Advocating for All

Sophie B. Wright began her life’s work as an educator when she was only fourteen years old, opening a day school for girls in a spare room in her family home in 1880. Her career in education grew to include operating the Home Institute, a day and boarding school for girls. Within the institute’s facilities, she also operated a free night school for working men and boys.

In addition to her career in education, Wright worked as the state secretary for the King’s Daughters and Sons, a Christian charitable organization. It was in this role that Wright helped open the Home for Incurables, a care facility for disabled children in New Orleans, and the Rest Awhile, a retreat for underprivileged women and children in Mandeville.

In 1903 Wright was awarded the Daily Picayune’s Loving Cup, an award given annually to celebrate the philanthropic work of a local New Orleanian. Wright was the third person and first woman to receive the award. Shortly before her death in 1912, the Sophie B. Wright School, a high school for girls, was named in her honor. Following her death, a park on Magazine Street, near the former site of the Home Institute, was also named in her honor. A statue of her, sculpted by Enrique Alférez, was erected in the park, and an adjacent street was renamed Sophie Wright Place. 

An early women’s rights activist, Caroline Merrick was the daughter of a Louisiana planter and married a man more than twice her age when she was fifteen. After the Civil War, her family settled in New Orleans, where she became active in women’s clubs and social organizations and served on the board of St. Anna’s Asylum, a home for destitute women and children of all denominations. In 1878 her fervor for women’s rights was sparked when money a St. Anna’s resident had bequeathed to the institution went instead to the state, because the will had not been witnessed by a man.

In 1879 Merrick joined with other women’s rights activists and presented a petition to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention, demanding suffrage for women. Though the petition was unsuccessful, Merrick continued her activism in the woman suffrage movement, founding the Portia Club, the first suffrage organization in Louisiana, in 1892.

Merrick also became involved in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Though she was not a true believer in abstinence from alcohol, Merrick was drawn to the organization by her friendship with and respect for Frances Willard, the group’s leader from 1879 to 1898. Under Willard’s leadership, the WCTU’s national platform was expanded to include suffrage, labor laws, and prison reform, causes Merrick furthered when she served as the first president of both the New Orleans and the Louisiana branches. 

A free woman of color, Henriette Delille was the great-granddaughter of an emancipated slave. She found her calling in faith and charitable works. In an inscription left behind in one of her books, she professed in French, “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I wish to live and die for God.” Her dedication to that faith was manifested in 1836 when she founded the Sisters of the Presentation, an informal religious community for women of color.

Together with fellow free women of color Josephine Charles and Juliette Gaudin, Delille provided religious instruction to free and slave children, served as a sponsor for baptisms, and cared for orphans, the elderly, and the poor. Over time, the three women moved toward a more formal religious life, taking vows before Father Etienne Rousselon, vicar general of the Diocese of New Orleans, in 1852.

Today, the religious order of women of color that Delille established is known as the Sisters of the Holy Family. Since her death, the sisters have continued her work, caring for the sick and elderly and operating schools and orphanages. In 1988 the Catholic Church began the process of considering Henriette Delille for sainthood.

The first twenty-five years in the life of the businesswoman and philanthropist Margaret Haughery were marked by tremendous personal suffering. Born into poverty in Ireland in 1813, Haughery immigrated with her parents and two of her five siblings to Baltimore at the age of five. By age nine, she was an orphan. At age twenty-one, she married, moved to New Orleans, and had a child. Both her husband and child died within the next two years.

Haughery stayed in New Orleans and worked as a laundress, donating her extra wages to the Sisters of Charity, who ran the Poydras Orphan Asylum. Eventually she began working for the Sisters of Charity and saved enough money to buy two cows to start a dairy. As the small dairy expanded and Haughery became increasingly successful, she acquired a bakery and, with her newfound wealth, helped finance the construction of orphanages such as St. Elizabeth’s Asylum, St. Teresa’s Asylum, and St. Vincent’s Asylum.

Haughery supported the orphanages for the rest of her life, and when she died, in 1882, she left her entire fortune to charity. Haughery’s incredible legacy is commemorated by a statue at the intersection of Camp and Prytania Streets, dedicated in 1884. The monument is one of the earliest statues honoring a woman to be placed on public land in the United States.

Eliza Jane Nicholson bears the distinction of being the first woman in the United States to own a major newspaper. Born in 1843 near Pearlington, Mississippi, she enjoyed writing from a young age, and, against her family’s wishes, she eventually moved to New Orleans to pursue her dream of being a professional journalist. She became the literary editor of the Daily Picayune in 1870, where she wrote under the pseudonym Pearl Rivers.

Two years later, she married the owner of the newspaper, Alva Holbrook, and when he died, in 1876, she inherited it. The paper was in financial trouble, but under Nicholson’s management, it became profitable once again. She was an outspoken proponent of women in the workforce and equal pay. She hired and mentored other female journalists, most notably Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, the nationally syndicated advice columnist who went by the nom de plume Dorothy Dix.

Nicholson was involved in creating the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1884 and was a founding member of the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which was launched in 1892 and continues to operate today as the Children’s Bureau of New Orleans.

