Representative women of New England/Ednah D. Cheney
EDNAH DOW CHENEY, one of the founders in 1862 of the New England Hospital, Boston, its secretary for twenty-seven years and president fifteen years, is numbered among the veterans of the forward movements in education, philanthropy, and reform of the nineteenth century. who happily still live to grace by their presence and help by their wise counsels the deliberative assemblies and budding activities of the twentieth century. She has recently given to the public an interesting volume of "Reminiscences." Born in Boston, June 27, 1824, daughter of Sargent Smith and Ednah Parker (Dow) Littlehale, she was named for her mother, and until her marriage, May 19, 1853, to the artist, Seth AVells Cheney, was known as Ednah Dow Littlehale.
Her father was for thirty years a Boston merchant. His native place was Gloucester, Mass. Born in 1787, he died in 1851. He was of the fifth generation of the Essex Coufity family founded by Richard Littlehale, who took the "oath of supremacy and allegiance to pass for New England in the Mary & John of London, Robert Sayres, Master, 24th March, 1633," joined the Massachusetts Bay Colony at Ipswich, and, eventually settling in Haverhill, was Town Clerk for twenty years, serving also as Clerk of the Writs. Richard Littlehale, of Gloucester (Joseph; Isaac, Richard), Mrs. Cheney's grandfather, was a Captain of militia. He married a widow, Mrs. Sarah Byles Edgar, daughter of Captain Charles Byles, who commanded a company at the siege of Louis- burg, and who also fought at Quebec under Wolfe.
Mrs. Cheney's mother, Mrs. Ednah P. Littlehale, a native of Exeter, N.H., born in 1799, died in Boston in 1876. She was the daughter of Jeremiah and Ednah (Parker) Dow and on the paternal side a descendant in the seventh generation of Thomas Dow, one of the early settlers of Newbury, Mass., freeman in 1642. The Dow ancestral line is Thomas, Stephen, Nathaniel, Captain Jeremiah, Jeremiah, Ednah Parker (Mrs. Littlehale).
Thomas' Dow removed from Newbury to Haveihill, where he died in 1654. Stephen, son of Thomas and his wife Phebe, was born in Newlniry in 1642. Stephen, born in Haverhill in 1670, married Mary Hutchins. Their son Nathaniel, born in 1()99, married Mary Hendricks, and lived in Haverhill and Methuen, Mass., and Salem, N.IL, formerly a part of Haverhill, Mass.
Captain Jeremiah, born in Haverhill, Mass., in 1738, married Lydia Kimball, of Bradford, daughter of Isaac* Kimball, a lineal descendant of Richard' Kimball, of Ipswich. Captain Jeremiah Dow died in Salem, N.H., in 1826. His name is in the Revolutionary Rolls of New Hampshire under different dates. He commanded a company in Lieutenant Colonel Welch's regiment, which marched from Salem, N.H., to join the Northern army in September, 1777. He was probably the Jeremiah Dow of New Hampshire who was private in Captain Marston's company in the expeflition to Crown Point in 1762. Retire H. Parker marched to Cambridge as a minute-man of the Second Bradford Foot Company on the alarm of April 19, 1775.
Mrs. Littlehale's maternal grandparents were Lieutenant Retire H. and Ednah (Hardy) Parker, of East Bradford, now Groveland, Mass. The Parker line of ancestry began with Abraham' Parker, who married at Woburn in 1644 Rose Whitlock, and about the year 1653 removed to Chelmsford. It continued through Abraham,^ who married Martha Liver- more and settled in East Bradford; Abraham and wife, Elizabeth Bradstreet (a descendant of Humphrey Bradstreet, of Rowley); Abraham and his second wife, Hannah Beckett, daughter of Retire Beckett, of Salem, belonging to a noted family of ship-builders; to Lieutenant Retire H. Parker and his wife, Ednah Hardy, above named.
Martha Livermore, wife of Abraham Parker, of East Bradford, was a daughter of John Livermore, of Watertown (the founder of the family of this name in New England), and his wife Grace (born Sherman), whom he married in England, and who was closely related to the immigrant progenitors of the most prominent Sherman families of America. Mrs. Grace Sherman Livermore was a useful member of the colony, being an obstetrician. She survived her husband, and died in Chelmsford in 1690, aged seventy-five years (gravestone). Judging from printed records, the name Ednah has come down to Mrs. Cheney not only from her mother, her grandmother Dow, and her great-grandmother Parker, but from a more remote ancestress, Mrs. Ednah Bailey, wife of Richard' Bailey, of Rowley, Mass. Tracing backward, we find that Mrs. Ednah Hardy Parker, born in 1745, was the daughter of Captain Eliphalet* and Hannah (Platts) Hardy, grand-daughter of Jonas Platts and his wife, Anne' Bailey, and great-grand-daughter of Deacon Joseph' Bailey, of East Bradford, who was son of Richard^ and his wife Ednah. Richard Bailey was one of the company that set up in Rowley the first cloth-mill in America. Mrs. Ednah Bailey's maiden name is thought to have been Halstead.
