Ahern, Mary Eileen (01 October 1860–22 May 1938), librarian and editor, was born on a farm southwest of Indianapolis, Indiana, to William Ahern, a farmer, and Mary O’Neill, both Irish immigrants. In 1870 the family left the farm for Spencer, Indiana, where Mary Eileen graduated from high school in 1878. Following her graduation from Central Normal College in Danville, Indiana, in 1881, she worked as a teacher in the public schools of Bloomfield, Spencer, and Peru, Indiana, for eight years....
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Holly A. Baggett
Anderson, Margaret (24 November 1886–19 October 1973), editor and author, was born Margaret Carolyn Anderson in Indianapolis, Indiana, the daughter of Arthur Aubrey Anderson and Jessie Shortridge. Anderson’s father was a railway executive who provided a comfortable middle-class existence for his wife and three daughters. Anderson, whose chief interest as a young woman was music and literature, was soon regarded as the rebel of the family. After three years at Western College for Women in Ohio, she dropped out and made her way to Chicago, hoping to find work as a writer. After various stints as a bookstore clerk, print assistant, and part-time critic, Anderson decided to start her own literary journal. With little money but a great deal of enthusiasm and support from friends, Anderson founded the avant-garde ...
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Margaret Anderson. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-112044).
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Theresa Leininger-Miller
Bennett, Gwendolyn (08 July 1902–30 May 1981), writer and artist, was born in Giddings, Texas, the daughter of Joshua Robin Bennett and Mayme F. Abernathy, teachers on a Native American reservation. In 1906 the family moved to Washington, D.C., where Bennett’s father studied law and her mother worked as a manicurist and hairdresser. Her parents divorced and her mother won custody, but her father kidnapped the seven-year-old Gwendolyn. The two, with her stepmother, lived in hiding in various towns along the East Coast and in Pennsylvania before finally settling in New York....
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Tinky ‘‘Dakota’’ Weisblat
Blackwell, Betsy Talbot (1905?–04 February 1985), fashion editor, was born in New York City, the daughter of Hayden Talbot, a playwright, and Benedict Bristow. After the Talbots were divorced in about 1913, Mrs. Talbot had to find a way to support herself, and her daughter later remembered: “When my mother divorced my father she wasn’t trained for anything … had never worked … didn’t have any experience, but what she did have was a flair for fashion. … Mother knew fashion and she was fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time.” Benedict Talbot went to work as a fashion stylist for Lord & Taylor department store, setting her daughter an example as a working woman as well as a fashion expert....
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Kathleen Feeney
Bloomer, Amelia Jenks (27 May 1818–30 December 1894), temperance and women's rights reformer and editor, temperance and women’s rights reformer and editor, was born in Homer, New York, the daughter of Ananias Jenks, a clothier, and Lucy Webb. She received a basic education in Homer’s district schools and by the age of seventeen was teaching in Clyde, New York. After a year of teaching, Bloomer became a governess and tutor for a Waterloo, New York, family....
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Maurine H. Beasley
Booth, Mary Louise (19 April 1831–05 March 1889), magazine editor and translator, was born in Millville (later Yaphank), Long Island, New York, the oldest child of William Chatfield Booth, a schoolteacher, and Nancy Monsell. Booth attended local schools at Yaphank and at Williamsburgh, which became part of Brooklyn, where the family moved in 1844 when her father became principal of a public school. Mainly, however, she was self-taught, reading the entire Bible at age five and Racine in the original French at seven. Although her father thought teaching the only suitable career for a woman, and she taught in his school briefly (about 1845–1846), she aspired to a literary career....
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Ann T. Keene
Chase, Edna Woolman (14 March 1877–20 March 1957), magazine editor, was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey, the daughter of Franklyn Alloway and Laura Woolman. Her parents divorced during her infancy, and her mother remarried and moved to New York City, leaving Edna to be brought up by her maternal grandparents in New Jersey. Her mother’s family were members of the Society of Friends—Laura Woolman was a descendant of ...
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Dorothy M. Scura
Clark, Emily Tapscott (08 September 1892–02 July 1953), editor and writer, was born in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of the Reverend William Meade Clark, rector of St. George’s Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and Nancy Tapscott. The Clark family moved to Richmond in 1896 when the scholarly Mr. Clark became rector of St. James’s Episcopal Church and editor of the ...
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William S. Powell
Clarke, Mary Bayard Devereux (13 May 1827–30 March 1886), poet and editor, was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, the daughter of Thomas Pollock Devereux—Yale graduate, lawyer, and owner of several large plantations—and Catherine Anne Johnson, great-granddaughter of Samuel Johnson (1696–1772), first president of King’s College (now Columbia University) in New York. Among her other ancestors were five colonial governors. Her brother, John, was educated at Yale; and after her mother’s death in 1836, Mary and her sisters were taught at home by an English governess who closely followed the Yale course of study....
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W. Farrell O’Gorman
Demorest, Ellen Curtis (15 November 1824–10 August 1898), publisher and businesswoman, was born Ellen Louise Curtis in Schuylerville, New York, the daughter of Henry Curtis, a farmer and manufacturer, and Electa Abel. She attended local schools and graduated from Schuylerville Academy at age eighteen. Exposed to the fashion industry from an early age—her father’s factory made hats, and the nearby resort at Saratoga Springs regularly featured dapper visitors from across the nation—she established a prosperous local millinery business immediately after graduating. Within a year she had moved on to larger markets in Troy and finally—by the early 1850s—to New York City. Settling in Brooklyn, she met merchant William Jennings Demorest during a business transaction. They were married in 1858. In addition to raising two children from her husband’s first marriage—he was a widower—Demorest would have two of her own. Unlike most couples of their era, the Demorests became equal partners in professional as well as domestic life....
