Mary Ashton Rice Livermore

• Mary Ashton Rice Livermore
• Born: December 19, 1820
• Died: May 23, 1905

Civil War medical services organizer, temperance worker, and woman suffrage activist, was born in Boston, near the historic Old North Church. Her father, Timothy Rice, was a laborer of Welsh background whose basically optimistic personality was at constant odds with his Calvinism. Her mother, Zebiah Vose Glover (Ashton) Rice, a Bostonian of mixed English-New England descent, was tolerant and nondogmatic. Six children were born to the family, Mary Rice being the fourth and the first to survive infancy.

Her formal education began at Miss Hall’s Primary School, continued at Hancock Grammar School, and concluded at Miss Martha Whiting’s Female Seminary, in the Boston suburb of Charlestown, from which she was graduated in 1836. She taught Latin and French at Miss Whiting’s for two years and then worked as tutor for a family in rural Virginia.

After returning north in 1842, she entered the faculty of a new coeducational school in Dux-bury, Massachusetts. There, in 1845, she married Daniel Parker Livermore, a Universalist minister. It was a happy marriage, which between 1848 and 1854 produced three daughters: Mary Eliza, who died at four; Henrietta White; and Marcia Elizabeth. For twelve years Mary Livermore divided her attention between raising a family and writing fiction (her Pen Pictures was published in 1863). She also became a member of the Washingtonians, a temperance organization founded in 1840.

In 1857 the family moved to Chicago, where Daniel Livermore became pastor of the Second Universalist Church. There, until 1860, she helped him edit The New Covenant, a Universalist monthly, and engaged in charity work, helping to found the Home for Aged Women and the Hospital for Women and Children. An abolitionist since her days as a tutor in Virginia, she also became active in antislavery work.

When the Civil War began, Mary Livermore resolved to help in the Union effort. With the approval and encouragement of her husband, she volunteered for the Northwestern Sanitary Commission. This was a regional division of the United States Sanitary Commission, a private organization that coordinated the efforts of volunteers to help the medical department of the army transport supplies to the sick and wounded. The commission was organized in hundreds of aid societies, its nationwide membership chiefly female. In December 1862 Mary Liver-more and a Chicago colleague, Jane C. Hoge, were put in charge of the commission’s Chicago office, from which they directed activities over most of the Middle West.

Her wartime experiences profoundly altered Livermore’s attitudes about the proper sphere of women. Her vision, like that of many other women who had worked in the war, had been broadened; she had acquired a network of personal contacts over a wide geographical area; and she had been trained in the arts of public speaking and large-scale organization. She also came to realize that women could effect change and reform only if they had political power. “Women are degraded,” she argued in her autobiography, “by disenfranchisement, and, in the eyes of men . . . are put in the same category with their infant children.” Previously, she had believed that the innate moral superiority of women would suffice to enact major reforms. Now, in concurrence with many other women reformers after the Civil War, she became an active suffragist.

Livermore began writing articles supporting woman suffrage in The New Covenant and in local newspapers and soon was invited to speak on the subject. In 1868 she helped found and became president of the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association. The next year she started a suffrage newspaper, The Agitator, and helped organize the American Woman Suffrage Association.

Late in 1869, after accepting an offer to become the editor of a new weekly, Woman’s Journal, Mary Livermore moved with her family to Melrose, a suburb of Boston, where she helped found the Massachusetts Woman’s Suffrage Association. (Daniel Livermore disposed of his paper so that the family could return to Massachusetts; there he accepted a pastorate in Hingham.) From 1875 to 1878 she was president of the American Woman Suffrage Association. She was also the first president (in 1873) of the Association for the Advancement of Women, a national organization, composed of clubwomen, educators, and others, that provided a voice for moderate feminism.

Offers to speak continued to pour in from around the country, and she decided to sign on with James Redpath, a lecture promoter whose speakers included many luminaries. For the next twenty-five years (1870-95) Livermore was a fixture on the national lecture circuit, averaging 150 appearances annually and speaking on a wide variety of topics. Her most popular lecture, given nearly 800 times, was “What Shall We Do with Our Daughters?,” in which she advocated that girls receive advanced education, regular physical exercise, and training in homemaking skills.

Despite her busy schedule, she began working actively for temperance. Frequent appearances on behalf of the national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) prompted Frances E. Willard to say that Livermore was that organization’s chief speaker. In 1893 Willard and Livermore edited A Woman of the Century, a compendium of biographical sketches of over 1,400 women active in all fields; reprinted a number of times, it remains a valuable reference work. Livermore also helped found the Massachusetts WCTU and was its president from 1875 to 1885.

After 1896 Livermore retired from lecturing, although she participated in some local organizations, such as the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston and the Beneficent Society of New England. Her husband died in 1899. Six years later, at eighty-four, she died of pneumonia and heart disease. Her ashes were buried in Wyoming Cemetery in Melrose.

In her autobiography, Livermore declared her suffrage work to be her most important, because “it underlies all temperance reform work; it means the freeing and developing of half the human race.” To her generation she was a major figure who helped organize and popularize not only suffrage but also the cause of women in general.

The surviving letters of Mary Livermore are held in the Kate Field Collection of the Boston Public Library, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, and the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College. In addition to her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1897) and fiction, she wrote My Story of the War (1888), which discusses her work with the Sanitary Commission. The 1893 edition of Willard and Livermore’s A Woman of the Century was reprinted in 1967. A good summary of Livermore’s life appears in Notable American Women (1971). Livermore’s position in the feminist movement is discussed in B. G. Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (1978). See also A Woman of the Century and the Dictionary of American Biography (1933). Obituaries appeared in The New York Times and The New-York Tribune, May 25, 1905; Woman’s Journal, May 27 and June 10, 1905; The Boston Transcript, May 23, 1905; and Arena, August 1905.