Rachel G. Foster Avery

• Rachel Foster Avery
• Born: December 30, 1858
• Died: October 26, 1919

Suffragist, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, probably the youngest of three children—a son and two daughters—of J. Heron Foster and Julia (Manuel) Foster. The Quaker family was of English descent on both sides. J. H. Foster, the founder and editor of The Pittsburgh Dispatch, served two terms in the state legislature. Julia Foster was a suffragist, a lifelong friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the vice president of the Pittsburgh suffrage society (whose initial gathering was held at her residence). The family was extremely affluent.

Rachel Foster grew up in a reform household. In addition to her mother’s involvement in the suffrage cause, her father actively opposed slavery. After her father’s death in 1868, Rachel Foster went with her mother and sister to Philadelphia, where she and her sister attended private schools. All three Foster women were active in Lucretia Mott’s Citizens’ Suffrage Association, an early woman suffrage organization.

Foster began to write for Pittsburgh newspapers when she was seventeen. She traveled to California, sending letters commenting on western life. Later she wrote from Europe, where she traveled extensively. She also studied at the University of Zurich, where she attended a course in political economy in 1885.

Her career as an activist in the woman suffrage movement began in 1879, when she attended the National Woman Suffrage Association, in Washington, D.C. There she met Susan B. Anthony, who inspired her participation and gained her friendship.

Rachel Foster, a meticulous and resourceful administrator, was elected corresponding secretary of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1880, a position she held until 1901. She arranged several suffrage conventions in 1880 and 1881, two of which were held simultaneously with and in the same cities as the national presidential conventions. In addition, she managed the suffrage amendment campaigns in Nebraska in 1882, and in Kansas in 1887 and 1892.

Her close relationship with Susan B. Anthomy whom she called Aunt Susan, was cemented during a European tour the two women took in 1883. Rachel Foster financed the trip, as she did many suffrage activities, out of her personal fortune, inherited from her father, and acted as guide and translator. Subsequently, Anthony came to rely more and more on her to organize Anthony’s and the movement’s activities and to help write the history of the movement.

In November 1888, Rachel Foster married Cyrus Miller Avery, whose mother Rosa Miller Avery was a Chicago suffragist. The wedding was performed by the Rev. Charles G. Ames, assisted by the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw, the only ordained woman in the Methodist church in the United States at that time. Anthony feared that Avery would leave the movement after her marriage; however, her husband always encouraged her work. Rachel and Cyrus Avery had two children, Rose Foster Avery and Julia Foster Avery. The Avery name was legally added to that of Rachel’s other daughter, Miriam Alice Foster, whom she had adopted as an infant in 1887.

Not an original thinker, Rachel Avery was a hard-working supporter of the woman suffrage movement, providing funds and organizational ability to many suffrage activities. She served as secretary of many of the movement’s proponent groups: The International Council of Women (1888-1893), an international women’s rights group that she helped to found; the National Council of Women (1891-1894), the International Council’s American affiliate; the organizing committee of the World’s Congress of Representative Women (1893), held in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition in Chicago; and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, a European-based group (Berlin, 1904-1909). Other positions she held included first vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1907-1910), formed by the merger of the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association, competing groups until their unification; and head of the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association (1908-1910).

Seldom in all that time did Avery do more than enthusiastically support the reform ideas of others. In 1896, at the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, she did lead a protest against The Woman’s Bible, which had been written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and supported by Susan. B. Anthony. Avery felt that the book, which argued that the Bible was derogatory to women, would upset religious people who might otherwise support the suffrage movement. Then, in 1910, she resigned from the association, protesting the ineffective presidency of Anna Howard Shaw, whom she viewed as a poor administrator and impolitic leader.

Rachel Foster Avery died of pneumonia in 1919 in Philadelphia, at the age of sixty, and was cremated.

Avery edited the Transactions of the National Council of Women of the United States, assembled in Washington D.C., February 22 to 25, 1891 (1891). She wrote “Woman Suffrage in the United States,” in W.D.P. Bliss and R. M. Binder, eds., The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform, (1908). Biographical material may be found in F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967); E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 4-6 (1902-22); and E. Flexner, Century of “Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959). See also Notable American Women (1971) and Who Was Who in America (1943).