The Remarkable Anna Carpenter (Garlin) Spencer

Anna Carpenter (Garlin) Spencer

 [April 17, 1851 - February 12, 1931]

It was 162 years ago today (April 17, 1851), that Anna Carpenter Garlin was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts.  Anna was the fourth and youngest child of Nancy Mason Carpenter and her husband, Francis Warren Garlin.  Anna's mother Nancy was the older sister of my 2x great grandfather, Samuel Carpenter.  Nancy was also the author of the reply letter to Miss Emily Aplin as recounted in my article for American Ancestors magazine (Vol. 12, No. 4 -- Fall 2011) -- Echoes from the Dorr Rebellion: The 1842 Aplin/Carpenter Correspondence.  [The article was republished on this blog with the kind permission of the New England Historic Genealogical Society on January 14, 2013.  See, http://filiopietismprism.blogspot.com/2013/01/echoes-from-door-rebellion-1842.html]

Anna died in New York just shy of 80 years old on February 12, 1931  -- twenty-two years to the day after she was one of 19 women and 42 men who signed the "Call for the Lincoln Emancipation Conference in 1909."  That manifesto, now generally referred to as "The Call," was signed by sixty prominent African American and caucasian leaders.  The Call brought about a meeting of progressives of different races, religions, educational attainment, and socioeconomic means and they emerged as the founders of the NAACP. [See the March 12, 2013 post on this blog, Fearless Females -- Nineteen Who Joined "The Call." ]

Anna may have been the "baby of the family," but it was clear from a young age that she was a self-confident and motivated girl who became quite a remarkable woman in her time.  At age 17, Anna joined the Women's Suffrage Movement of Providence, Rhode Island.  In a description of what might have been her first appearance among the suffragettes of Providence, it was later written, ". . . a young girl then in her early teens, came into a small meeting of woman-suffragists of Providence, R.I. rose unannounced, and spoke a few clear, strong words for the advancement of women.  Her dainty girlish beauty was unknown to most of the persons in the little assembly into which she had come but the slight, expressive figure, the clear brown eyes, the dainty coloring of hair and skin and above all the musical voice and the nature of what she said did not fail to attract attention and more than one of those present divined that this fluty voice and those steadfast brown eyes had a message from a soul to deliver to the world." [1]

Unusually for a woman of her time, Anna spent the years from age 18 through 21 engaged in private college tutoring in Providence schools (1869 - 1871).   During this same time, and for years beyond, she also worked as a writer for the Providence Daily Journal (1869 - 1886).

By the time Anna was 24 years old, she had developed doctrinal issues with the Congregational church to which she belonged and so in 1875 she joined the Providence Free Religious Society.  This began a new endeavor for Anna as she commenced several years of preaching to such liberal religious organizations as the Progressive Friends in Chester, Pennsylvania and the Free Religious Society in Providence.  In 1878, she was a speaker at the Free Religious Association's annual meeting and it was there that she met her future husband, Unitarian Minister William Henry Spencer, who was also a speaker at the meeting.  Anna and William were married on August 15, 1878 and they moved to Haverhill and Florence, Massachusetts and then to Troy, New York as William pursued his calling as a Unitarian minister.  Anna was his assistant in all these assignments.

In 1889, the Spencers were living in Wisconsin where William had returned to assist in the Spencer family business (a loan collection agency) and word was received that James Eddy, patron of the liberal Bell Street Chapel in Providence, had passed away.  The Eddy family wanted Anna to return to Providence to assist the Eddy family in administering the James Eddy trust.  Anna agreed to the request and the Spencers returned to Providence where Anna, now the mother of five-year-old daughter Lucy, dove into civic and religious activities.  She became Vice President of the Providence Women's Suffrage Association (the organization she had boldly addressed in her early teens) and she joined other organizations in the city.  This return to Rhode Island and Anna's flurry of civic activity undoubtedly helped her recover from the still stinging misery of having lost her first-born child, son Fletcher Carpenter Spencer.

