A feminist ahead of her time
Excerpted from an address by Joseph Leach to the Newport Historical Society, May 2, 1997

 

Charlotte Cushman in the Hall of Fame

"Today, all people who demand wider choices for America's women pay tribute to the challenge that Charlotte Cushman laid down."

Julia Ward Howe said it first. In Charlotte Cushman's triumph as a woman, she declared, "I feel much better about womankind."

In her apartment in Rome, Charlotte made a second career out of sponsoring young women art students who, like herself earlier, now hungered for expression and recognition.

Emma Stebbins was one of her special protegées, when at age 41, she arrived in Rome, a would-be sculptor from New York.

Under her wing, Harriet Hosmer, a girl from Watertown, Massachusetts, became a noted sculptor--in spite of William Wetmore Story, the so-called dean of American artists in Rome, who scoffed that if Harriet Hosmer had inventive artistic powers, she would be the first woman who ever had.

In reply to that, Charlotte tossed off all the male sculptors in Rome as "chiselers."

Charlotte sponsored the half-black, half-Chippewa girl Edmonia Lewis in her struggles to become a sculptor, then stood back in pride when that "poor little soul, who has more than anybody else to fight," made a resounding success.

When the Capitol Building in Washington opened its Sculpture Gallery, Charlotte pulled every string on behalf of Emma Stebbins. A statue of Christopher Columbus by Miss Stebbins, Charlotte wrote Secretary Seward, would be an encouragement to all "our women workers."

When Emma Stebbins was slow being paid for her Horace Mann statue on the State House lawn in Boston, Charlotte offered to lead a fund-raising campaign. "In this way," she declared, "women will raise the statue."

When asked why--on three different occasions--she had rejected proposals of marriage, she was explicit: God had indicated her purpose by endowing her with a talent. Otherwise, she explained, "I should have been casting about for the 'counter-part' and not given my entire self to my work." If most women looked to marriage as their one end in life, so be it, but it "would not have been wisest and best for my work, and so for God's."

So, at her weekly salons in Rome, her guests invariably met her female protegées.

When rich tourists sought her advice about works of art to take home to England and America, she smoothly maneuvered them to the "right" studios. At her dinner table the talk always came to focus, somehow, on a better deal for women.

When Harriet Beecher Stowe, as one of her guests, asked if anyone could maintain that actresses like Sarah Siddons and Fanny Kemble should have stayed home and kept house--or, as in our day, "baked cookies"--"because they were women," Charlotte applauded the implication.

When Harriet Hosmer declared that every woman had a god-given duty to "perfect her talents and to practice them for her own good," Charlotte loudly approved. "What fun it would be," cried Hattie in 1861, "to come back to this earth" after a hundred years and see "what has been going on in the flesh while we have been going on in spirit!"

Charlotte's efforts did not go unappreciated.

Long after success on two continents had crowned Harriet Hosmer, she could declare that Charlotte Cushman had been her "truest friend."

From the early lead Charlotte had given her in Rome, the writer Grace Greenwood made a career out of her enthusiasm for woman suffrage. "Would I vote if I could?" cried Grace. "Yea, verily, casting my vote right and left and from morn to dewy eve."

In Concord, Massachusetts, Louisa May Alcott used Charlotte Cushman as the prototype for her Miss Cameron in Jo's Boys, the epitome of many women's dreams.

At age fifty-five, Charlotte herself reaffirmed her personal creed. After a long absence from the stage, when thundering ovations greeted again her powerful art, she threw up her hands in joy. "How have I lived without this through all these years!"

Talent must as surely be served as husband or family.

At her death, the New York Tribune declared that as Charlotte's public career displayed "the strong features of her private character," many a "fainting spirit" had doubtless drawn strength from her example as a woman.

To honor Charlotte Cushman as a woman, Katherine Cornell, Jane Cowl, and Minnie Maddern Fiske sponsored her admission to New York's Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1925.

Today, all people who demand wider choices for America's women pay tribute to the challenge that Charlotte Cushman laid down.

"The truth is," says Elizabeth Schlesinger, "every woman is different. That's one of the best things about us. We are all different."