Rebecca Ann Latimer Felton

• Rebecca Ann Latimer Felton
• Born: June 10, 1835
• Died: January 24, 1930

Reformer, journalist, and first woman to be seated in the U.S. Senate, was born in DeKalb County, Georgia, the oldest of three children of Charles Latimer and Eleanor (Swift) Latimer. She grew up on a prosperous plantation in an intellectually lively atmosphere, hearing feminist ideas from her mother and listening to the political talk at her father’s crossroads store. Determined to give his children the best education in Georgia, her father sent her to board in a clergyman’s home in Oxford, Georgia, while she attended school and later moved the family to Decatur, where Rebecca Latimer attended a private academy. In 1852 she was graduated from the Madison Female Seminary, a Methodist institution where she acquired the standard female “accomplishments” of the time—French, drawing, and music. In 1853 she married her commencement speaker, Dr. William H. Felton, a thirty-year-old widower with a small daughter. A licensed Methodist preacher as well as a physician, Dr. Felton, who had served a term in the state legislature, had retired from professional life because of ill health and was farming a large tract of land near Cartersville. Four sons were born there: John Latimer 11854), William Harrell Jr. (1859), Howard E.(1869) and Paul (1871). Paul and a daughter born in 1856 died in infancy, and Rebecca Felton’s two oldest sons perished of disease in a refugee camp near Macon, Georgia, where the family had fled from the looting and burning of the countryside by both Union and Confederate troops. Rebecca Felton returned home to a ruined farmhouse with an abiding hatred of war and a conviction that it was women and children who suffered most from the governments of “stupid, cruel men.”

While rebuilding their farm, the Feltons operated a school where Rebecca taught mathematics and music to eighty pupils. They were also active in temperance and charitable organizations. During the trying postwar years they acquired the sympathetic understanding of the impoverished small farmers of the region and their resentment of the Bourbon Democratic machine, an alliance of planters and “New South” business interests that came to power in 1870 at the end of Reconstruction. Dr. Felton, who firmly believed that women should not be excluded from the political arena, welcomed his wife’s help in marshaling the individualistic farmers and small businessmen into an Independent Democratic movement that elected him to Congress in 1874. Rebecca Felton became his campaign manager and press secretary, at first behind the scenes, where she conducted a campaign of letters to the editor signed with pseudonyms, and later openly. In her husband’s campaigns of 1876, 1878, and 1880, Rebecca Felton spoke at barbecues, mass meetings, and crossroads gatherings throughout the district and became an accomplished orator in the evangelical style. In 1880, when Dr. Felton lost the election to the Bourbons, who had determined to crush the Independents once and for all, Rebecca Felton charged in a series of emotional letters to the press that hundreds of Independent voters had been kept waiting at the polls until closing time while Bourbon voters were swiftly ushered in through a side door.

In Washington Rebecca Felton served as her husband’s secretary, learned to draft bills, and wrote letters to constituents whose claims she pressed before various government departments. She continued these functions during the three terms Dr. Felton served in the state legislature after being defeated for Congress again in 1882. There Dr. Felton supported measures that also furthered his wife’s main concerns: temperance, public education, and prison reform, in particular the pernicious convict leasing system, a source of cheap labor for planters and industrialists. In 1881, inspired by a newspaper account of a fifteen-year-old black girl sentenced to five years’ hard labor for stealing fifty cents, Rebecca Felton launched a personal investigation of convict camps that resulted in relentless exposures of the system’s evils, especially the enforced housing of females with males and juveniles with hardened criminals. She obtained the support of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union for her crusade, which she pursued even after some of the worst abuses were ended by housing different categories of criminals separately and placing state wardens in all camps, until the entire system was abolished in 1908.

In the legislature Dr. Felton also supported the state university against attacks from denominational interests opposed to secular education, defended the railroad commission’s regulatory powers against attacks by newspapers, which the Feltons charged were controlled by big business, and successfully opposed the sale of a state-owned railroad because the income from its leasing was used for the public schools. During this period Rebecca Felton briefly edited the Cartersville Courant, which the Feltons had founded as a platform for their views. From a series of lecture tours throughout the state she earned some much-needed money and became a popular public figure. She campaigned for her husband in his unsuccessful congressional campaign in 1890, and again in 1894, when he accepted the Populist nomination—reluctantly because of ill health and because like his wife he thought some of their economic views too extreme.

Dr. Felton’s retirement from public life coincided with the beginning of his wife’s most intense political activity. In 1899 the rising politician and publisher Hoke Smith, eager to curry favor with the small farmer constituency where Rebecca Felton was most popular, invited her to write a column for the rural edition of his Atlanta Journal. For over a quarter of a century she used this column, as well as her frequent lectures and appearances before legislative bodies, to promote her views on subjects ranging from the vicious agricultural credit system manipulated against the farmer, to pellagra (which she thought was caused by a germ carried by “diseased immigrants”), to lynching (which she believed fully justified in cases of rape of white women), to her favorite causes of prohibition (enacted by the state in 1907), woman suffrage (which she said would help maintain both prohibition and white supremacy), and education for women. She advocated a compulsory education law, the admission of women to the state university (voted by the legislature in 1889 but delayed by the trustees until 1919), and the provision of vocational education for women. Largely through her efforts, including a large donation she obtained from Mrs. Russell Sage, the Georgia Training School for Girls was established in Atlanta in 1915.

Her lifelong dread of war led Rebecca Felton to oppose American intervention in World War I, the draft, and especially, the League of Nations, against which she waged a shrill campaign in the Hearst press. In 1920 she was instrumental in obtaining the election of Thomas Hard-wick as governor and his fellow isolationist, her old Populist friend Thomas E. Watson, as U.S. senator. Two years later when Watson died in office Hardwick gave her the appointment as a gesture; Watson’s elected successor would be voted in by the time Congress reconvened. On the first business day of the new session, however, Rebecca Felton, having persuaded Senator-elect Walter George to delay presenting his credentials, took the oath of office, made a witty valedictory speech predicting the eventual entry of more women into the Senate, and departed for Georgia in a storm of national publicity.

In her column and other outlets she continued to champion the causes of women and children until her ninety-fifth year, when she died of bronchial pneumonia in Atlanta where she had gone to attend a trustees’ meeting of the Georgia Training School. She was buried beside her husband, who had died in 1909, in a marble mausoleum in Cartersville. Like many other southern Populists she had accurately diagnosed the economic and political ills that surrounded her, and although she could not rise above the prejudices of her time and place she had used her considerable intelligence and energy to achieve many lasting reforms.

In addition to her newspaper work Rebecca Felton wrote My Memoirs of Georgia Politics (1911), Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth (1919), and The Romantic Story of Georgia Women (1930). An extensive collection of her papers in the University of Georgia library is the basis for Rebecca Latimer Felton: Nine Stormy Decades, by J. E. Talmadge (1960); his articles on her also appear in ed., H. Montgomery, Georgians in Profile, (1958) and in Notable American Women. R. B. Floyd’s articles in the March and June, 1946, issues of the Georgia Historical Quarterly are especially good on women’s issues.