Male Entitlement, c. 1800, Philadelphia

During the first years of the nineteenth century, when Rebecca was beginning her charitable endeavors with the Female Association, she was part of the literary set which had formed in 1801 around the new Philadelphia periodical, the Port Folio. The Female Association brought her into contact with the matrons who had founded the organization; her social life, with the young literati of Philadelphia. There was virtually no overlap between these two groups.

However, in the Port Folio issue dated May 22, 1802, someone who calls himself "Quixote" reports that the women he knows have a lively curiosity about the Tuesday Club, an informal group of young male contributors to the periodical who were spending more time with each other than with the ladies. He presents himself as a defender of the women's interests, having suggested that the Club elect a secretary who could then provide its minutes to each meeting of the "Philadelphia Female Association." Unfortunately, he says, he was voted down, but promises to encourage the club members to spend their leisure in female company. For this he requires no reward, "and in return we will not ask, or even wish, to be admitted at the meetings of the Philadelphia Female Association."

Well, that's patronizing but not at all unusual. Misogyny has always been a theme of satire (because most satirists have been male). It would have been more remarkable if the young men of Philadelphia had written of women with respect. But it is interesting in two regards: that the first nonsectarian charity organized by women is picked out is a worthy object for male disdain, and that the only person in the Female Association who was also part of the coterie around the Port Folio was Rebecca Gratz.

This suggests that the writer was Samuel Ewing, one of the Port Folio's most prolific contributors and a man who certainly seems (based on other evidence) to have loved and admired Rebecca. Here though, he is up to something else. He chooses curiosity, a failing traditionally ascribed to women, as the problem which he seeks to allay although the women would much rather have the men's company again than receive information about their club activities. Implicit in Quixote's "helpfulness" is the message that the men are not about to make themselves more available. At the same time, he belittles the Female Association, the one interest which Samuel Ewing did not share with Rebecca and which may have been making her less available to him. The point of view here is men will do as they please; women should not allow interests which men find boring to interfere with their availability. If a woman was less than enchanted with the perspective revealed here -- hey, it was just a little light humor. Any woman who objected was likely to be labelled a prig or a bluestocking.

I am not trying to blacken Samuel Ewing's character by speculating on his authorship. Whoever wrote it shows no more arrogance than the average man of the time. The insidious and casual entitlement displayed by the author was so pervasive among men that the writer probably would have had no sense of his own bias.

Rebecca chafed under the men's prevailing attitudes. Although she rarely criticized classes of people, she wrote to a friend in 1800, "As all men claim a superiority, tis proper they should possess it and I believe those who have least to boast, are not the most sensible of their deficiency." Here it sounds as though she may be willing to consider that some men might have a claim to superiority although she knows many who do not. But in 1804, she wrote in exasperation that she had heard so much about "woman's whim" (another traditional female failing) but would "not again reject a woman's word for any lord of the creation." It doesn't sound as though she was about to cede anything to any man.

The male attitudes were hard to bear in repartee, but they were infinitely more onerous as institutionalized in law. Married women, although they may have brought wealth into their marriage, and inherited wealth afterwards, owned nothing. Everything belonged to the husband who could do with it as he wished. Many women's charities (including the Female Association) would require that their treasurer be a single woman, spinster or widow, so that a husband could not commandeer for himself the money she was holding for the organization. This rule was often honored in the breach but it was nonetheless on the books. Similarly, the children of a marriage, in the event of a divorce, were the husband's as they were seen as part of his goods and chattels. The feminist movement from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century is usually remembered as a struggle for women's suffrage, but early on it had other very serious issues to address.

(Rebecca's letter from 1800 is in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection at the Library of Congress; the 1804 letter is in the Verplanck Collection at the New York Historical Society.)

Rebecca Makes Use of Her Writing Skills

In biographical sketches of Rebecca Gratz she is often credited as a founder and the initial secretary of the Female Association, the first nondenominational charity in Philadelphia organized by women. As I have shown in the previous post and the one dated December 1, 2009, this is an exaggeration.

However, Rebecca did become the second secretary of the Association sometime between 1804 and 1808, probably earlier rather than later in this period because Sarah Butler Mease, the first secretary, delivered her third child in four years in 1804 and was likely ready to give over some of her responsibilities outside the home at that time.

