A Biographical Sketch of Lillie Devereux Blake
by Rosalind Rosenberg
Ann Whitney Olin Professor
Department of History
Barnard College, Columbia University
Lillie Devereux Blake (August 12, 1833 - December
30, 1913), the woman for
whom P.S. 6 is named, was a prominent author and leading
suffragist in the
late 19th century. In the 1870s she commenced a campaign to open
Columbia
College to women, a campaign that ultimately led to the founding
of Barnard
College. Her daughter, Katherine Devereux Blake, was herself a
suffragist,
as well as a teacher and P.S. 6's first principal.
Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, the daughter of
planter George Pollock
Devereux and Sarah Elizabeth Johnson, Lillie Devereux Blake spent
her early
childhood in the South. Following the death of her father in
1837,
however, her mother decided to return home with her daughters to
Connecticut and Blake grew up with her Johnson relatives in New
Haven.
The Johnsons had long occupied a lofty position in university and
political
life. Blake was the great great granddaughter of Samuel Johnson,
the
first president of Columbia University, when it was still King's
College
(1754-1763), and the great granddaughter of William Samuel
Johnson, the
first president of Columbia after the American Revolution
(1787-1800), a
member of the Continental Congress, a delegate to the
Constitutional
Convention, and a senator from Connecticut.
A brilliant and spirited young woman, Blake attended Miss
Apthorp's school
for girls in New Haven until she was fifteen and then studied the
Yale
College curriculum with a tutor. In 1855, she married Frank
Umsted, a
lawyer from Philadelphia, and settled briefly in St. Louis,
where, after
the birth of her first daughter, Bessie, in 1857, she began
writing short
stories and essays for Harper's Weekly and the Knickerbocker. In
her
fiction, Blake subverted conventional courtship narratives by
portraying
heroines as courageous figures and heroes as vulnerable
creatures, easily
dominated but quick to disparage women as "mere
playthings." After moving
to New York and giving birth to a second daughter, Katherine, in
1858,
Blake published her first novel, Southwald, in February 1859.
Three months
later her twenty-six year old husband, having lost her
inheritance, killed
himself with his revolver.
Traumatized by the suicide of her husband, Blake resisted
remarriage as a
solution to her financial predicament and began writing again.
She became a
war correspondent during the Civil War, and went on to write
hundreds of
stories and articles, as well as four more novels. Her novel
Fettered for
Life (1874) is still in print. In 1866 she married Grinfill
Blake, who
worked for a manufacturing firm in New York, and kept on writing.
The
couple had no children.
Blake embarked on a second career as a women's rights advocate in
1869,
when she joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in
the fight
for woman suffrage. Widely known for her personal charm and
beauty, Blake
also proved to be a powerful orator, a talent that she parlayed
into the
presidency of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association
(1879-90) and
the New York City Woman Suffrage League (1886-1900). Blake always
insisted, however, that the vote was only one of the goals women
should
pursue in their search for complete social, political, and
economic
equality. Access to higher education, in particular, attracted
her support.
On October 4, 1873, she petitioned President F. A. P. Barnard, on
behalf
of her daughters and other qualified young women, to open
Columbia College
to females. Invoking the authority of the college's charter,
which
dedicated the institution to the training of the "youth of
the city," she
argued that "youth" should be understood to include
women as well as men.
Barnard presented her plea to the Columbia Board of Trustees with
his
endorsement two days later, and the board referred the matter to
a
committee chaired by the Reverend Morgan Dix. The Rector of
Trinity
Church, a leading Columbia Trustee, a fervent opponent of woman
suffrage,
and an equally determined opponent of coeducation, Dix persuaded
the board
at its next meeting that "it is inexpedient to take any
action on the
subject." Undaunted, Blake enlisted the help of Sorosis, the
pioneering New
York club for professional women, which renewed her plea in 1876,
the year
of the nation's centennial. Again, she met defeat.
In early 1883, as public debate over the possibility of opening
Columbia
College to women students reached an emotional peak, she entered
the fray
once more in a famous battle with the Reverend Dix. During Lent
that year,
the Reverend Dix gave a series of sermons, published as
"Lectures on the
Calling of a Christian Woman and Her Training to Fulfill It"
(1883), in
which he warned the public that educating women and men together
would lead
to communist revolution. Blake promptly issued a rebuttal in a
series of
withering lectures of her own, published as "Women's Place
Today"(1883), in
which she insisted on women's right to full economic,
educational, and
political equality with men.
While Blake failed in her ambition to open Columbia College to
women, the
Columbia Trustees finally capitulated to public opinion in 1883
by
authorizing a "Collegiate Course," whereby women could
qualify for a
Columbia College degree by studying on their own and passing the
requisite
exams. A small handful of women did so before a campaign led by
Annie
Nathan Meyer led to the founding of Barnard College in 1889.
Barred from attending Columbia, Katherine Devereux Blake attended
the
city's Normal School, now Hunter College. She became a teacher in
the New
York City Schools and rose to the position of principal of P.S.
6.
[For further reading see: Grace Ferrell, "Lillie Devereux
Blake
(1833-1913)," Legacy, vol. 14, no. 2 (1997): 146 53.
Ferrell's full
biography of Blake is forthcoming from the University of
Massachusetts
Press. Blake's papers are at the Missouri Historical Society and
the Sophia
Smith Collection at Smith College. Her daughter, Katherine
Devereux Blake,
wrote a memoir, with the help of Margaret Louise Wallace, based
on Blake's
papers, entitled Champion of Women: The Life of Lillie Devereux
Blake
(1943). See also biographical essays in Dictionary of American
Biography,
Notable American Women, and American National Biography. A
portrait of
Blake, painted by William Oliver Stone in 1859, and donated to
Columbia
University by her grandchildren in 1992, hangs in the Columbiana
Room of
Low Library at Columbia University.]
