Representative women of New England/Mary F. Eastman

by Mary H. Graves

MARY F. EASTMAN was born in Lowell, Mass. She was the third child of Gardner K. and Mary F. Eastman. Two brothers had died in childhood. A sister, Helen Eastman, who was two years younger than herself, and who was her lifelong companion, flied in 1902.

The Eastman and Flanders families, from which Miss Eastman sprang, were both of English origin. Their early representatives in this country were among the sturdy pioneers who settled at Salisbury, Mass., about 1640. The earliest ancestor in America, on one side, was Rodger Eastman; on the other, Stephen Flanders.

As noted by the author of "The History and Genealogy of the Eastman Family in America," Mr. Guy S. Rix, of Concord, N.H., "Rodger Eastman and the other first settlers in Salisbury and adjoining towns were Puritans; and under the tyranny of the Tudors and Stuarts many left th(>ir native country to enjoy civil and religious liberty."

The immediate ancestor of Rodger Eastman was John Eastman, of Romsey, County Southampton, England, whose will was proved in 1602. A noteworthy fact in the otherwise conservative will of three hundred years ago is that his wife Anne is appointed by him residuary legatee and executrix. Considering the very limited amount of education available to women in those days, especially in matters of business, the trust would seem to mark her as a woman of superior education as well as of practical ability.

While the descendants of Rodger Eastman and his associates were becoming "townsmen," "commoners," "freemen," and legislators—sturdy workers and men of affairs as well—at intervals the lurid light of conflict illumined their sky. By a wily foe their houses were set in flames, women carried into captivity, and families scattered.

When a son of Rodger Eastman died, in administration of his estate "his brother was appointed guardian of his only son and of his mother Deborah, who was then in captivity to the Indians." Yet a valorous spirit possessed them, and the settlement began to extend into Connecticut, along the sea-coast, and, in the third generation, up the Merrimac valley.

Captain Ebenezer Eastman was the first settler of Concord, N.H. He was a man of resolute courage, and had six sturdy sons. As he had also considerable property, he soon became "the strong man of the town." It is of interest to note that from this simple Salisbury stock came the intellectual acumen of Daniel Webster and the spiritual vision of John G. Whittier.

Daniel Webster was born at Salisbury, N.H., 1782. He was the second son of a small farmer and justice of the county court, Ebenezer Webster. His mother was Abigail Eastman, fifth in line of descent from Rodger Eastman, original settler, ancestor of the subject of this sketch.

Fifth in the line of descent from Stephen Flanders, "original settler" at Salisbury, Mass., was James Manders, Esq., of Warner, N.H., who was Miss Eastman's great-grandfather. He was a prominent citizen, and represented his constituency in the House and Senate of New • Hampshire for twenty-four consecutive years. His loyalty to conviction appears in the fact that at one period he refused to take the oath of office to support the Constitution unless he could add the words "except in so far as it recognizes human slavery." This tied the legislative body up in a debate which lasted three days, at the end of which time he was allowed to take his seat.

The same quality conspicuous in James appears in his son Philip, the maternal grandfather of Miss Eastman.

He was a farmer, and was the father of sixteen children. He was held in the highest MARY F. EASTMAN esteem for his sterling qualities. Like most worthy citizens of the perioil, he was a member of the Orthodox Congregational church; but, having read reports of the doctrines preached in England by John Murray, he pondered over the new faith, and finally went into his regular church prayer-meeting and said, "Brethren, I have seen a great light." He then stated the new belief of the so-called " Universalists," that a loving God would, in his own good time, bring back all sinners to himself; and he added, " I have reflected upon it, and I think it may be true." The shock to his fellow church mem- bers, that so good a man should thus depart from the faith of his fathers, was very great. At his funeral, in the presence of the twelve surviving children, the minister extolled his .virtues, but said, "We don't know where Major Flanders has gone." Miss Eastman's mother, one of the younger of the twelve, remembers the shock which fell upon them at such a decree. On the next Sunday, however, in a funeral discourse, the same minister said, referring to the fact that Mr. Flanders was member-elect of the New Hampshire Legislature, " Brother Flanders will not represent us in the courts of earth, but we know that he represents us in the courts of heaven."

The simple trust which characterized the father descended to all but one of his many children, and the courage of conviction seems to have done so likewise, so that succeeding generations have rejoiced in any light which broke for them from the clouds of error, and, like him, they "were not disobedient to the heavenly vision."

