Caroline Maria Seymour Severance

• Caroline Severance
• Born: January 12, 1820
• Died: November 10, 1914

Suffragist and a founder of the women’s-club movement, was born in Canandaigua, New York, the eldest of three daughters and two sons. Her father, Orson Seymour, a bank cashier, was a Presbyterian from West Hartford, Connecticut; her mother, Caroline Maria (Clarke) Seymour, was an Episcopalian from New York City.

When Orson Seymour died in 1824, the family moved briefly to Auburn, New York, and then returned to Canandaigua, where Carolina Seymour began her education. She continued her schooling at the Upham Female Seminary and at Miss Almira Bennett’s Boarding School in Owasco Lake, New York. In 1835 she graduated from Elizabeth Ricord’s Female Seminary in Geneva, New York. She then taught for a while at Mrs. Luther Halsey’s school for girls near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Her teaching career ended in 1840, when she married Theodoric Cordenio Severance, an employee in her uncle’s bank at Auburn. Soon thereafter the couple moved to Cleveland, where Theodoric Severance became a banker. The Severances had five children: Orson Seymour (born in 1841 and died the same year); James Seymour (born in 1842); Julia Long (born in 1844); Mark Sibley (born in 1846); and Pierre Clark (born in 1849).

During the early 1850s Carolina Severance became interested in the women’s-rights movement, largely through the influence of the Hutchinson family singers, an extremely popular band of entertainers that toured the country presenting songs on a wide variety of reform themes, including abolition, temperance, and woman suffrage.

Along with Frances Dana Gage, Severance organized women in Ohio. She attended conventions at Akron (1851) and Syracuse, New York (1852), presided over the first annual meeting of the Ohio Woman’s Rights Association (1853), and in 1854 attended the national convention of the Woman’s Rights Association in New York City.

Severance’s locus of activity changed in 1855, when her husband accepted a position at Boston’s North Bank. For a while she lectured at a school for young women run by Dio Lewis. In 1866, along with Susan B. Anthony and others, she helped found the American Equal Rights Association, of which she became corresponding secretary.

The association was organized in order to protest the inclusion of the word male in the proposed Fourteenth Amendment—the first time in the Constitution’s history that suffrage had been qualified by sex. When the proposed Fifteenth Amendment gave the franchise to black men, but not to women, the woman-suffrage movement split into two wings over the issue of supporting ratification and over Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s call for a woman-suffrage amendment to the Constitution. Severance was one of those who agreed with Lucy Stone that the enfranchisement of black men should take priority over the enfranchisement of women, and she helped Stone found the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.

Although active in the suffrage movement, Severance is best known for her role in founding one of the first women’s clubs. After the Civil War, Severance and her friends in Boston, including such eminent women as Dr. Marie E. Zakrzewska, began a series of parlor meetings to discuss the need for a centrally located place in which women friends could meet. The result was the New England Woman’s Club, started in February 1868.

The club was created with the explicit hope that it would provide a focus for the hitherto fragmented social and charitable efforts of educated and gifted women. These hopes were realized in succeeding years, as the club helped found the Girls’ Latin School and the Co-operative Building Association of Boston. It also helped elect women to the Boston School Board. Severance was president of the club until 1871.

Along with the New York club Sorosis, founded at virtually the same time, the New England Woman’s Club created the club movement for women in the United States. Its example was soon followed throughout the country, as middle- and upper-class women discovered the club to be an ideal vehicle for participation in the social, educational, and charitable activities of their communities.

Severance founded not only the New England club but one in Los Angeles, where she and her husband moved in 1875. After several false starts, the Los Angeles Friday Morning Club took permanent form in 1891, with Severance as its president (she served until 1894). Like its predecessor in Boston, the club became involved in local affairs, including efforts on behalf of woman suffrage and the creation of a juvenile-court system. Severance supported the efforts of Emma Marwedel to train kindergarten teachers and organized the Los Angeles Free Kindergarten Association, which succeeded in having kindergartens incorporated into the public schools. From 1900 to 1904 Severance was president of the Los Angeles County Woman Suffrage League, and in 1911, at the age of ninety-one, she became the first woman to register under the state’s new suffrage law.

In addition to her work for suffrage, women’s clubs, and abolition, Severance supported the social purity movement and was a founder and first president of the Moral Education Association of Boston (1873). She was a member of the first board of the New England Hospital for Women and Children, founded in Boston in 1862 by Zakrzewska. Along with her husband, Severance founded the first Unitarian church in Los Angeles, the Unity Church.

Severance, widowed in 1892, died at the age of ninety-four and was buried in Rosedale Cemetery, Los Angeles.

Among Severance’s few publications, the most useful is “The Genesis of the Club Idea,” Woman’s Journal, May 31, 1902. The best short account of her life is the sketch in Notable American Women (1971), which provides an extensive bibliography. Also useful are J. A. Sprague, History of the New England Women’s Club (1894), and E. G. Ruddy, The Mother of Clubs: Caroline M. Severance (1906). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1935). Obituaries appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, November 11, 1914.