Kate Gordon was a champion of progressive reforms in early twentieth-century New Orleans. She was a member of the Portia Club (the first suffrage organization in Louisiana) but found the group too conservative and singularly focused. In 1895 she broke off from the organization and founded the Equal Rights Association (ERA Club).

In addition to suffrage, the ERA Club advocated for child labor reform, adequate funding for the city’s efforts to provide flood control and clean water, the admittance of women to the Tulane University School of Medicine, the creation of a juvenile court, and the appointment of a female juvenile court officer. Gordon also served as the vice president and corresponding secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

She was not, however, uniformly invested in the rights of all women. Because she was adamantly opposed to the enfranchisement of African Americans, Gordon opposed amending the US Constitution to extend suffrage to women, fearing that federal oversight of voting rights would upset social order in the South. Instead, she advocated for amending individual state constitutions, a position that led her to found the Southern States’ Woman Suffrage Conference in 1913 and to actively campaign in opposition to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

She was also a vocal advocate in the public health effort to control tuberculosis. In 1906 she organized the Louisiana Anti-Tuberculosis League, and later she managed the New Orleans Anti-Tuberculosis Hospital, located in the Gentilly neighborhood.    

Jean Gordon was an advocate of social-welfare reform and a proponent of woman suffrage. As a member of the Equal Rights Association (ERA Club), she was a leader of child labor reform efforts in Louisiana. Her work led to the passage of the Child Labor Act of 1906, which provided for female factory inspectors; placed age restrictions on children engaged in manufacturing; provided for a sixty-hour workweek; and mandated safe stairways, the provision of bathroom facilities, and seating for female employees. Gordon became the state’s first female factory inspector, serving from 1906 through 1911.

In 1908 she helped to secure the passage of an act that prohibited the employment of children under fourteen. The following year she worked with Eleanor McMain to create the New Orleans Day Nursery at Kingsley House, which provided low-cost day care for many of the working mothers she encountered as a factory inspector.

Her work in the factories also led her to recognize the needs of children she classified as "feeble-minded." In 1919 she spearheaded the transformation of a local orphanage, the Alexander Milne Asylum for Destitute Orphan Girls, into an institution devoted specifically to girls with mental disabilities. At the newly named Alexander Milne Home School for Girls, disabled girls were provided housing, education, and job training through work at the small farm the home operated. Gordon served as the president of the home’s board as well as the superintendent, living on site at the Gentilly Road facility from 1925 until her death.

Her approach to disability was not without controversy. A follower of the eugenics movement, she firmly believed in preventing the home’s residents from reproducing and was an active promoter of sterilization laws, which never came to fruition. For her work at the Milne Home School and her advocacy for the underprivileged, she was awarded the 1921 Times-Picayune Loving Cup. In 1958 a public elementary school was named in her honor. 

As a middle-class African American in New Orleans during Reconstruction, Sylvanie Francoz Williams witnessed the struggles that black people faced in fighting for their rights and livelihoods. She especially empathized with African American women and worked to support them.

Williams was a graduate of the Peabody Normal School, an academy dedicated to preparing African Americans to teach in public schools, and she later served as the Peabody’s principal and only teacher. In 1896 Williams became the first principal of the Thomy Lafon School, continuing in that role until 1921, when she retired shortly before her death. She faced tremendous adversity when the school was destroyed by fire during a race riot in 1900, but under her leadership, the school was rebuilt six years later in a different location.

As founder and president of the local Phillis Wheatley Club, which was affiliated with the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), she steered the club’s 1896 opening of a nursing school for young black women, which included a free medical clinic. In 1901, the club established a kindergarten and day care program for working women. At a time when black women were being excluded from the larger suffrage movement, Williams and the Phillis Wheatley Club advocated for African American women’s right to vote.

An active member of the NACW, Williams served as an officer of the organization and fought unsuccessfully for its inclusion in the National Council of Women. In 1915 she led a campaign that funded the first public playground for African American children in New Orleans. Following her death, her legacy of public service was commemorated by the naming of a community service organization, a swimming pool, and an elementary school in her honor.

Eleanor McMain began her career as a teacher and operator of a private school in her native Baton Rouge before moving to New Orleans to train with the Episcopal Church’s Free Kindergarten Association. Through her participation with that program, she formed an association with Kingsley House, a settlement house in the Irish Channel. Settlement houses were a late-nineteenth-century development that began in London. Located in poor, urban neighborhoods, they attracted educated middle- and upper-income residents (settlers) to live in the houses and provide education and social services to the surrounding community.

By 1901 McMain was appointed head resident of Kingsley House, a position she would hold for more than thirty years. Her work included the provision of many services—free kindergarten, playgrounds, social clubs, classes, a grocery cooperative, health and hygiene services, and a low-cost day care for working mothers. While serving at Kingsley House, McMain made two trips to Chicago to study and work at Jane Addams’s Hull House, a thriving settlement house in the Near West Side of Chicago. Following one of those trips, she founded the Southern School of Social Science and Public Service, which would eventually become the Tulane School of Social Work.

She also founded the Central Council of Social Agencies of New Orleans, a group devoted to streamlining the delivery of social services and encouraging long-term planning among its member agencies. She served as the first president of the Woman’s League of New Orleans, which brought together progressive reformers throughout the city. In 1932 a public high school for girls was named in her honor.