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Dodge, Mary Elizabeth Mapes (26 January 1831?–21 August 1905), editor and author, was born in New York City, the daughter of James Jay Mapes, an agricultural reformer, and Sophia Furman. She and her siblings were educated at home, mainly by their father, a brilliant but impecunious self-taught chemist, inventor, and publisher. In a home where intellectual endeavors were valued as highly as material goods, the Mapes children frequently encountered scientists, poets, musicians, journalists, and statesmen, giving them access to a truly liberal education. Lizzie, as the young Mary Elizabeth was known, was an avid reader of English literature, and by her teens she was assisting her father in editorial duties....
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Fauset, Jessie Redmon (27 April 1882–30 April 1961), writer, editor, and teacher, was born outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in Camden County, New Jersey, the daughter of Redmon Fauset, an African Methodist Episcopal minister, and Annie Seamon. Fauset was probably the first black woman at Cornell University, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in classical and modern languages in 1905. She taught briefly in Baltimore before accepting a job teaching French and Latin at the famed all-black M Street (later Dunbar) High School in Washington, D.C. While teaching, Fauset completed an M.A. in French at the University of Pennsylvania (1919)....
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Jessie Redmon Fauset. Oil on canvas, 1945, by Laura Wheeler Waring. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Harmon Foundation.
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Jay Neugeboren
Foley, Martha (21 March 1897–05 September 1977), editor and writer, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Irish-American parents, Walter Foley, a physician, and Millicent McCarty, a schoolteacher who had also written a novel and a book of verse. When both of her parents fell ill, Foley was sent with her half-brother to stay with a family who, she later wrote, “either did not like or did not understand children.” It was a harsh and brutal period in her life, mitigated only, she recalled, by the fact that her parents’ library went with her. “Those books became home to me,” she wrote, “the only home I was to know for a long time.”...
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French, Lucy Virginia Smith (16 March 1825–31 March 1881), writer and editor, was born in Accomac County, Virginia, the daughter of Mease W. Smith, a lawyer and educator, and Elizabeth Parker. French’s wealthy and cultured family—dating to the revolutionary war—provided her with a solid education for her extensive writing career. After their mother’s death in 1826, French and her younger sister, Lide, were educated at Miss Foster’s Presbyterian boarding school in Washington, Pennsylvania (her maternal grandmother’s hometown), from which Lucy graduated with honors in 1846. In 1848 she and her sister returned to Virginia, only to leave within the same year because they were unhappy with their father’s remarriage. They moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where both were able to secure teaching jobs. Their self-willed exodus from Virginia strengthened the bond between the sisters, who remained close all their lives....
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Fuller, Margaret (23 May 1810–19 July 1850), author and feminist, was born Sarah Margaret Fuller in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, the daughter of Timothy Fuller, a lawyer, and Margaret Crane. Her father taught his oldest child reading at age three and Latin at age six, but Fuller’s education grew eclectic in later childhood when she was left largely to her own resources. “To excel in all things should be your constant aim; mediocrity is obscurity,” her father wrote to Margaret when she was ten. Under such pressures, Fuller suffered periodically throughout her life from depression and headaches. Timothy Fuller was often away, serving four terms in Congress (1817–1825). Margaret’s mother, a devout Unitarian, was subdued by sickly health. In Fuller’s fictional ...
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Gilder, Jeannette Leonard (03 October 1849–17 January 1916), editor, literary critic, and author, was born in Flushing, New York, the daughter of Reverend William Henry Gilder, the principal of a Long Island seminary for girls, and Jane Nutt. Because of frequent changes in employment, Reverend Gilder moved about considerably during Jeannette’s childhood; he left the seminary in Flushing to take Methodist congregations in Redding and in Fair Haven, Pennsylvania, then later opened another school in Yonkers, New York. Jeannette’s childhood years were spent in Flushing and in Bordentown, New Jersey, the home of her mother’s family; there Jeannette received most of her erratic education. The Gilders settled permanently in Bordentown after the death of Reverend Gilder, in 1864, from smallpox contracted while he served as a Methodist chaplain in the Union army....
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Diane Prenatt
Gilman, Caroline Howard (08 October 1794–15 September 1888), writer and editor, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Samuel Howard, a prosperous shipwright who had participated in the Boston Tea Party, and Anna Lillie. Her father died in 1797 and, after her mother’s death in 1804, Gilman spent the rest of her youth with relatives in Concord, Dedham, Watertown, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. At a series of local schools she received the education typically given to young women of the time, although she was taught Latin, which she later recalled as “a great step for that period.” During these years she gave early evidence of literary talent with the composition of an epistolary novel and the publication, when she was sixteen, of a poem, “Jephthah’s Rash Vow.”...
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Joyce W. Warren
Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell (24 October 1788–30 April 1879), magazine editor, was born in Newport, New Hampshire, the daughter of Gordon Buell and Martha Whittlesey, farmers. She was educated at home, first by her mother and then by her brother, Horatio, who during his years at Dartmouth College outlined a course of study for his sister that paralleled his own. She taught school from 1806 until 1813. In 1813 she married David Hale, a lawyer, who continued her education. He died of pneumonia in 1822, leaving her with little money and the fear that their five children would be “deprived of the advantages of education.” She subsequently began writing, she later said, “in the hope of gaining the means for [their] support and education.” Friends of her husband helped establish her and her sister-in-law in a millinery business, but Hale did not succeed in the venture. In 1823 the same friends backed the publication of a book of her poetry, ...