In reading the history of the persecutions our Puritan ancestors inflicted on Quakers, Baptists, and others who did not conform to the strict rules of the standing order, one can- not help hoping that one's own kindred were superior to the delusions and exempt from the antagonisms to other faiths than their own that marked our Puritan ancestors. Miss East- man finds in Hoyt's "Old Families of Salisbury and Amesbury" something conhrmatory of her hopes as to her own forbears in the report of a famous witch case: —

Thomas Bradbury was one of the most promi- nent citizens of Salisbury — town clerk, school- master, Representative in General Court for a number of years, as.sociate judge, etc. Most of the ancient records of Salisbury and many of the county were written by him. He dietl in 1694. Two years earlier Mrs. Brad- bury, his wife, was tried for witchcraft and ably and courageously defended by Major Robert Pike. She was condemned, but not executed. A petition was presented in favor of Mrs. Bradbury with eighty-seven signers, one of whom was an ancestor of John G. Whit- tier, and ten of whom were Eastmans male and female.

The father of Mary F. Eastman, Gardner Kimball Eastman, was born in Boscawen, now Webster, N.H. The "Genealogy of the Eastman Family in America," by Guy S. Rix, says he was called "Bonus." Her mother, Mary Flanders, was born in Warner, N.H., the daughter of Philip Flanders, one of the sixteen previously mentioned in this sketch. She was an earnest student, and on one occa- sion appealed to an older cousin and her brother to clear the mysteries she found in studying interest and "the rule of three." They replied that they were ashamed of a girl that wanted to study interest. She became a successful teacher, and, if not the first, she was among the first to be thought competent to teach and control the tall youth of a winter school in her native town. Her later teaching was in Charlestown and Somerville, Mass.

Shortly after her marriage to Mr. Eastman they came to the young city of Lowell, where their four children were born, and where Mr. Eastman passed a long business career. He also represented his constituency in the Mas- sachusetts Legislature in his younger years, but later was too avowed an abolitionist to represent any party of the time.

In speaking of her home life Miss Eastman says: "In our homo, while we lived in the practical and real, we lived also in the ideal. We lived in a (luiet way, but in the most pro- gressive ideas and leading movements of the time. I think of nothing which marks the advanced thought and outreach of our later times which my mother's thought and desire did not foreshadow, except the great work of organization, especially that among women, which characterizes our period. By all that thought is "advanced," it tends to isolation: and those who in the middle half of the last century were avowedly of the anti-slavery and religiously unorthodox type were in so far accounted peculiar people.

"I well recall tiiat, when a little girl, the wonder to nie was that, while our associates went only to fine halls, where were music and gayety, we children were taken up into strange halls in second stories, where few and mostly elderly people were gatheretl, to listen to sad tales of oppressed peoples far away, where once I re- call the speaker, William Lloyd Garrison, who stood on steps from which he tokl us that men, women, and children had been sold like cattle. In later years I looked back upon these meetings and knew that the 'upper chambers' in which master spirits are called to meet their disciples were not all in the far- back centuries, and that I had been privileged to look into a face illumined by the Christ spirit."

In the prevalence of organization to-day, notably that of women, all this is correcting itself and working for the advancement of humanity to a degree far beyond our ken.

" My parents were Universal ists, but were not church members. As president of the one sociological movement of the church at the time, the ladies' sewing society, my mother was asked why she and my father did not join the church. Her reply was, "Do I not work as cordially with you as if I did?" Being far- ther pressed, she said, "To-day I am with you in your fundamental beliefs, but I don't know where I shall be to-morrow. There is much yet to learn, and I am mentally and spirit- ually on the inarch, and, if I join you, you will want to hold me back; so I must be free of any bonds, that I may follow my leading without hindrance." Later on, however, she with a very few women friends formed an organization for discussion or formal debate of the leading questions of the day. So far as I can ascertain, this was the first organization of the sort in the city of Lowell.

My sister and I were the younger members. My sister was of an artistic temperament anrl a deep spiritual nature. While self-distrustful to shyness, a strong dramatic instinct had its way, and drew her first upon the platform as a reader, by preference of Shakespeare, where she was received with distinguished favor. She one day surprised the family by saying, " I shall never do justice to the author, the art, or even to myself, until I can lose my- self in a single character." This finally led to some months' study under W. H. Sedley Smith, of the Boston Museum, and her debut under Manager Ellsler, in Cleveland, OJiio, in the part of Juliet, and an offer of a week's engagement in the parts of Parthenia, Bianca, Evadne, and Juliet, which followed her debut in Boston. William 'arren, who observed her critically from the floor, said to her friends:

"Anything I can do for that young lady I am ready to do. She will succeed." And she did. But, alas, her delicate constitution seemed to be threatened by the strain inseparable from her strenuous art; and, to allay the anxiety of her mother, she surrendered this art, to which every instinct of her nature called her, as she would have buried a lost love. She died in 1902. In connection with this beautiful life Miss Eastman says: —

"I count it first of all chiefest of felicities
To have a spirit poised, and calm, and whole,
And next in order of felicities
I hold it to have walked with such a soul."