Rebecca's election as secretary was quite an achievement. Although American girls had much more freedom than their peers in Europe, they became full adults only when they married. In social matters, the matrons held sway, and married women would naturally hold the important positions in charities. Rebecca's election to the post of secretary when she was a marriageable girl in her twenties tells us that the Association was 1) so desperate to fill the post that they took a chance on a young woman or 2) that Rebecca's work for the organization and her general comportment showed her to be a viable candidate despite her age.

Either way, Rebecca benefited because she found she had a talent for her new responsibilities. She had always loved literature -- her relationship with Samuel Ewing, a published poet, was based in part on this mutual interest -- and she was at this time part of the social set which had formed around a literary periodical called the Port Folio, published in Philadelphia since 1801. Many of the young men she knew published poetry and articles in the PF -- and at least four of her women friends were also contributors. Although she wrote poetry, there is no evidence that Rebecca ever submitted anything for publication; she probably knew that her poetical efforts did not rise above the amateur.

As secretary of the Female Association, she had a chance to try her hand at a different type of writing. Her main responsibility was the minutes of the meetings which she produced with accuracy and thoroughness. But the secretary's duties also included the creation of the Annual Report which was read at the yearly public meeting of the Association. Often charities printed up these reports as pamphlets for prospective donors or published them in newspapers as advertisements.

I have not come across a single example of Rebecca's annual reports for the Female Association, but based on her extant work for later charities, I can say that she grasped the importance of the reports' public relations and promotional function. Besides a list of good works, her reports made a clear statement of the charity's mission and explained the necessity for donations at the moment at hand. In 1824, two years after she gave up her office as secretary of the Female Association, the Port Folio ran an overview of local charities, based on their yearly reports. It stated that the Association "has published its annual address, but it enters into no particulars from which any conjecture may be formed of the present situation of the society."

Obviously Rebecca's talents were not so common. When a family tragedy caused her to try to resign as secretary of the Philadelphia Orphan Society in 1823, she was deflected from her purpose, probably by those who realized how hard she would be to replace.

Rebecca had found that she could use her writing abilities in the service of a good cause, a situation which she must have deemed very satisfactory. The office of secretary provided her with a central role in the organization and therefore the power to foster projects and help bring them to fruition. All in all, it was a congenial position for her and one she would accept again in two more of her charities.

(My assertion that Rebecca kept thorough minutes is based on information in the Crampton pamphlet, cited in my post of December 1, 2009. Ms. Crampton, writing in 1965, seems to have had more original FA material than is accessible now, and I am relying on her for accuracy. Rebecca's letter of resignation is in the collection of Philadelphia Orphan Society materials at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The quote from the Port Folio is from its April 1824 issue.)

The Female Association

In my blog post dated December 1, 2009, I provided an introduction to women's charities as well as information about the founders of the first women's nonsectarian charity in Philadelphia, the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances. The women who met in October 1800 had ambitions for their charity, but they were also prudent. Male concerns about the delicacy of women working with the poor, the need for financial support from men and perhaps their own collective comfort zone combined to make the objects of their charity women and children of all social classes who were in need through no fault of their own. (Most often, they were in reduced circumstances due to the loss of their breadwinner.) Helping the respectable and deserving poor was less a cause of concern for the men in the community.

Since many of their potential clients were embarrassed by their fall into poverty, the founders of the Female Association planned to have a representative, called a manageress, in each ward of the city who could locate and be available to those in need. Each manageress would inform the Board of Directoresses about her clients and their requirements, and the Board would authorize such financial aid or goods as it deemed necessary. The founders also created a "select committee" to attend to "those persons whose peculiar circumstances prevent their situations from being publicly known" (i.e., women from the upper classes). This option meant that these women would remain anonymous in the organization's records.

To do all this, the Female Association needed a large number of active members -- about 14 manageresses throughout the city, a board of directoresses to make the decisions and officers to run the organization -- about 30 women who were willing and able to commit a significant amount of time to meetings, fundraising and social work. This may be the reason that the organization became nonsectarian -- one congregation could not provide enough women with both the time and inclination for good works.