In 1890 Anna helped found the American Purity Alliance -- later renamed the American Social Hygiene Association -- and she became the Chair of the Family Relations section.  Then, in 1891, Bell Street Chapel voted unanimously to ordain her and she became the first female ordained minister in Rhode Island.  Anna served as pastor and President of the Bell Street Chapel for the next eleven years.

Anna in a colorized photo taken in the Bell Street Chapel (date unknown)

In the years 1891 - 1902, Anna had a long list of service and involvement in religious, social and political activities from her base in Rhode Island.  She was a member of the Board of the Rhode Island State Home and School for Dependent Children; Vice President of the Providence Society for Organizing Charity; Chair of the International Congress of Charities, Correction and Philanthropy at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago; Vice President of the Free Kindergarten Association; member of the Women's Christian Temperance Movement (Providence Chapter); member of the Board of Directors for the Free Religious Association and delegate to the Unitarian Convention, the World Parliament of Religions and the Free Religious Association.  Somehow, with all this involvement and the raising her daughter, Anna also found time to write.  Over the years, she had numerous publications and books to her credit in newspapers, magazines and the likes of the Journal of Sociology, Popular Science Monthly and others.

In 1902, the Spencers moved to New York City where their daughter Lucy started a career in theater. Ever active, Anna became an Associate Director of the New York School of Philanthropy (later known as the New York School of Social Work before it was merged into Columbia University as its School of Social Work).  Anna lectured at the School of Philanthropy until 1912.  She also was Associate Director of the New York Society for Ethical Culture.  Among her later academic pursuits, she was a lecturer on Social Service at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago.  From 1913 - 1918, she was Professor of Sociology and Ethics at Meadville Theological School in Pennsylvania and she was a special lecturer at Teachers College, Columbia University from 1920 until her death.  

Anna's husband died in 1923 and Anna herself died of a heart attack in New York on Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1931, while attending a dinner of the League of Nations Association.

Anna Carpenter (Garlin) Spencer on the right with Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of Lucy Stone.

Anna Carpenter (Garlin) Spencer was an author, lecturer, ordained minister and social activist.  She is  my 1st cousin 3x removed.  

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[1]     Quote from a hand-written script found among the papers in the Anna Garlin Spencer Papers (DG 034), Swarthmore College Peace Collection. [Author unknown.]

All photographs of Anna Carpenter (Garlin) Spencer from photographs in the Anna Garlin Spencer Papers (DG 034), Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew
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Fearless Females -- Nineteen Who Joined "The Call"

Last month was Black History Month in the U.S. and Canada (the UK also celebrates it, but in October).  This month is National Women's History Month.  Here are 19 Fearless Women who are worthy of noting and remembering every March AND February:

     Miss Jane Addams of Chicago                                     Mrs. Ida Wells-Barnett of Chicago
     Mrs. Harriet Stanton Blatch of New York                   Miss Kate Claghorn of New York
     Miss Mary E. Dreier of Brooklyn                                Mrs. Florence Kelley of New York
     Miss Helen Marot of New York                                  Miss Mary E. McDowell of Chicago
     Miss Lenora O'Reilly of New York                            Miss Mary W. Ovington of New York
     Dr. Jane Robbins of New York                                  Miss Helen Stokes of New York
     Mrs. Mary Church Terrell of Washington, DC           Mrs. Henry Villard of New York
     Miss Lillian D. Wald of New York                             Mrs. Rodman Wharton of Philadelphia
     President Mary E. Wooley, Mt. Holyoke College       Miss Susan P. Wharton of Philadelphia    
     Mrs. Anna Carpenter Garlin Spencer of New York

So who are these 19 women and why do I use the antiquated Miss and Mrs. distinctions throughout?  Well, that was the formal convention back in 1909 when these brave and principled women stepped up and joined "The Call."

