Frances Harriet Whipple Green McDougall

• Frances Harriet Whipple Green
• Born: September 1, 1805
• Died: June 10, 1878

An early writer on behalf of various reform causes, was born in Smithfield, Rhode Island, the daughter of George Whipple, descendant of an old Rhode Island family. Her education began in local elementary schools and was completed at the private school of Dr. Peter Ferris in Providence. In 1842 she married Charles C. Green of Springfield, Massachusetts.

She early demonstrated a flair for writing and even as a very young woman began publishing in local newspapers. In Griswold’s Women Poets of America (1854), one of the standard reference works of its time, she received a chapter and considerable praise for her poems. She also wrote fiction, concluding her fifty years of literary effort with The Veil in 1878. Nevertheless, she is best known today as a writer and publicist of various reform causes.

Griswold noted in his sketch that “Mrs. Green has perhaps entered more largely than any of her countrywomen into discussions of religion, philosophy, and politics.” To the list he could have added abolition, temperance, suffrage, and the rights of working people. She was always on the side of new, and often unpopular, causes and had a sharp eye for uncovering injustices suffered by ordinary people.

In the Memoirs of Elleanor Eldredge (1838), Frances Green described the tribulations of a free black woman in Rhode Island who had lost her house through the shady dealings of some local tax officials. The proceeds from the sale of Green’s book, and a sequel, Elleanor’s Second Book (1839), helped in recovering the lost property. Characteristically, Green presented the affair as an instance of virtue rewarded. The story of how the honest and hardworking, if na]ve, Elleanor Eldredge recovered her house through her own efforts and those of her friends was offered for the purpose of “bringing forward, and setting before the colored population, an example of industry and untiring perseverance” and providing a model “worthy of their regard and earnest attention.”

The theme of virtue as a bulwark against exploitation appeared again in Green’s writings on the rights of working women and men. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century the industrial revolution was beginning to have a significant influence on American life, bringing with it situations and problems for which both workers and employers were poorly prepared. One of the regions most affected was New England, which was dotted with textile mills, shipyards, and machine shops. Green was one of the earliest writers to address the new factory and corporate mode of production in her writings. Her major contribution was to found The Wam-panoag and Operatives’ Journal, which she edited and published in Fall River, Massachusetts, every other month, during 1842-43.

The Wampanoag was intended to give “mechanics,” that is skilled manual laborers, an outlet for their literary talents and a source from which they could learn about important matters affecting them, such as the nature of capitalism, local history, craft organizations, and opportunities for educational advancement. Most issues contained at least one poem, sometimes by Green, but including, for example, a work on beauty “by a mechanic,” and a recently discovered fragment by Lord Byron. Above all, however, the Wampanoag was a vehicle for the views of Frances Green. The journal’s subtitle aptly summarized her views on the social ethics of work: “Idleness and luxury pamper the animal; labor makes the man.”

Green was not a union organizer, for labor unions and labor strikes were generally regarded as illegal, and even immoral. Instead she recommended self-improvement and the cultivation of self-esteem and moral discipline. The working man, she once observed, should be gratified to know, “when he retires from his daily toil to his smiling family, and cheerful fireside, that though his is not a high calling, nor a very profitable one, yet it is an honest one . . .and that he possesses an ‘Eternal Spirit’ and a ‘Chainless Mind’ by which he feels his dignity and his destiny.” In seeking his own good, the working man was helping protect the liberty of all Americans: “What availeth the general truth that ‘All men are free and equal,’ if the stern decrees of our local systems make men slaves?”

Green addressed the issue of liberty again in a book written in support of Thomas Dorr and his followers, who were seeking a broader male franchise in Rhode Island. At a time when other states were discarding property restrictions on the right to vote, Rhode Island retained its ancient colonial charter, which contained property qualifications that effectively disenfranchised most male residents of the state. In 1840 Dorr and others organized to reform the suffrage, and succeeded in gaining enfranchisement for native citizens without property in the Constitution of 1843. A bitter struggle ensued in which civil violence almost erupted and Dorr was tried for treason. The treason charge was revoked in 1854, just prior to Dorr’s death, but naturalized citizens without property did not gain the vote until 1886. In keeping with her ardent desire for justice and equality before the law. Green praised Dorr’s efforts in Might and Right, by a Rhode Islander (1844).

Slavery was the subject of her two novels, The Envoy: From Free Hearts to the Free (1840), and Shahmah in Pursuit of Freedom: Or, the Branded Hand (1858). Shortly before she started publishing the Wampanoag, she wrote a novel, The Mechanic (1841), concerning the adventures, temptations, and eventual virtuous triumph of a young New England apprentice. The work is an eloquent plea for the dignity of skilled manual labor, written at a time when there was a growing social prejudice in favor of white-collar professional careers.

Green earned her living by writing and by teaching writing and botany. In 1842 she offered her services, gratis, to the newly founded Working People’s Lyceum of Fall River, Massachusetts. After her divorce from Charles Green in 1847, she moved to New York City. There she lived with S. B. Brittan, a noted spiritualist, contributing articles to his spiritualist publications and helping him edit a magazine, the Young People’s Journal of Science, Literature and Art. About 1860 she moved to California, where, in 1861, she married William C. McDougall. She died at seventy-two and was buried in Oakland, California.

Frances Whipple Green McDougall was an American original, an idealist who took literally the rhetoric about America as the land where equality, liberty, and opportunity ought to flourish. She was not an organizer, like Frances E. Willard of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, nor did she have the personal magnetism and eloquence of an Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She performed most of her reform work before the Civil War, before the great quickening of reform momentum that characterized the period after 1860. As a result, her important contributions to the early stages of several reform movements have been neglected.

In addition to her poems and novels, and her various works on reform, Green wrote The Housekeeper’s Book, . . . with a Complete Collection of Recipes for Economical Domestic Cookery (1837), and, in collaboration with J. W. Congdon, a Primary Class-Book of Botany, published in revised form in 1855 as the Analytical Class-Book of Botany. The Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, has copies of her works. Frances Green McDougall’s life is very poorly documented. The best account is the sketch in The Dictionary of American Biography (1931), which is based mainly on S. S. Rider’s, Bibliographical Memoirs of Three R. I. Authors (1880) and S. B. Brittan, “Mrs. Frances H. Green M’Dougall,” Banner of Light, August 24, 1878. An obituary appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, June 11, 1878.