Mrs. Cheney's birthplace was on Belknap Street, now Joy, about half-way up Beacon Hill from Cambridge Street. She was the third child born to her parents. Five children came after her, one a little brother; but only four — Ednah and three sisters, one a lifelong invalid—lived to adult age. When she was two years old, the family removed to Hayward Place, and six years later they took up their abode in a new house on Bowdoin Street. At the first school she attended, kept by the Misses Pemberton, she had good training in reading, spelling, arithmetic, grammar, and geography. The second was Mr. William B. Fowle's Monitorial School, which she entered with her elder sister. Mary Frances. Here she distinguished herself by her knowledge of grammar, as shown by her skill in " parsing," and her ready recitations in other studies that interested her, one of these being French, which was especially well taught. The attraction of a new and friendly acquaint- ance. Miss Caroline Healey, drew her to the school on Mount Vernon Street of Mr. Joseph H. Abbot. For a few terms she continued to advance in various ways of learning, more or less pleasurable, in the meantime successfully cultivating independence of thought, till, feeling herself not in harmony with the constituted authorities, she was as anxious to leave the Abbot school as she had been to enter it. Here ended her school-days — education still to be won. The home atmosphere was favorable to mental growth. Love of learning, with a taste for good literature, was an inheritance. The mother, "a beautiful type of woman, of good practical ability and great tenderness of heart, was very fond of reading." "Indeed," says Mrs. Cheney, "I can never remember seeing either her or my father sitting down to rest without a book in their hands." Mr. Littlehale had a good knowledge of history, especially American.
The period of time now arrived at, the vivifying dawn of New England Transcendentalism, brought golden opportunities to the young aspirant for intellectual culture. A great awakening and a new sense of the surpassing riches of life was the result to Ednah D. Littlehale of attending for three successive seasons the conversations of Margaret Fuller. Few teachers have shown to such a degree the power of personality.
Mrs. Cheney writes: "I absorbed her life and her thoughts, and to this day I am astonished to find how large a part of what I am when I am most myself I have derived from her. . . .She did not make us her disciples, her blind followers. She opened the book of life and helped us to read it for ourselves."
Of Mr. Emerson, Mrs. Cheney says, "I never missed an opportunity of hearing him or read- ing his works"; and of Mr. Alcott, not all of whose theories she could accept, "But he gave me an insight into the life and thoughts of the old philosophers, and moreover gave me the constant sense of the spiritual, the supersensual life that is the most precious of all possessions."
It is significant that Mrs. Cheney and her elder sister, Mary F., were among the first parishioners of Theodore Parker when he came from West Roxbury to Boston, 1846. Inspirer, friend, and comforter in time of sorrow he ever remained.
For a year or two before her marriage Mrs. Cheney was the secretary of the School of Design for Women in Boston, of which she was one of the founders. Short-lived, the school yet served to show the existence of talent among American women, and is remembered as "one of the failures that enriched the ground for success."
Twin ambitions, art and literature, were native to Mrs. Cheney. Choosing the latter for her field of action, she ceased not to cultivate her taste for the former. As an artist's wife she made her first visit to Europe, sailing with her husband for Liverpool in August, 1854. The year following their return (in June, 1855) witnessed the birth of a daughter, Margaret Swan, in September, 1855, and the death of Mr. Cheney in April, 1856, in South Manchester, Conn., his native place. He was one of the earliest crayon artists in America. Mrs. Howe thus speaks of him: "Seth Cheney's crayon portraits w^re among the delights of his time. The foremost women of Boston were glad to sit to him, and his rendering of their features has now for us
"’The tender grace of a day that is dead.'
Among his portraits of men, I especially remember one of Theodore Parker which was highly prized. An exhibition of a number of these works was arranged some years since by Mr. S. R. Koehler, curator of engravings. Art Museum, at the Boston Art Museum. It was an occasion of much interest, recalling many lovely and distinguished personalities, interpreted by Mr. Cheney with a grace and simplicity all his own."
