Madeline McDowell Breckinridge

• Madeline Breckinridge
• Born: May 20, 1872
• Died: November 25, 1920

Social reformer, was born at Woodlake, near Frankfort, Kentucky. She was the sixth among seven children, the third daughter of Henry Clay McDowell and Anne (Clay) McDowell. Her parents were both descended from early Kentucky settlers. When Madeline McDowell was ten, her family moved into Ashland, the Lexington, Kentucky, home of her great-grandfather Henry Clay. She spent a large part of her childhood with her father and engaged in outdoor sports.

After attending private girls’ schools in Lexington and Farmington, Connecticut (Miss Porter’s School), she returned to study at the State College of Kentucky (now the University of Kentucky) from 1890 to 1894. At that time she also became involved in the Fortnightly Club in Lexington, which provided the young woman with an outlet for her intellectual interests as well as meeting her social needs and where she developed a strong interest in reform. On the verge of a career as a reformer, she became a victim of tuberculosis. This made periodic rest cures necessary throughout her lifetime and contracted the scope of her potential influence.

She married Desha Breckinridge, member of a prominent Kentucky family, a lawyer and editor of The Lexington Herald, in November 1898. Desha Breckinridge’s sister was Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, soon to become an important Chicago social worker, and Breckinridge himself was to be a strong supporter of his wife’s interest in reform. The couple had no children.

At the turn of the century, Madeline Breckinridge began campaigning for a variety of reforms, some of which sprang from personal concerns, including a desire for autonomy as a woman, and some of which were more altruistic. She also became a crusading writer on her husband’s paper, starting its weekly page for women that stressed questions of overall social and political importance rather than the traditional advice on kitchen management or clothes buying. Women could be concerned, she felt, with matters of importance, even those not directly related to feminist issues. Through the newspaper she sought to influence the state legislature for many reforms. With the legislative section of the State Federation of Women’s Clubs, which She headed from 1908 to 1912, she gained an important victory in the last year of her leadership when the legislature granted women the right to vote in school elections.

Stimulated by her observations of rural poverty on a horseback trip through the Kentucky mountains in 1899, Breckinridge began to work with the Gleaners, a female group affiliated with her family’s Episcopal church in Lexington to create a settlement house at Proctor, a small town in the hills of Kentucky. This Episcopal neighborhood mission pioneered in adapting settlement projects that had been established in major cities to rural, even primitive areas.

Breckinridge was involved with the social problems of Lexington, too, and helped lead the Lexington Civic League, which she had helped to establish in 1900, in creating a playground in the city’s Irishtown slums. Breckinridge brought many resources to the league’s social settlement school, founded in 1912 and administered with the municipal school board. She designed the building, managed its staff work, raised $35,000 to supplement public subsidies for building c rats, and sought to introduce into the activities and curriculum of the project the progressive views of John Dewey on education and of Jane Addams on social work.

As she pressed for new approaches in social work, Breckinridge also began the pursuit of her intense personal interest in fighting tuberculosis. Starting in 1905 she worked through groups such as the Civic League, the Kentucky Association for the Prevention and Relief of Tuberculosis, and the Kentucky Anti-Tuberculosis Society. Her grandfather William Adair McDowell, a Kentucky doctor, had written A Demonstration of the Curability of Pulmonary Consumption, in All Its Stages (1843); Breckinridge respected his work and sought to educate the public about her ailment. She started a state-sponsored sanatorium and was instrumental in the founding of the Blue Grass Sanatorium in Lexington in 1916. It was financed by $50,000 she raised and by public funds for which she lobbied tirelessly. After helping to create the Kentucky State Tuberculosis Commission, she served as one of its members from 1912 through 1916.

Breckinridge was committed to numerous other reforms, including improvements in the treatment of juvenile offenders. She had become interested in this cause during her stay at a Denver sanatorium, in the winter of 1903-4, where she watched the juvenile court of Judge Ben B. Lindsey at work. With the Lexington Civic League, she fought for juvenile courts in Kentucky, and the legislature responded positively in 1906. It also set limits on child labor, another of Breckinridge’s projects. Breckinridge also fought to improve conditions for female offenders, to build new parks and to beautify Lexington, to start a free medical clinic, and to direct public attention to the plight of the economically deprived in general. Much of her philanthropic work was conducted through the Lexington Associated Charities, which she helped to found in 1900 and of which she served as a director from 1907 to 1920.

Nationally known for her work with many causes, Breckinridge spoke extensively in Kentucky and in other states for woman suffrage. Frequently able to use her influence in one cause to build support for another, she often suggested to colleagues in one or another area of reform that they join her in some “suffrage work.” From 1912 to 1915 and once more in 1919 until she died, Breckinridge was president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association. She built its membership from 1,700 to 10,000 during her first term of office. As vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1913 to 1915, she campaigned for the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended the right to vote to all citizens, and she was rewarded with its passage by the Kentucky legislature on January 6, 1920. Breckinridge did not join many of her feminist colleagues in the Woman’s Peace Party before the First World War, but she did lecture for the League of Nations (and the Democratic party) in 1920.

Apart from her political feminism, Breckinridge developed national ties by membership in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, on whose board of directors she served for two years, beginning in 1910; by her lectures to the Conference for Education in the South in 1911 and 1912; and by her address to the National Conference of Charities and Correction in 1914.

Always physically fragile, Madeline Breckinridge died of a stroke on November 25, 1920, in Lexington. She was forty-eight years old. During her lifetime, she managed to place the considerable resources of her own energy and talents, and her family’s prestige and wealth at the disposal of groups struggling against disease and social inequity. In an era of burgeoning reform, she sought to embrace many causes and to connect their efforts, thus contributing to the rise of the progressive movement.

The Library of Congress holds Breckinridge’s personal papers, part of the substantial Breckinridge collection. The article in Notable American Women (1971) contains a bibliography. See also S. P. Breckinridge, Madeline McDowell Breckinridge (1921) and I. H. Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 5 and 6 (1922).