After making allowance for the limited forms of news media in place then (chiefly newspapers and magazines), the celebrity that Mayor Mitchel conferred on Miss Davis by his appointment of her as Correction Commissioner was somewhat akin to that conferred on Ferraro and Palin by Mondale and McCain, respectively, in our own mass media era.
As the first female ever to command a large uniformed (and overwhelmingly male) law enforcement force of a major city in the United States, and as the first female to run any municipal agency in NYC, Katharine Bement Davis (KBD) became a national figure, one of the most well-known women in America of her time. She had nationwide name recognition.
Whereas Palin and Ferraro -- already well known in their respective home bases -- acquired national celebrity by virtue of their VP candidacies, Davis' constitutional convention candidacy came about, at least in part, because she had already acquired national celebrity.
Katharine had been in the resort area of Syracuse on a long-postponed, much-needed vacation away from the NYS reformatory when the quake struck. As its survivors streamed into that small town from their destroyed villages and as most tourists fled the scene for happier holiday locales, Davis stayed and organized recovery and relief programs for the quake victims.
NAWSA leader Carrie Chapman Catt was quick to see the potential value to the suffrage cause if this woman -- who had become NYC's Correction Commissioner and thus a national celebrity -- could be enlisted in the campaign.
Davis was asked if she was interested in the cause and would consider participating in it. KBD explained she had been interested in it from childhood when her grandmother Rhoda Bement told her stories about the now-celebrated Women’s Convention at the Wesleyan (Methodist) Chapel at Seneca Falls, N.Y. Rhoda had played a significant role in the development of the chapel as center for abolition and suffrage activity. Its site is now a national women’s history shrine as the "birthplace" of the Women's Rights Movement. There Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s call for woman’s suffrage was formally proposed and adopted in 1848. Five years earlier -- on Sunday, October 1, 1843 -- Mrs. Bement, then a member of the First Presbyterian Church, confronted that church's acting pastor, the Rev. Horace P. Bogue, about his not announcing an abolitionist meeting despite her providing notices for him to do so.
In the weeks and months preceding the Bement-Bogue verbal clash in the First Presbyterian Church vestibule, Seneca Falls had been the setting of a series of abolitionist meetings, including several in August featuring Abigail Kelley Foster as the main speaker. Abby Kelley, as she was mostly called, was well known for her fiery rhetoric opposing gradualism as an anti-slavery strategy, for her views that today would be called feminist, for her addressing so-called "promiscuous audiences" (mixed audiences, both genders), and for criticizing Northern clerics not breaking ties with Southern congregations viewed as tolerating slavery practiced by some members.
Three days before the scheduled opening of that anti-slavery fair, Mrs. Bement encountered Rev. Bogue in the church vestibule and challenged his claim he had not seen the abolition meeting notices that Rhoda accused him of ignoring. Rhoda said that a week earlier she had given the first notice -- later testimony indicated it was for an Abby Kelley lecture -- to a church officer to pass along to Rev. Bogue to announce. The pass-along method having failed to result in the desired announcement, the following Sunday she placed the second notice on the pastor's desk herself. Had Rev. Bogue flatly said that he decided against announcing the meetings because he himself had been criticized by Abby Kelley during at least one of her abolition gatherings in August, who would have blamed him? Instead, he persisted in claiming not to have seen the notices. So Mrs. Bement continued to express doubt about that explanation. As this exchange between them in the vestibule grew more intense, and possibly louder, the audience of congregants witnessing it likewise increased.
She was also charged with
The book subtitled The Trial of Rhoda Bement details the case brought against the woman from whom Katharine Davis received her middle name, one she always proudly included in her signature, never substituting the initial "B." The book sets that case within the larger context of rural antebellum New York struggling with spiritual zeal -- in part a byproduct of earlier eras' religious revivals -- helping to fuel movements for social reform: temperance, abolition and gender equality. Her "trial" is the lens used by the book's authors for viewing that context which the book's rather lumbering title Revivalism, Social Conscience and Community in the Burned-Over District attempts to encompass. ("Burned-Over District" refers to central and western New York State.) The church trial ended, not surprisingly, in Mrs. Bement's expulsion. With her went a number of her supporters among the congregation. She and they joined the Wesleyan Chapel group which had spun off from the local Methodist Church in the spring of 1843 over the question of slavery condemnation versus abolition advocacy. In her testimony about the church vestibule confrontation with Rev. Bogue, Rhoda recalled him as saying, "Mrs. Bement, I think you are very unchristian, very impolite and very much out of your place to pounce upon me in this manner." Perhaps the expression "very much out of your place," if actually uttered by the minister, referred to her lay person status as a congregant, an ordinary member of the congregation without office or holy orders. But could Rhoda have interpreted his words as conveying she was "out of place" as a woman challenging authority?