Miss Eastman's education in earlier girlhood was received mainly in the public schools of Lowell, whose limitations were supplemented at the same time by instruction in private classes in drawing, painting, horseback riding, dancing, and later in the Lewis gymnastics. The public course ended with the excellent high school. So far as careful investigation by Miss Eastman could go some years since, she concluded that to Lowell belongs the honor of being the first city in the whole country to open a high school for girls as well as boys. General Benjamin F. Butler was of the first class, and well remembered Miss Eastman as his one girl classmate, of whom he kept track for some time.

It was with poignant grief to the family of Miss Eastman, as well as to herself, that, when the high school course of instruction ended, Harvard and other colleges tiiat welcomed the boy graduates barred their doors against girls. Therefore the unfortunate girl was compelled to accept the resources of a seminary for young ladies.

An eager desire for the most fundamental mental training obtainable by girls led her, on the advice of a favorite teacher, to enter a State Normal School at West Newton. There she fount! what she sought as to quality of instruction. This pledged her to the work of teaching, which was altogether congenial to her. Directly after graduating, she was invited to take charge of the high school at South Brook- field, Mass. After two years she accepted a position in the Boston High and Normal School, where she remained several years. When Arttioch College in Ohio opened, under the leadership of the great educator and states- man, Horace Mann, he urged Miss Eastman and a classmate at the normal school to enter as pupils. Notwithstanding their high esteem for Horace Mann, the parents of Miss Eastman felt that Ohio was too far away. After she had become a teacher. President Mann invited her to come as instructor in the preparatory classes of the college, and she went to a most interesting work, with mature pupils, most of them by many years her seniors. She had a class of very interesting and loyal students. Here she remained till near the close of Horace Mann's noble life.

Antioch, like Oberlin, which preceded it, opened its doors, without restriction of race or sex, something hitherto unprecedented in history. But while Oberlin gave to women a motlified course, presuming, it seems, on only limited capacity in the female brain, or limited need that the sex should be much educatetl, Antioch, grown bolder and wiser, and with Horace Mann at its head, offered the same curriculum to all.

Says President George L. Gary, professor at Antioch and later President of the Meadville Theological School, "In the light of the expe- rience of the last forty years it need harilly be said that the women who responded to this welcome needed to have no concession made to their imagined inferiority."

He finely depicts Mr. Mann in these words: "The most striking characteristic of Mr. Mann'.s nature was his ethical passion. ... To feel that a thing was right, either for himself or others, was a challenge to its performance or to its earnest defence, if nothing else was possible, which he never allowed to go unheeded." To a young teacher, close association with so noble a nature as Horace Mann, and with those his fine instinct ilrew around him, may well be counted high privilege. Miss Eastman counts especially, among the many recognitions which she has so generously and so gratefully received, one from President Horace Mann, made shortly after her withdrawal from An- tioch College:

Minister Sarmiento, Representative of Buenos Ayres to the United States, advised President Mann of the desire of his government to im- prove its schools by the introduction of the most approved methods in use in the United States. He also asked him to suggest a suit- able person to conduct such a work. Presi- dent Mann wrote to Miss Eastman, to ask if she would meet Minister Sarmiento to con- sider with him the undertaking of such a work. Miss Eastman felt, however, that more maturity and wider experience than she possessed at the age of twenty-five were required, unless a considerable time could be allowed for due preparation; nor woukl her family consent to the wide separation involved in her going so far from home.

On returning to Lowell, she was given charge of the girls' department of the high school, numbering about two hundred pupils. After several years in this position she was invited to Meadville, Pa., as principal of a young lathes' seminary, endowed by the benefactions of the esteemed Huidekoper family. During seven years of her stay here she was the happy sharer of the home of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Huitlekoper. One evening at a reception at the Unitarian Divinity School a group fell into a conversation which led to some consideration of woman suffrage. After the party was over, the students met, and voted to invite Miss Eastman to give her views on the subject more fully in their chapel, and appointed a committee to extend the invitation. A fine audience gathered, and this was her first public address. On returning to Massachusetts she was invited by Mrs. Lucy Stone to deliver the address in New England. This inaugurated a work of many years throughout the country and its adjacent provinces that was prosecuted from the platform and occasionally from the pulpit. This work proved of the deepest interest to Miss Eastman, and, judging from the unanimous tone of audiences and press, her listeners found it no less so. It soon became an open question with her whether to abandon the congenial educational work for that of the platform. She reminded her mother, who was naturally chary of her daughter's reputation, that in advocating an unpopular cause she should pass out of the accustomed sphere of general sympathy and probably meet criticism and even misrepresentation, and asked her if she could bear it. Her mother felt most keenly the need of service along the line of the new departure, and replied, in the brave spirit of the mother of the Gracchi, " It will be hard, but I can endure even that better than I can bear to have you reach my age and feel, as I do, that I have seen all my life the great harm to both men and women which this non-representation of women works, and yet have done nothing to correct it." In this the mother was mistaken, for within the limits of a private sphere she had valorously and with rare influence championed the cause of equal rights and opportunities, in which she had the sympathy of her husband. The world was kinder to her daughter than she had dared hope, for these heroic souls, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mrs. Livermore, and their cotemporary peers, with a dignity and a sweetness befitting their cause, turned the sharpest point of their opponents' steel.