We do not know how Rebecca became involved with the Female Association, but a pamphlet about the organization shows that she was a member from 1801, along with her mother, her sister Richea Hays and her aunt Bella Cohen. (Her sister Rachel joined in 1803.) Of the nearly one hundred women on the membership list in 1803--an annual donation of $3 was the sole requirement for members--several others were Jewish. Their full names are not always given, but it seems that another family of civic-minded women was among them: Rebecca Machado Phillips, a Mrs. Levy who was probably her daughter Rachel and a Miss Levy.  (We will meet Phillips family again at the founding of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society.) Another was Miss Deborah Cohen, the daughter of Jacob Cohen, the hazzan (reader) at Mikveh Israel.

In the first years of the Female Association, Rebecca Gratz was not an officer or a manageress, but she did more than pay her dues. In a pamphlet from 1803, there is mention of the soup kitchen, a new idea from Europe, which the surprisingly adventurous Association had adopted as a way of feeding the poor. A building had to be renovated to fill this function and topping the list of Female Association fundraisers for the new soup kitchen was Rebecca Gratz with $35, not an insignificant amount in those days. Rebecca's conversational powers, so admired by Samuel Ewing in his character sketch (post dated September 8, 2009), were now being used for a good purpose. Her dedication to the Female Association would be noted.

(Information for this post came from the pamphlet cited in the previous post on the Female Association, dated December 1, 2009, and two editions of another pamphlet, The Constitution of the Female Association..., dated 1801 and 1803, which may be viewed at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Also consulted (and quoted) is a book, Invisible Philadelphia: community through voluntary organizations, compiled and edited by Jean Barth Toll and Mildred S. Gillam, Atwater Kent Museum, Philadelphia, 1995.)

Women's Charities, Philadelphia 1800

Philadelphia had always been a progressive city, and by the last decade of the eighteenth century, it had produced numerous charities, some run by religious organizations, some by ethnic groups, others by professions, but all created and organized by men.

The first charity developed by women was the Female Benevolent Society at the African Church (now the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas). A mutual aid society introduced in 1793, the organization was made up of subscribers who could call upon it for help if and when they were in need.

The second women's charity, founded by Anne Parrish, a member of the Society of Friends, and administered by the women of her Meeting, also originated during the difficult period 1793-1995 when Philadelphia suffered through two yellow fever epidemics. Shortly after its formation, the Female Society of Philadelphia for the Relief and Employment of the Poor (as the organization came to be known) received a letter from a male Friend who was concerned about the "indelicacy" of women working with the urban poor. The Secretary copied the letter into the minutes, and the group proceeded with their endeavors. In the early years of the nineteenth century, they were best known for their Hall of Industry, where they paid poor women to spin.

What is noticeable here is that these are good works attributable to outlying groups, not the women from the socially and politically prominent families who attended the Dancing Assemblies. It would not be until October of 1800 that a group of such women met in the parlor of the minister of the Second Presbyterian Church to begin their efforts for the needy. Among them were Hannah Boudinot, whose husband had been president of the Continental Congress in 1782-83; her daughter Susan Bradford, widow of an Attorney General of the United States; Sarah Butler Mease, a daughter of a signer of the Declaration; Sarah Ralston, a daughter of Mayor Matthew Clarkson whose leadership during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 fostered calm and produced effective action in the city; and Miss Sproat, probably a daughter of the Rev. Mr. James Sproat of Second Presbyterian who died ministering to the sick during the same epidemic. Although they met under the auspices of a religious congregation, these women came from families with a tradition of civic responsibility as well. In the new republic they may have seen their actions as not simply a way to live their faith, but also as their contribution to nation-building. In a republic, who better than they to see the needs of poor women and take up the task of helping those in difficult circumstances?

Nearly 40 years later, Dr. Ashbel Green in whose parlor this meeting took place would remember: "It was at that period an untried experiment for the female to attempt extending the sphere of her exertions beyond the narrow limits of her own household." Yet these women were about to found an ambitious citywide organization, the first to go beyond a single congregation and become truly nonsectarian in its membership. Among the first women to become members in the organization's first full year were a number of Jewish women including twenty-year-old Rebecca Gratz.

(The information about the earliest charities is from Bruce Dorsey's 2002 book Reforming men and women: gender in the antebellum city. Information about the founding of the Female

Association is from a pamphlet by Eleanor S. Wistar Crampton, "The Female Association of Philadelphia for the Relief of Women and Children," published in Philadelphia in 1965. I found it among the Female Association papers at Haverford College's library.)