later as a senator from
Connecticut. Blake entered this family milieu of Whig politics, Episcopalian
respectability, social power, and academic achievement as a young child, following the
death of her father in 1837 and her mother's decision to return to her family in New
Haven, Connecticut.
A brilliant and spirited young woman, Blake
attended Miss Apthorp's school for girls until she was fifteen and then studied the Yale
College curriculum with tutors. Determined to find an "occupation in
life," she yearned to be a writer but recognized that the drawing room offered a more
certain avenue to power. "I live to redress the wrongs of my sex," she
wrote at sixteen. To do so, she believed, "men's hearts must be trifled
with."
In 1855, she married Frank Umsted, a lawyer
from Philadelphia, and settled briefly in St. Louis, where, after the birth of her first
daughter in 1857, she began writing short stories for Harper's Weekly and the Knickerbocker.
In her fiction, Blake subverted conventional courtship narratives by portraying heroines
as courageous figures and heroes as vulnerable creatures, easily dominated but quick to
disparage women as "mere playthings." After moving to New York and giving birth
to a second daughter in 1858, Blake published her first novel, Southwald, in
February 1859. Three months later her twenty-six year old husband, having lost her
inheritance, killed himself with a pistol.
Tormented by her husband's suicide, Blake
resisted remarriage as a solution to her financial predicament and began writing
again. She became a war correspondent during the Civil War, and went on to write
hundreds of stories and articles, as well as four more novels. In 1866 she married
Grinfill Blake, who worked for a manufacturing firm in New York, and kept on
writing. The couple had no children.
In addition to her literary career, Lillie
Devereux Blake pursued a second career as a women's rights advocate. In 1869 she
joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the fight for woman suffrage.
Widely known for her personal charm and beauty, Blake also proved to be a powerful
orator, a talent that she parlayed into the presidency of the New York State Woman
Suffrage Association (1879-90) and the New York City Woman Suffrage League
(1886-1900). Blake always insisted, however, that the vote was only one of the goals
women should pursue in their search for complete social, political, and economic
equality. Access to higher education, in particular, attracted her support.
On October 4, 1873, standing beneath the
portraits of her ancestors, she petitioned President F. A. P. Barnard, on behalf of four
young women, to open Columbia College to females. Invoking the authority of the
college's charter, which dedicated the institution to the training of the "youth of
the city," she argued that "youth" should be understood to include women as
well as men. Barnard presented her plea to the Columbia Board of Trustees with his
endorsement two days later, and the board referred the matter to a committee chaired by
the Reverend Morgan Dix. The Rector of Trinity Church, a leading Columbia Trustee, a
fervent opponent of woman suffrage, and an equally determined opponent of coeducation, Dix
persuaded the board at its next meeting that "it is inexpedient to take any action on
the subject." Undaunted, Blake enlisted the help of Sorosis, the
New York women's club, which renewed her plea in 1876, the year of the nation's
centennial. Again, she met defeat. In early 1883, as public debate over
the possibility of opening Columbia College to women students reached an emotional peak,
she entered the fray once more in a famous battle with the Reverend Dix. In a series
of Lenten sermons, published as "Lectures on the Calling of a Christian Woman and Her
Training to Fulfill It" (1883), Dix warned women not to neglect their traditional
domestic duties. Blake promptly issued a rebuttal in a withering series of
lectures of her own, published as "Women's Place Today"(1883), in which she
insisted on women's right to full economic, educational, and political equality with men.
While Blake failed in her ambition to open
Columbia College to women, the Columbia Trustees finally capitulated to public opinion in
1883 by authorizing a "Collegiate Course," whereby women could qualify for a
Columbia College degree by studying on their own and passing the requisite exams. A
small handful of women did so before a campaign led by Annie Nathan Meyer led to the
founding of Barnard College in 1889.
[Grace Ferrell, "Lillie
Devereux Blake (1833-1913)," Legacy, vol. 14, no. 2 (1997): 146 53.
Ferrell's full biography of Blake is forthcoming from the University of Massachusetts
Press. Blake's papers are at the Missouri Historical Society and the Sophia Smith
Collection at Smith College. Her daughter, Katherine Devereux Blake, wrote a memoir,
with the help of Margaret Louise Wallace, based on Blake's papers, entitled Champion of
Women: The Life of Lillie Devereux Blake (1943). See also biographical essays in
Dictionary of American Biography, Notable American Women, and American National
Biography. A portrait of Blake, painted by William Oliver Stone in 1859, and
donated to Columbia University by her grandchildren in 1992, hangs in Columbiana. |