Also, I checked the Swarthmore Peace Archives, where Katherine
Devereux
Blake's papers are kept. According the to brief biography they
have on
her, she was principal of P.S. 6 until 1927. The website is:
http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/CDGA.A-L/blake.htm
Best wishes,
Rosalind
Posted with permission from:
*********************************
Rosalind Rosenberg
Ann Whitney Olin Professor
Department of History
Barnard College
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
Telephone: 212-854-5046
FAX: 212-987-6007
rrosenberg@barnard.edu
rr91@columbia.edu
*********************************
Dear Rosalind,
So there it is! 1894-1927, our first principal,
born 1858,
graduated from Hunter 1876,
taught 18 years till,
appointed principal in 1894 at age 36,
served 33 years till retirement at age 69 in 1927.
Thank you.
Steve Hackbarth
"Katherine Devereux Blake was born on July 10, 1858; her
mother, Lillie Devereux Blake, was a pioneer suffragist,
newspaper correspondent and novelist. Katherine graduated in 1876
from what later became Hunter College, and thereafter began her
career as a public school teacher in New York City. In 1894, she
was appointed principal of Public School 6 (later named The
Lillie Devereux Blake School), which position she held until her
retirement in 1927. Through the years she served on a number of
committees that promoted teacher benefits, good relations between
public schools and the National Education Association,
improvements in classroom lighting and sanitation, reform of
school books, night school for women, and the election of women
to the New York Board of Education (Blake was the first woman
treasurer) and to the presidency of the National Education
Association. Blake was one of the 19 teachers chosen to accompany
Dr. John Dewey on his official visit to Russia in 1928."
Katherine
Devereux Blake: http://www.swarthmore.edu/Library/peace/CDGA.A-L/blake.htm
Dear Steve,
I've been trying to figure out exactly when P.S. 6 was named the
Lillie
Devereux Blake School. I do not have an answer yet, but I just
reread
Katherine Blake's biography of her mother and no longer believe
the naming
could have taken place before LDB's death in 1914. This is what
Katherine
Blake writes on the final page of the biography of her mother,
Champion of
Women: The Life of Lillie Devereux Blake (1943):
"Later on [after LDB's death in 1914], New York City Public
School No. 6,
of which I was Principal, was named for her, and I was permitted
to place
at the front entrance of the building a bronze tablet telling of
her work"
(222).
Best wishes,
Rosalind
>
>Thanks Rosalind.
>The plaque (now in the rotunda) reads "Devereux,"
but in front
>of the school it is engraved "Devereaux." Is that
an acceptable
>alternative spelling as far as you
>know? We have "Deveraux" on our logo; an allowable
spelling?
>Thanks.
>Steve
Dear Steve,
I have never seen Devereux spelled with an "a" and
assume that the
engraving was a mistake.
I discovered something in the Teachers College archives yesterday
that you
might be interested in. I came across some heavy volumes of old
Teacher
Payroll records. On a whim I pull out the book for 1901 and
discovered the
following. P.S. 6 had a boys department and a girls department,
each with
its own principal. The boys' principal was Wilbur Hudson, whose
salary for
the year was $3500. The girls' principal was Katherine D. Blake,
and her
salary was $2500. I checked about a dozen other schools. Each had
a boys'
principal who made $3500 and a girls' principal who made $2500.
I was, first of all, dismayed to see the salary discrepancy --
which seemed
to be standard and to take no account of experience, credentials,
etc. But
I was also intrigued by the two-schools-in-one pattern. I know
from the
centennial newspaper you sent me that P.S. 6 originally had a
boys
department. What I did not know was that it also had a boys
principal who
significantly out-earned KDB.
So now I have more questions. When did the dual principal
practice
end? Did there come a time when KDB became the sole principal of
P.S. 6,
and if so when was that?
Best,
Rosalind
Fruitful historical research, like that in the fields of astronomy and physics, raises more questions than it answers.
Steve
March 20, 2001
Dear Steve,
I spent yesterday afternoon in the Columbia University Teachers
College
Archives and discovered the following:
1) According to the Department of Education Building records,
P.S. 6 was
"designated as the Lillie Devereux Blake School" on
March 22, 1916. So it
was not named the LDB School when it opened in 1894, as we had
thought. The archivist thinks that there was a movement in the
teens to
name schools after people, so P.S. 6 may have been part of this
wider trend.
2) Katherine Devereux Blake was principal of the "Girls
Department" of P.S.
6 from 1894 to 1911, at which point the male principal of the
"Boys
Department" disappeared and KDB became the school's sole
principal.
3) Also in 1911 the New York State Legislature passed an equal
pay act that
made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex. The law
provided that
"in the schedule of salaries hereafter adopted there shall
be no
discrimination based on the sex of the member." Salaries
were to be
regulated solely on the basis of merit, grade of class taught, or
experience. New York did not eliminated salary discrimination
between
elementary and high school teachers until 1947.
Best wishes,
Rosalind
*********************************
Rosalind Rosenberg
Ann Whitney Olin Professor
Department of History
Barnard College
3009 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
Telephone: 212-854-5046
FAX: 212-987-6007
rrosenberg@barnard.edu
rr91@columbia.edu
*********************************