Mar 01, 2025
Last year I discovered in our archives, and wrote about in this article, a massive scrapbook of posters and ads printed by J. Stillman Spear of Medfield. One of the more perplexing items in the scrapbook is a poster advertising a lecture to be given in Medfield in November of 1875 by a woman named Mary A. Livermore on the topic of “Superfluous Women.” As March is Women’s History Month, I seized the opportunity to investigate.
As always, the research process challenged my expectations. The first “hit” in my online search brought up A Superfluous Woman, a novel by late-Victorian English feminist author Emma F. Brooke (1844-1924), published in 1894 during the period of the “New Woman” movement and literary genre. Brooke was a member of the Fabian Society, (Daniels) which still exists, and bills itself as “Britain’s oldest political think tank…at the forefront of developing public policy and political ideas on the left for 140 years (Fabian).” During the author’s lifetime, the Fabians were involved in progressive causes, although the ideas they considered progressive were subject to the prejudices of the time. Through the notion of “a superfluous woman” Emma Brooke uses fictional characters to critique the rising leisure class of women who married men of great wealth, and simultaneously lost their individual identities. In one passage of dialogue, a character called Dr.Cornerstone refers to the type of woman who would “sell her best friend for a diamond,” prompting the main character, Jessamyn Haladay, to muse, “I wonder if I would do so. I love diamonds! (Brooke)”
Knowing that the Livermore lecture presented at Medfield Town Hall had a similar title, I mistakenly assumed that the Brooke novel preceded the lecture. However, I discovered that Mrs. Livermore was an iconic figure in American Women’s History whose work preceded the Brooke novel by more than two decades. The lecture was given on November 23, 1871, which was in fact Thanksgiving Day!
Mary Ashton Livermore of Melrose was a celebrated American suffragist, journalist, abolitionist, temperance advocate, and feminist, married to Daniel Parker Livermore, Doctor of Divinity. She traveled around the country to speak to Lyceum audiences. Her published writings included: Thirty Years Too Late, (1847), a temperance story; and What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? (1883). The actual lecture that Mrs. Livermore delivered on that November night at Town Hall was the final lecture in a series that may well have been sponsored by the Medfield Lyceum. The text is available to read online at Google Books in a volume titled What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? Superfluous Women and Other Lectures. One of her lectures, with the same title as that delivered in Medfield, was given in Brandon, VT in 1875 and described in the Rutland, VT newspaper. “After a brief preface, in which Mrs. Livermore summed up the gains of women during the last twenty-five years,” which included access to “colleges and professional schools” as well as employment outside the home, she declared that “it is not of the general elevation of women that I propose to speak tonight. It is rather with the generally accepted theory of woman’s life that I propose to deal, with the theory that the final cause of woman was simply that man needed her…” Livermore was not against marriage. In fact, she had a long and happy one. Rather, she was against the view that unmarried women had no purpose in life (a view echoed by some American politicians who spoke derisively of “cat ladies” during the 2024 campaign season.) The idea that marriage is “the final cause of women,” she argued, “is incorrect and harmful.” (Superfluous Women Lecture.)
The Livermores’ fiftieth wedding anniversary was described elaborately in Boston’s Woman’s Journal (May 11, 1895): “The day was golden with sunshine, and the house, open to catch the breeze, was filled with flowers, in which yellow, the suffrage color, predominated (Livermore Golden Wedding).” I can imagine the excitement of the women of Medfield, going out for the evening, paying 25 cents per ticket to be part of a major feminist event. I wonder if they were married or single, if they were eager to shed their corsets, and what the men thought of the whole thing. I wonder how the event, now merely a memory on a faded poster, may have influenced the rest of their lives.
_____
Works Cited
Brooke, Emma F. “A Superfluous Woman: Brooke, Emma Frances. Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, New York : The Cassell Publishing Co., 15 May 2007.
“Superfluous Women” Lecture, Brandon, 1875 (Pt1).” Newspapers.com, 30 Dec. 1875. https://www.newspapers.com/article/rutland-daily-herald-superfluous-women/123260941/
The Late Kay Daniels (2003) Emma Brooke: Fabian, feminist and writer, Women’s History Review, 12:2, 153-168, DOI: 10.1080/09612020300200353
“The Livermore Golden Wedding.” The Woman’s Journal, HeinOnline, 8 Mar. 2021. https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals%2Fwmjrnl26&div=20&id=&page=