My Dear Mrs. Ames : a Study of the Life of Suffragist Cartoonist and Birth Control Reformer Blanche Ames Ames, 1878-1969
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University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 1-1-1996 My dear Mrs. Ames : a study of the life of suffragist cartoonist and birth control reformer Blanche Ames Ames, 1878-1969. Anne Biller Clark University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1 Recommended Citation Clark, Anne Biller, "My dear Mrs. Ames : a study of the life of suffragist cartoonist and birth control reformer Blanche Ames Ames, 1878-1969." (1996). Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014. 1228. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_1/1228 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014 by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MY DEAR MRS. AMES: A STUDY OF THE LIFE OF SUFFRAGIST CARTOONIST AND BIRTH CONTROL REFORMER BLANCHE AMES AMES, 1878-1969 A Dissertation Presented by ANNE BILLER CLARK Amherst in Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 1996 History © Copyright by Anne Biller Clark 1996 All Rights Reserved MY DEAR MRS AMES; A STUDY OF THE LIFE OF SUFFRAGIST CARTOONIST AND BIRTH CONTROL REFORMER BLANCHE AMES AMES 1878-1969 A Dissertation Presented by ANNE BILLER CLARK Approved as to style and content by im'ce Berkman, Chair Margo Culle?y. Member David Glassberg, Menw^ Kathy Peiss, Member Bruce Laurie, Department Head History Department ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to thank the staff of the Sophia Smith Collection for their valuable assistance and unfailing courtesy during the research stage of this study. Thanks also to Oakes Plimpton for his splendid tour of the Borderland estate and permission to use his grandmother's political cartoons as illustrations for this work. As for my faculty, Joyce Berkman, Margo Culley, David Glassberg, and Kathy Peiss, their patience and expertise has been a great support, as has been the encouragement of my family. iv ABSTRACT MY DEAR MRS. AMES: A STUDY OF THE LIFE OF SUFFRAGIST CARTOONIST AND BIRTH CONTROL REFORMER BLANCHE AMES AMES, 1878-1969 MAY 1996 ANNE BILLER CLARK, B.A., HOLLINS COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by Professor Joyce Berkman Blanche Ames Ames, an elite graduate of Smith College and a distinguished state and national leader in the woman suffrage and birth control causes, was one of a small cadre of educated women who, in the early 1 900s, recast the iconography of political cartoons, long a means of discourse used only by men, to promote women's rights. In this, she was most unusual. Fortunately, because of her prominence, Ames's extensive family papers have been preserved in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. She has not slid into obscurity as other women political artists and reformers have done. As a result, Ames serves as a sort of template of how an elite woman chose to become publicly involved in issues she might have fiinded others to pursue and also how women cartoonists went about adapting the political cartoon to promote their goals.. It becomes clear from studying her letters and diaries that Ames was an unusually logical, pragmatic and determined progressive feminist, involved and engaged, who preserved a sense of humor, of irony, of detachment that allowed V her to persevere in her causes without fanaticism, while carving an autonomous place for herself in a world uncertain of the wisdom of women's rights. Part of Ames's success was that she was buoyed at each step of her life from prep school to the presidency of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts by her fascinating family, the founder of which was the brilliant and outrageous Civil War Gen. Benjamin "Beast" Butler. Ames's parents encouraged her education and allowed her a growing autonomy in which to learn to think and then to act for herself After an early and difficult struggle for autonomy in her marriage, Blanche and her husband, Oakes Ames, became partners in a joint campaign to create a sustaining family life at their North Easton estate at Borderland, while allowing Oakes to pursue a distinguished career at Harvard and Blanche an equally distinguished career as a suffragist, a political cartoonist, botanical illustrator, painter and birth control reformer. Thus the study of the life of Blanche Ames Ames is not just one of individual artistic or political brilliance, but also of how that brilliance was nurtured, encouraged and sustained throughout the vicissitudes of a life defined by a desire for real social reform by a domestic support system that too often goes unrecognized. This family support system, along with Blanche Ames Ames's activism and achievements as a political cartoonist and a leader in the suffrage and the birth control fight, are the focus of this dissertation. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv ABSTRACT v Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. WELLSPRINGS OF REFORM: A TRADITION OF LEADERSHIP 18 3 . DEAR BLANCHIANA: CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION 59 4. OAKES: MARRIAGE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR AUTONOMY ... 98 5. SUFFRAGE 130 6. THE MIGHTY PEN 170 7. PRESIDENT BLANCHE AND TFIE BIRTH CONTROL LEAGUE OF MASSACHUSETTS 205 8. BACK TO BORDERLAND 247 APPENDICES A. CARTOONS 262 B. FAMILY TREE 268 BIBLIOGRAPHY 270 Vll CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Gazing across the green lawn on which school children prance and race to the parking lots beyond, it is easy to think of the little fieldstone castle at Borderland as a musty museum, open to a public now that knows little of its history, as dead and gone in spirit as those who once built and loved it. But a bird's bright trill across still spring air from one of the box hedges in front of the house briefly lends the illusion that it is a spring of 70 years ago and the visitor can imagine herself as a guest of the family, privileged to poke and peer and traipse around the Ames estate and to explore its heart. For, whatever her adventures, traveling worldwide with her botanist husband, Oakes Ames, to gather orchids, or campaigning in Boston and New York for woman suffrage and birth control, Blanche Ames Ames (1878-1969), the subject of this biography, always returned to Borderland, the 1,200-acre estate she shared with her husband and family in North Easton, Massachusetts, a town of green trees and deep welling ponds, as well as several large Ames family estates. The Borderland house itself--a small, many-windowed castle built of concrete so that Oakes's precious library would be fireproof and faced with field stone gathered on the property-was finished in 1910 and still stands, little affected by the passage of years and deaths of Blanche in 1969. those who made it their mutual magnum opus, Oakes in 1950 and The house speaks volumes about them and their desire for family privacy, their desire 1 to determine and control their surroundings after spending years under a mother-in- law's roof, their love for books, for rare plants, and for art. The house also reflects their privileged lives and the power they chose to wield in their lives, Oakes as a pioneering botanist and Blanche as a progressive leader for reform, always, as it seems on the border of new realms to be conquered, a sort of Borderland of the soul that kept Blanche alert and active into extreme old age. Blanche's story is the story of how such disenfranchised groups as American women have gained political leverage without the ballot, using such tactics as petitions to Congress and state legislatures from the interested parties themselves; votes from sympathetic politicians; pressure tactics such as mass meetings, marches and picketing; the publication of newsletters, books and pamphlets along the lines of the "cahiers" of the French Revolution; and even the organization of mass arrests for their publicity value. One tactic that has been little explored for its part in the woman's suffrage insurgency, however, is the political cartoon, and it is as a political cartoonist that Blanche Ames Ames has caught and retained the interest of historians. Since the earliest days of the American Republic, political cartoonists have presented images intended to sway public opinion in social, economic and political spheres. They have done so, however, almost entirely without the contribution of women artists and with little consideration for so-called women's issues, such as suffrage, birth control, maternal and infant health care, equal pay, or protective factory legislation. 2 Certainly, even a brief glance at today's, as well as yesterda/s newspaper editorial pages, would make it clear to the sensitive observer that women's issues are ignored by political cartoonists and that even women's images appear less often than do those of men. The Springfield Republican , for example, a distinguished newspaper at the turn of the century, was lavishly illustrated with representations in pen and ink of newsworthy figures of the day-including a pig-tailed, deposed emperor of China—but not a single female face appeared in any social, political, or economic context whatever in illustration, photograph or advertisement. The exception to this ongoing male dominance of political cartooning was the period running approximately from 1900 to the mid- 1920s, when a number of women artists like Blanche Ames—