#sorosis

My latest work on Zoe Wilbour and the Wilbour Family Papers, which I am processing for the Brooklyn Museum Archives, took me to the Little Compton Historical Society in Little Compton, Rhode Island. The Wilbour family played an important role in the small seaside town of Little Compton, which boasts an eponymous cemetery and the Wilbour Woods, a section of forest named after the family.

Charles Edwin Wilbour’s mother, Sarah Soule Wilbour, and his wife, Charlotte Beebee Wilbour, were both active in the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Rhode Island and New York. Sarah Soule Wilbour paid taxes in protest throughout her life, in objection to the taxation of women without attendant voting rights. Sarah was also an active member of the National Woman Suffrage Association, founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Letters from both Stanton and Anthony are contained in the Wilbour Family Papers here at the Brooklyn Museum (one of which is shown above the bone folder).

Charlotte Beebee Wilbour served as the president of the New York-based women’s club, Sorosis, as well as chairing the Committee on Correspondence for the Friends of Woman’s Suffrage in the State of New York. She maintained regular correspondence with Susan B. Anthony, including a letter from May 26, 1872, on long-term loan from the Newport Historical Society to the LCHS, in which Anthony describes an open bench warrant for her arrest in Ontario County, New York, where she was conducting a lecture circuit. We are delighted to find similar letters to and from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the Brooklyn Museum Archives."

On August 6, 1872, the first meeting of the Nantucket Sorosis Club took place at the home of Sarah Cathcart on Main Street.  Originally founded in New York in 1868, several of its founding members were Nantucket women such as Maria Mitchell and Reverend Phebe Coffin Hanaford, and the club appropriately found its way to Nantucket where Hanaford first publicly announced its inaugural meeting from the pulpit of the Unitarian Church.  Its purpose: the “intellectual improvement of its members, by means of written essays, select readings, recitations and discussions upon the current questions of the day.”  It was Hanaford and Nantucket summer resident Rebecca Morse – members of the New York Sorosis – who developed the idea of founding a Nantucket Sorosis.  Like the sewing circles founded earlier in the nineteenth century, the development of a Sorosis on Nantucket may have been in part to aid women not only during a period of economic decline on the island, but to help those women who found that they were now losing their jobs as whalemen returned to the island for good and tried to “reclaim” the jobs of men.  It was also a logical club to have for women on the island – given the history of their playing such an integral role in all aspects of island life.  Two other island women involved with the Nantucket Sorosis Club were Eliza Starbuck Barney and the Reverend Louise S. Baker.

The main Sorosis club came about as a reaction by female journalists barred from attending and reporting on Charles Dickens’ first public lecture in the United States in New York City.  They quickly came together to created forms of support for one another in their field, expanding to include women working in a variety of other fields – science among them.  Thus, Maria Mitchell was one of the founding members when the first official meeting was held at Delmonico’s in NYC.

With a thirteen-article constitution, the Nantucket Sorosis had a board of directors with officers being elected annually.  The club hosted lecturers and orators, discussed social and political issues – particularly those of woman suffrage – and also discussed art, literature, travel, and current events.  The Nantucket Sorosis lasted approximately thirty years.  Little is known about who was involved outside of key players and when exactly the group folded and why, but the last printed material that can be located dates to 1903, and by that time most of the Nantucket Sorosis members were in their seventies and eighties.