From the platform she spoke along the lines of reform in way of "Equal Suffrage," "Progress in the Aims and Methods of Education," "Rights and Wrongs of the Indians," "Duties of Government," "Literature," "Travel," and other miscellaneous topics.

Miss Eastman could scarcely have received more encouragement than she did in her public career, whether from her audiences, the press, or from the leaders of thought throughout the country. Her arguments were always logical and given with candor. That she had the faculty of captivating her audience is abundantly shown, but it was accomplished by no meretricious arts or display.

The Lawrence American said, "Miss Eastman's address displayed the thinking, philosophic power of analysis of John Stuart Mill, while the earnestness of her manner proved clearly the earnestness of her sentiments."

The St. Louis Globe said: "Miss Howe addresses you. Miss Eastman talks to you. With a subtle and effective sarcasm she laughs you out of your prejudices. She reasons with you. With an eloquence that stirs your blood, she rouses you from your apathy; and, having said all this and much more, she leaves the platform, while the audience applauds her to the echo."

The Pittsburg correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial said : "Miss Eastman is undoubtedly one of the largest-brained women in America. A clear, logical thinker and a woman of scholarly training, she has thought out for herself the questions with which she deals, and she hits the nail on the head every time.

"I did not say she was a grave woman': she is one of the brightest, merriest women alive. I said she was a grand woman, and I'd like to say it again."

Colonel T. W. Higginson, in an article on "How to Speak," after expressing the great delight to his ear of listening to a perfectly tlistinct and clear-cut utterance, says, "If you wish to know what I mean by a clear and satisfactory utterance, go to hear Miss East- man speak." Again he says: "She is a thinker, not a mere agitator. She always has something fresh to Say, and her talk is up to the day."

Wendell Phillips, after listening to one of her speeches, commented on her "words of eminent wisdom."

Mrs. Howe contributes her word for the publishers of this book: "Miss Eastman is a woman of superior culture and abiUty, eloquent with pen and tongue. Her interest in public questions has made her gifts available for the benefit of the community in which she has long had her home. She has always been an ardent advocate of woman suffrage. She was a valued officer of the Association for the Advancement of Women, a pioneer company whose wide-spread labors did much to render possible the general federation of women's clubs, which now embraces every State in the Union."

Of Miss Eastman's success in the pulpit let Robert Collyer speak, in the spirit of many another:—

Dear Miss Eastman:

I want to thank you for the sermon you preached in Unity the other Sunday. It went to the heart of the whole congregation. I have not spoken to a man or a woman who is not of my mind—that it was one of the best sermons we have ever heard about the immortal life. Permit me to say, too, that I believe you can do great good as a preacher of the eternal truth; and I trust you will give this no secondary place in your life, but will think of the pulpit as your true place. I am sure you will be welcome.

Miss Frances Willam wrote her after one of her speeches made in Illinois: —

My dear Mary:

Our good Dr. Jutkins, who has just called, says he heard you with great pleasure in Lexington, Ky., years ago, and that "your brightness was not worn like a jewel on a dark garment, but encompa.ssed you like a luminous atmosphere."

Isn't that a nice one? Too good to keep.
⁠Ever thine,
⁠Frances.

Of herself Miss Eastman says, looking back over her past life and writing in the retirement of her pleasant home in Tewksbury, Mass.: "I seem to myself to have lived a life very like that of other New England girls and women, to whom came fortunate parentage, neither poverty nor riches, and, being of New England birth, the best opportunities the world had to offer to its daughters in the way of education and association, albeit, in view of the exclusion of my sex from its colleges, but a tithe of the education which the eager girl of that period hungered for. . . . When some one asked me recently where I got my education, with the colleges closed against me, I ought to have said, 'At home.'"

That her life has been one of large and powerful influence, especially in connection with work for the advancement of woman, those familiar with her career best know; and those who have been privileged to meet her in these later years best know in what high degree she retains her powers of thought and clear, forceful expression, and that natural charm of manner that has always been one of her most noticeable characteristics.