Fannie Garrison Villard -- "Mrs. Henry Villard"
(1844 - 1928)
Daughter of publisher and noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison 

Jane Addams (1860 - 1935)
First American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

Mary Church Terrell (1863 - 1954)

Daughter of slaves she was one of the first African-American

women to earn a college degree 

1909 was a time in America when women still did not have full voting rights.  It was a place where Jim Crow laws were rampant throughout many states in the country and where the civil rights of black Americans were violated in horrible ways with very little official intervention.  Black Americans were beaten, tortured and lynched for the most minor of infractions and often for no reason other than being non-white.  Just five to seven years later, white mobs in largely Southern states lynched 126 black Americans.  It was not an easy time to be a progressive who defended and worked for the civil rights of  Americans who happened to be other than male or other than white.  As the 100th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln approached on February 12, 1909, it was not a time when there were many profiles in courage involving the political and civil equality of Americans who happened to be other than male or other than white.  And yet in early 1909 the nineteen women named above joined with forty-one men to do a remarkable thing.  They signed a manifesto that came to be known later as "The Call."

Oswald Garrison Villard wrote what he titled a "Call for the Lincoln Emancipation Conference in 1909." Sixty well-known Americans (black and white) -- including the nineteen women named above -- signed Mr. Villard's manifesto.  The manifesto stated truthfully and plainly the lack of progress in America since the time of Lincoln.  It stated in part . . .

If Mr. Lincoln could revisit this country he would be disheartened by the nation's failure . . . He would learn that on January 1st 1909, Georgia had rounded out a new oligarchy by disenfranchising the negro after the manner of all the other Southern states.  He would learn that the Supreme Court of the United States, designed to be a bulwark of American liberties, had failed to meet several opportunities to pass squarely upon this disenfranchisement of millions by laws avowedly discriminatory and openly enforced in such manner that white men may vote and black men be without a vote in their government; he would discover, there, that taxation without representation is the lot of millions of wealth-producing American citizens, in whose hands rests the economic progress and welfare of an entire section of the country.  He would learn that the Supreme Court, according to the official statement of its own judges in the Berea College case, has laid down the principle that if an individual State chooses it may "make it a crime for white and colored persons to frequent the same market place at the same time, or appear in an assemblage of citizens convened to consider questions of a public or political nature in which all citizens, without regard to race, are equally interested." . . . He would see the black men and women, for whose freedom a hundred thousand of soldiers gave their lives, sit apart in trains, in which they pay first-class for third-class service, in railway stations and in places of entertainment, while State after State declines to do its elementary duty in preparing the negro through education for the best exercise of citizenship. * * * Added to this, the spread of lawless attacks upon the negro, North, South and West -- even in Springfield made famous by Lincoln -- often accompanied by revolting brutalities, sparing neither sex, nor age nor youth, could not but shock the author of the sentiment that "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." Silence under these conditions means tacit approval.

The nineteen women named above -- who themselves still lacked the right to vote -- were joined by forty-one men and they did not remain silent.  They put out The Call saying, ". . . we call upon all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty."  The conference took place and from that meeting a new organization was founded.  It was called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  

The nineteen fearless women named above were instrumental in encouraging the formation of the NAACP in 1909; among them was Anna Carpenter Garlin Spencer.  More will be said about Anna at this blog on April 17th.

Anna Carpenter (Garlin) Spencer (1851 - 1931)

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Photograph of quote by Jane Addams in The American Adventure in the World Showcase pavilion of Walt Disney World's Epcot by Neelix.  The copyright holder released the work into the public domain.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Addams.JPG 

Photograph of  Fannie Garrison Villard (1913) was taken before 1923 and is now in the public domain in the United States.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fanny_Garrison_Villard.jpg  

Photograph of Jane Addams in profile is in the public domain in the United States and is available from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs division. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jane_Addams_profile.jpg

Photograph of Mary Church Terrell is based on the work of a National Park Service employee created as part of the person's official duties and as such is in the public domain.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mary_church_terrell.jpg

Photograph of Anna Carpenter (Garlin) Spencer from the Anna Garlin Spencer Papers (DG 034), Swarthmore College Peace Collection. 

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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew

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