioning, preaching, publishing, and education. During her lifetime, Willard succeeded in raising the age of consent in many states as well as passing labor reforms including the eight-hour work day. Her vision also encompassed prison reform, scientific temperance instruction, Christian socialism, and the global expansion of women's rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abigail Scott Duniway</span> American suffragist, writer, journalist, pioneer (1834–1915)

Abigail Scott Duniway was an American women's rights advocate, newspaper editor and writer, whose efforts were instrumental in gaining voting rights for women in the United States.

Georgiana Bruce Kirby Preparatory School, referred to as Kirby School, is a co-educational, non-sectarian independent school located in Santa Cruz, California. The school educates students in grades 6–12.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eliza Farnham</span> American novelist

Eliza Farnham was a 19th-century American novelist, feminist, abolitionist, and activist for prison reform.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Pease Nichol</span> British activist (1807–1897)

Elizabeth Nichol was a 19th-century British abolitionist, anti-segregationist, woman suffragist, chartist and anti-vivisectionist. She was active in the Peace Society, the Temperance movement and founded the Darlington Ladies Anti-Slavery Society. In 1853 she married Dr. John Pringle Nichol (1804–1859), Regius Professor of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. She was one of about six women who were in the painting of the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Greenleaf Clement Leavitt</span> American missionary and activist (1830–1912)

Mary Greenleaf Leavitt was an educator and successful orator who became the first round-the-world missionary for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Setting out on virtually non-stop worldwide tours over a decade, she "went to all continents save Antarctica," where she crusaded against alcohol and its evils including domestic violence; and advocated for women's suffrage and other equal rights such as higher education for women. In 1891 she became the honorary life president of the World's WCTU.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Annie Schnackenberg</span> Prominent member of womens suffrage movement in New Zealand

Annie Jane Schnackenberg was a New Zealand Wesleyan missionary, temperance and welfare worker, and suffragist. She served as president of the Auckland branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union New Zealand 1887 to 1897, and national president for WCTU NZ from 1892 to 1901 – overseeing the final push for petitioning the government to grant women the right to vote in national elections. She also was a charter member of the National Council of Women of New Zealand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura de Force Gordon</span> American activist and lawyer

Laura de Force Gordon was a California lawyer, newspaper publisher, and a prominent suffragette. She was the first woman to run a daily newspaper in the United States, and the second female lawyer admitted to practice in California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary F. Thomas</span> American physician, abolitionist and temperance and womens rights leader

Mary F. Thomas (1816–1888) was a pioneer American woman physician, abolitionist, and temperance and women's rights leader who advocated for women, as well as those in need. Born into a Quaker family, she grew up in Ohio and spent most of her life in Indiana. Thomas was an active member of the women's suffrage movement and a founding member of the Woman's Rights Association of Indiana, serving as a vice president and president of the Indiana organization. In 1859 she became the first woman to present a petition before the Indiana General Assembly, calling for passage of laws to provide property rights for married women and a women's suffrage amendment to the Indiana Constitution. At the national level she served a one-year term as president of the American Woman Suffrage Association. In the mid-1850s she was a coeditor of Mary Birdsall's national woman's rights magazine, The Lily, and later an associate editor of the Mayflower with Lizzie Bunnel and a contributor to Woman's Journal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">M. Ella Whipple</span> American physician

M. Ella Whipple was an American physician.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georgiana Solomon</span> Scottish philanthropist in South Africa and suffragette

Georgiana Margaret Solomon was a British educator and campaigner, involved with a wide range of causes in Britain and South Africa. She and her only surviving daughter, Daisy Solomon, were suffragettes; as members of the Women's Social and Political Union, they were imprisoned during the campaign for women's suffrage for breaking the windows of Black Rod's office.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daisy Solomon</span>

Daisy Dorothea Solomon (1882–1978) was posted as a human letter in the British suffragette campaign using a quirk in the postal system to approach the Prime Minister who would not receive a delegation of women demanding the right to vote. Solomon was secretary to suffragette groups and imprisoned for protest, and went on hunger strike.

This timeline provides an overview of the political movement for women's suffrage in California. Women's suffrage became legal with the passage of Proposition 4 in 1911 yet not all women were enfranchised as a result of this legislation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ada McPherson Morley</span> American author, suffragist and rancher

Ada McPherson Morley was an American author, suffragist and rancher. Early in her time in New Mexico, she and her husband edited a newspaper and took on the Santa Fe Ring both in print and in business matters. Morley became involved with the New Mexico chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and later served as president. She was also involved in women's suffrage in New Mexico and helped recruit women into the Congressional Union (CU) later in her life. Morley owned a ranch in the Datil Mountains where she raised cattle and was able to host meetings.

Eliza Pottie was an Australian social reformer, and a leader in women's organization in New South Wales. She was involved in the founding of the Young Women's Christian Association in Sydney, the Ladies' Sanitation Association, and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. She served as president of the Ladies Sanitation Association for nine years. She advocated for prison reform, supported orphanages, visited people in hospitals and institutions, and campaigned for women's suffrage. She was appointed to the Government Asylum Inquiry Board in 1886. A member of the Religious Society of Friends, she helped found the Quaker Relief Committee during the depression of 1893. In 1896, she attended the first National Council of Women New South Wales as a delegate for the WCTU. She died at her home in Manly in 1907.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bertha M. Rice</span> American writer

Bertha Marguerite Rice was an American writer, philanthropist, conservationist, and clubwoman based in Santa Clara County, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Brentnall</span> Australian suffragist and philanthropist

Elizabeth Brentnall was an Australian suffragist, temperance activist and philanthropist. She was the first state president (1885–99) then honorary president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in Queensland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alli Trygg-Helenius</span> Finnish temperance advocate

Alli Trygg-Helenius (1852–1926) was a Finnish activist who worked with the temperance movement at the beginning of the 20th century, focusing especially on temperance work with children. In addition, she was a pioneer of the women's movement in Finland and a social activist responsible for the establishment of several organizations. Trygg-Helenius was the spouse and close colleague of Matti Helenius-Seppälä, who was influential in the temperance movement and the Christian labour movement.

References

  1. Guarneri, Carl. "Biographical Sketch of Georgiana Bruce Kirby". Alexander Street. Retrieved 4 March 2020.
  2. "Georgiana Bruce Kirby". New Brook Farm. Retrieved 4 March 2020.
  3. Kirby, Georgiana Bruce (1987). Steen, Judith B.; Swift, Carolyn (eds.). Georgiana Bruce Kirby: Feminist Reformer of the West. Santa Cruz County Historical Trust. ISBN   0-940283-02-6.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.