Born: 19 December 1820, United States
Died: 23 May 1905
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Mary Ashton Rice
The following is republished from the National Park Service. It was Contributed by Noelle Stockwell, Student Conservation Association Historic Preservation Intern. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Mary Livermore dedicated herself to women’s suffrage, temperance, and Civil War aid.
Born on December 19, 1820, Mary Ashton Rice Livermore grew up in Boston with her parents Timothy Rice and Zebiah Ashton. As a child, she displayed the compassion, charity, and intellect she was known for later in life. She studied at the Hancock Grammar School and continued her education at the Charlestown Female Seminary until 1836. She stayed on as a teacher of French, Italian, and Latin for two years before she took a governess position for the Henderson family in Virginia. Here she witnessed the extents of plantation slavery. She left Virginia a firm abolitionist in 1842.
While working as a principal at a co-ed school in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Mary Ashton Rice met Reverend Daniel Parker Livermore. Reverend Livermore’s teachings on Universalism, which emphasized salvation, attracted Mary Ashton Rice who struggled with her strict Calvinist upbringing. The couple married May 6, 1845 and had three children: Mary Eliza (1848-1852), Henrietta White (1851), and Marcia Elizabeth (1854).
Mary Livermore dedicated herself to the temperance movement and charity work. After moving to Chicago in 1857, she founded the Home for Aged Women and the Hospital for Women and Children and became a board member for the Home for the Friendless. Daniel Livermore started the New Covenant, a Universalist publication, with Mary Livermore as his associate editor. Until 1869 she wrote for almost all departments of the paper and often took charge of operations when Daniel Livermore travelled for church business.
U.S. Civil War
During the U.S. Civil War, Mary Livermore and Jane Hoge ran the Northwest Branch of the Sanitary Commission in Chicago which coordinated the United States relief effort and supported an overwhelming number of sick and wounded. Livermore organized relief groups, made speeches, wrote reports and news bulletins, and fundraised. She also travelled to the front where she toured hospitals, delivered aid, wrote letters for sick and dying soldiers, and accompanied soldiers leaving the hospital.
To fundraise for the Sanitary Commission, Livermore and Hoge had the idea to hold the first Sanitary Fair. Livermore said it “was an experiment, and was pre-eminently an enterprise of women, receiving no assistance from men in its early beginnings.” From the opening procession on October 27, 1863, the Fair captivated Chicago and the region. When the Fair ended after two weeks, it raised nearly 90,000 dollars. The success of Livermore and Hoge’s Sanitary Fair inspired others to be held in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City.
Women’s Suffrage
Before the Civil War, Mary Livermore favored minimal social changes for women, such as entrance in higher education and repeal of discriminatory laws. However, similar to many women who took on new roles during the Civil War, Livermore’s experience changed her opinion and she began to advocate for women’s suffrage. Livermore said,
I saw how women are degraded by disenfranchisement, and in the eyes of men, are lowered to the level of the pauper, the convict, the idiot, and the lunatic, and are put in the same category with them, and with their own infant children. Under a republican form of government, the possession of the ballot by woman can alone make her the legal equal of man, and without this legal equality, she is robbed of her natural rights.
Realizing the need for women to gain political influence, Mary Livermore committed herself to the suffrage movement. In 1868, she organized the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association and served as president. At this time, Livermore created her own suffrage and temperance publication called The Agitator.
When the suffrage movement split, Mary Livermore joined Lucy Stone in the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). In January of 1870, at the invitation of Lucy Stone, Livermore returned to Melrose, Massachusetts to be an editor at The Woman’s Journal. Livermore soon became a leader among the women’s suffrage movement. She became the first vice president of the AWSA, and later held the position of president from 1878 to 1895. She also helped found the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. During this time, her dedication to the temperance movement continued; she served as president of the Massachusetts Woman’s Christian Temperance Union from 1875 to 1885.
As a popular public speaker, Livermore joined the lecture circuit full time after leaving her position at The Woman’s Journal in 1872. She gave an average of 150 lectures a year on a variety of topics, including on life, family, society, and women’s role. She gave her famous lecture “What Shall We Do With Our Daughters,” which encouraged women’s education, eight hundred times across the country.
Mary Livermore participated as a speaker at the Woman’s Tea Party in 1873. Reflecting on the Boston Tea Party, Livermore said,
The Woman Suffrage movement has been often spoken of as a new movement. It is, but it is based on old principles- the principles that were fought for and maintained on the field of battle nearly a hundred years ago. It is simply a carrying out of the principles further than our fathers carried them a hundred years ago.
In many of her other speeches and writings, Livermore insisted that suffrage was the only path to justice.
Until her death on May 23, 1905, Mary Livermore wrote and spoke in support of the suffrage and temperance movements. Her continued commitment progressed the lives of women and demonstrated her lifelong passion.
From Woman: Her Position, Influence and Achievement Throughout the Civilized World. Designed and Arranged by William C. King. Published in 1900 by The King-Richardson Co. Copyright 1903 The King-Richardson Co.:
Mary A. Livermore, Journalist, Philanthropist, and Lecturer, 1820 – 1905 A.D.
Her father was Timothy Rice, of Welsh descent, who possessed many of the sturdy Welsh qualities, even to not sparing the rod in the training of his daughter.
She graduated from the Boston public schools at fourteen and then attended the Female Seminary in Charlestown, Mass. The four years work she accomplished in half that time and then became a member of the faculty, teaching Latin and French.
Removing to southern Virginia, she saw slavery as it was and, when she returned to the North, was a confirmed Abolitionist.
In 1843 she became the wife of Rev. D.P. Livermore, a Universalist clergyman. Her husband was called to Chicago to become a manager and editor of The New Covenant. Mrs. Livermore became his associate on the paper and rendered valuable service.
When the civil war broke out she went to the front as a nurse, and was often under fire of the enemy’s guns. There was strong prejudice against women as army nurses, and much opposition was experienced.
The Sanitary Commission was largely indebted to her for its organized efforts. When money came slowly, she inaugurated the great Chicago Soldiers’ Fair, which netted $100,000. She was, in fact, the mother of this movement.
Her book, My Story of the War, has reached a sale of more than fifty thousand volumes. At the close of the war she turned her energies in the direction of the advancement of women. She established in Boston The Agitator, for the advocacy of temperance reform and woman suffrage. In 1870 The Woman’s Journal was started and she became the editor, her own paper becoming absorbed in the new journal.
For thirteen years she delivered on an average of one hundred and fifty lectures per year. She has spoken on a wide range of themes — biography, history, politics, religion, temperance, and other reforms, and various departments of sociology in their special bearing upon woman.