Fanny Garrison Villard

• Fanny Villard
• Born: December 16, 1844
• Died: July 5, 1928

Suffragist, pacifist, and philanthropist, was born in Boston, the only daughter and the fourth of seven children of William Lloyd Garrison, the militant abolitionist leader, and Helen Eliza (Benson) Garrison of Brooklyn, Connecticut. Her father’s family had emigrated from New Brunswick, Canada, in the early nineteenth century. She was named Helen Frances, but was known as Fanny from her childhood, during which she absorbed the progressive ideas of her father, especially abolitionism and women’s rights.

Educated at the Winthrop School in Boston, she became a piano teacher and in January 1886 married Henry Villard, a thirty-year-old immigrant from Germany and the Chicago Tribune’s Washington correspondent. They had four children: Helen (born in 1868); Oswald Garrison (born in 1870); Harold Garrison (born in 1872 in Germany); and Henry Hilgard, who died at the age of seven.

In 1870 Henry Villard gave up his reporting career and entered finance, eventually becoming president of the Northern Pacific Railroad and an original partner in the Edison General Electric Company. He also became active in politics, taking over, in 1881, controlling interests in The New York Evening Post and The Nation, two of America’s leading reform periodicals.

In the 1870s and 1880s Fanny Villard frequently accompanied her husband on his numerous business trips in the United States and Europe. In 1876 the couple moved from Boston to New York City, and in 1879 they purchased an estate in Dobbs Ferry, New York. They both became interested in public service and charitable work, and part of their ever-expanding fortune was spent on philanthropic activities. Among the charitable organizations to which Fanny Villard donated both money and time were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, the Riverside Rest Association, the Woman’s Exchange, the Consumers League, and the Working Woman’s Protection Association. From 1898 to 1922 she was president of the Diet Kitchen Association, which distributed food to the sick and milk to needy children. She served on the planning boards and helped raise money for the establishment of two major schools for women, Barnard College in New York City and the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and contributed as well to the support of black schools and colleges in New York State and the South, including the Hampton Institute in Virginia.

Her work with the poor convinced Villard that charitable organizations alone could not solve their problems; social reform, and particularly the reform of the political system, was an essential prerequisite. The death of Henry Villard in November 1900 left her free to pursue these efforts, with the encouragement of her son Oswald, who had taken over as editor and publisher of his father’s newspapers. Believing, along with many others, that women have a stronger moral sense than men and that social reform could not be achieved without women’s organized participation, Villard, in her sixties, became a leading member of several suffrage organizations in New York, serving as auditor and head of the legislative committee of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association and president of the William Lloyd Garrison Equal Suffrage Club. She actively campaigned for the New York State suffrage referendum, which was passed in 1917, and continued to lecture and debate in auditoriums, before street gatherings, and at state legislative hearings until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Like her father, Villard was a pacifist, and she participated in peace demonstrations and activities prior to 1914, after which she worked diligently to maintain the neutrality of the United States toward World War I. In August 1914 she led 1,500 women in black mourning dress down Fifth Avenue in New York City in a silent procession of protest. With Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House in Chicago, and others she organized the national Woman’s Peace Party in 1915, becoming an executive board member and heading its New York State division; she left in 1916 when the group voted to consider America’s entry into the war justified if it came in response to a belligerent act. When attacks on American merchant ships by German submarines did indeed propel the United States into the war, she turned her energies to relief and support programs for refugees and conscientious objectors. The Woman’s Peace Society, which she founded in New York City in 1919 and of which she was president for the rest of her life, was an association of believers in total disarmament, nonresistance to aggression under all circumstances, mediation of international disputes, and free trade between nations. For a pacifist to believe anything less was, she felt, hypocrisy.

Villard continued her philanthropic and social reform work until her death at the age of eighty-three of heart disease, at her country home in Dobbs Ferry. A humanitarian and idealist, she was a woman of high social position, wealth, and personal charm who dedicated a good part of her life and fortune to the pursuit of reform causes.

Fanny Villard’s papers are on deposit at Harvard University in the Villard Papers. Her only book was William Lloyd Garrison on Non-Resistance (1924); she also wrote part of her father’s biography, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879, 4 vols. (1889). There is no full-length biography. The best modern sketch is in Notable American Women (1971). Useful material on her life and career can be found in H. Villard, Memoirs, 2 vols. (1904), and the autobiography of O. G. Villard, Fighting Years (1939). For her suffrage activities see C. C. Catt and N. R. Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics (1923), and A. H. Shaw, The Story of a Pioneer (1915). On her work for the peace movement see J. Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House (1930) and Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922). See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1936). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, July 6, 1928.