The refusal of some managers of abolitionist meetings and conventions even to seat the representatives of women abolitionist organizations was particularly galling. Perhaps somewhat less immediately obvious to our contemporary mindset is how the Temperance Movement connected with abolitionism and the movement for women's rights. In bygone eras when women and children had few, if any rights, legal protections or even avenues for recourse to law, a man's habitual drunkenness constituted a real threat to them, to their very survival, because of their near-total dependence and vulnerability in the home and community. Alcoholism was seen as a slavery that not only destroyed the male drunk, but also his family. The makers and sellers of liquor were seen as akin to slave masters and slavery traders profiting from the misery they helped to cause. Refusing to acquiesce submissively to the abuses inflicted by intemperance, women organized to fight the "curse of drink" and the industry seen as promoting it. As a result of (pardon the use of late 20th Century terminology) raising consciousness among women about the inequities in domestic relations law, and empowering them to challenge those inequities through organized action in the public arena, temperance crusaders opened the door and pointed the way to campaigning for full equal rights, not just legal protections. This was the background to emergence of the Wesleyan Chapel building -- whose construction was completed the same month Mrs. Bement confronted Rev. Bogue -- as a haven for women's rights speakers as well as advocates of abolition and prohibition, with gatherings open to all of both genders. The chapel's reputation as a "free speech" institution made it the logical place to stage the first Women's Rights Convention that Elizabeth Cady Stanton of Seneca Falls and four other ladies (Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright, Mary Ann M'Clintock and Jane Hunt) organized for July 19-20, 1848. That summer the M'Clintock home in nearby Waterloo became a planning center for the convention. There Stanton consulted with Rhoda Bement's friend Elizabeth M'Clintock on the wording of the Declaration of Sentiments to be presented at the Convention for adoption. It included the historic proposed resolution: “Resolved, that it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.” The only name appearing in the convention notice they placed in the Seneca County Courier was that of Lucretia Mott, widely known Quaker minister and lecturer. A Philadelphian, she happened to be in the area for an extended stay with her sister Martha Coffin Wright of Auburn. During her stay with Martha, Lucretia visited Auburn Prison inmates, escaped slaves in Canada, and Senecas in western New York.
He accepted the invitation, attended the Convention, and spoke in support of the Declaration of Sentiments resolution calling for women to secure the "sacred right" of "elective franchise." An estimated 300 people attended the Convention over the course of its two days. Davis family lore holds that, not only did Rhoda Bement attend the Convention, she also took along her 10-year-old daughter, Frances, who 12 years later became the mother of Katharine. Since the Bements were still Seneca Falls residents in 1848 and members of the Wesleyan Chapel congregation, there is every reason to credit Davis family lore on this point. Would Rhoda have passed up attending a Convention which her friend Elizabeth M'Clintock helped organize in the Wesleyan Chapel which Rhoda had joined five years earlier after her encounter with Rev. Bogue and her subsequent "trial"? According to an excellent article Birth of the Women's Rights Movement in Seneca County available in county historian Walter Gable's section of that county's official web site: On the Sunday after the Seneca Falls convention, the Reverend Horace P. Bogue, pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Seneca Falls, preached a sermon opposing woman’s rights. Stanton and Mary Ann M’Clintock sat in the pews and took notes of what he said. When NAWSA president Catt heard Correction Commissioner Davis tell some of the Women's Rights Convention-related stories she learned as a child at Grandma Bement's knee, the tales could only have served to strengthen the suffragist leader's determination to recruit Katharine to the cause. Thomas C. McCarthy, |
Commissioner Davis' Celebrity Preceded Ballot Placement . . . . Commissioner Davis' Grandma an Abolitionist & Feminist . . . . Rhoda Bement Upset Over Abolition Meeting Non-announcement . . . . Elders' Charges Against KBD's Grandma Bement . . . . Abolition, Prohibition, Feminism Connection . . . KBD's Mom, Grandma at 1st Women's Rights Convention. | ||
KBD Agrees to Campaign for Suffrage If OK With Mayor . . . . City Hall Reporters Foresee Change Coming With KBD. . . . . . KBD Begins Suffrage Campaign: Pageant, Ball, Rally, Speeches . . . . KBD on TR Party State Ticket . . . . Mayor Mitchel Not Only OKs, But Endorses KBD Candidacy . . . .Support for KBD Candidacy Crosses Party Lines . . . . A Sister Reformatory Superintendent a District Delegate Candidate . . . . | ||
Women Delegate Candidates Lost But Cause Gained Ground . . . . Woman Suffrage Telephone Day at DOC . . . . Planning Ahead to Use the Vote to Promote Good Government . . . . KBD Hosts Suffragist Tea in Municipal Building . . . . KBD & 'Her Civil Service Girls' in Suffrage Parade . . . . In Face of Defeat, Fighting Spirits Rose High. . . . . | ||
Hughes Backs U.S. Suffrage Amendment, KBD Backs Hughes . . . . KBD a Leader on Hughes Women's Campaign Train . . . . 8 of 9 NY speakers on Hughes train not 'rich society matrons' . . . . Besides KBD: Mrs. Henry Moskowitz, Rebekah Bettelhelm Kohut, Mrs. Mary Antin, Mrs. Rheta Childe Dorr, Frances Alice Kellor, Mrs. Alice Snitjer Burke, Annie Smith Peck . . . . TR Welcomes Back KBD, Other 'Hughesettes' . . . . | ||
'Women Owe No One Party for the Vote' . . . . NY State Voting Rights Win Sped 19th Amendment . . . . DOCer/Assemblywoman Helps Ratify U.S. Suffrage Amendment . . . . Mrs. Lilly: Wife, Mother, Widow, School Teacher & Administrator, Lawyer, Club Woman, Editor, Legislator, Penologist . . . . Mrs. Lilly's Interaction With Anna Moskowitz Kross . . . . Her 1 Year as Assemblywoman Seen by Supporters as Effective . . . . Appointed to DOC on Memorable Day in NY Suffrage History . . . . Lilly Re-election Bid Hit on Election Eve . . . . Mrs. Lilly's Interaction With Katharine Bement Davis . . . . What Would Davis & Lilly Have Thought of the Collective Fact of Ferraro, Clinton, & Palin Candidacies? | ||