Mrs. Cheney was one of the subscribers toward the establishment in 1856, under the leadership of Dr. Zakrzewska, of the first women's hospital, the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. A few years later she was interested with others in the addition of a clinical department to the medical school for women in Boston, now merged in Boston University. In 1863 she was one of the three women corporators of the New England Hospital, which they had started in 1862 in a house on Pleasant Street. "Accepting the position of secretary, Mrs. Cheney, to quote the words of Dr. Zakrzewska, "devoted herself to the work, and became one of the most powerful advocates and supporters of this institution — an institution now firmly established and professionally recognized, and which by its efficiency and conscientious work has not only educated women as physicians and nurses, but has opened the way for the former to a professional equality with medical men, as the Massachusetts Medical Society was the first to admit women as members."
Succeeding Miss Lucy Goddard as president of the hospital in 1887, Mrs. Cheney continued in office, discharging the duties thereof with zeal and efficiency for fifteen years, or until her resignation on account of failing health in October, 1902. She is now Honorary President. Early interested in the work of the Freed- man's Aid Society, and becoming the secretary of the teachers' committee on the resignation of Miss Stevenson, Mrs. Cheney made several visits to the South in the years directly following the close of the war for the Union, the first time going with Abby M. May as a delegate to a convention in Baltimore. Unexpectedly called upon there to address a meeting composed largely of colored people, she had her first experience in public speaking. During her absence on one of these Southern trips a society was formed in Boston, of which she was appointed a director, being now Honorary President, and in which she has continued to work — the Free Religious Association, "the freedom and inspiration of whose first meetings" she finds it "impossible to report."
In 1868 Mrs. Cheney was one of the founders of the New England Women's Club, which soon came to be recognized as a forceful influence for good in the community; and about the same time she identified herself with the woman suffrage movement. For some years she was Vice-president of the Massachusetts School Suffrage Association. Joining the Association for the Advancement of Women early in the seventies, a year or two after its organization, she became one of its most valued workers and speakers. Mrs. Cheney also assisted in the founding of a horticultural school for women, of which Abby W. May became president. It was given up when Bussey College opened, and admitted women to its classes.
Mrs. Cheney's second visit to Europe in 1877, in company with her sisters and her daughter, was saddened in Rome by the death of her sister Helen. Returning to Boston in 1878, she responded to an invitation to give a course of lectures on art at the Concord School of Philosophy the following summer, and continued to lecture throughout the session.
In 1882 Mrs. Cheney was bereft of her daughter. She had been a student of great promise at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and, after she laid down her books and her young life, a room in the Technology building was fitted up and named for her the "Margaret Swan Cheney Reading Room."
Since 1863 Mrs. Cheney has made her home in Jamaica Plain. Her interest in things that make for human welfare and progress continues unabated. Her voice in these later days is yet occasionally heard in public, and her pen is still that of a ready if not constant writer.
Mrs. Howe, speaking from the standpoint of long and intimate acquaintance, says: "Mrs. Ednah Dow Cheney is one of the marked personalities of the last fifty years in her native town of Boston. In all this period of time she has been prominent in movements of sound and needed reform. Naturally averse to personal publicity, she has not shunned it where her name and word could add weight to the advocacy of a just cause. In the education and health of the community she has shown the most lively interest. She has been a strenuous champion of the claims of the colored race to political and social justice. She has had much at heart the spread of religious toleration and the enfranchisement of her own sex. One who has been proud and glad to work with her may say that she has always found her a woman of good counsel and of reliable judgment. Motives of personal advancement are foreign to her nature. Her life has been enriched by true culture, by the love of all that is beautiful in art, literature, and character. The good work which she has contributed to the tasks of her day and generation will surely endure, and should be held, with her name, in loving and lasting remembrance."
Among the books that Mrs. Cheney has written or edited may be named the following: "Handbook for American Citizens (written for the freedmen of the South), 1864; "Faith- ful to the Light, 1872; "Sally Williams," 1872; "Child of the Tide," 1874; "Gleanings in the Fields of Art," 1881; Life, Letters, and Journals of Louisa M. Alcott, 1889; Memoirs of her husband, Seth V. Cheney, of her daughter, Margaret S. Cheney, and of the distinguished engraver, John Cheney; "Stories of the Olden Time," 1890; "Life of Ranch, the Sculptor"; "Reminiscences," December, 1902.