Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Nonetheless, a handful of women did gain admission to the bar; Ada Hulett was the first woman admitted to a state bar, in 1869. After a five-year fight, the Washington, D.C., attorney Belva Lockwood became the first woman admitted to the bar of the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1879. Even when women did gain admission to the bar, however, they struggled to establish viable law practices because they were effectively shut out of government and corporate work, like the lucrative railroad general counsel positions that bolstered the practice of male lawyers such as Willie Breckinridge. In 1888, the year that Nisba graduated from Wellesley, there were only two women practicing law in nearby Boston.

  In the short run, the biggest obstacle that Nisba faced was her father. Nisba asked him if she could study law in his office, but by the end of her junior year she still didn’t have an answer. “I wish you would be very clear on the subject before I see you in June as to what you want Sophonisba to do,” she wrote to him. Later, she rather plaintively promised to be a “good girl” if he let her study law. Apparently Willie was fine with his daughter working quietly in a lab somewhere but not in a high-profile profession like law.

  Nisba received her bachelor of science degree in June 1888; her father gave the commencement address. She returned with him to Washington, having made up her mind to study law. No one could have been better situated to break into law than Nisba. She had a degree from a prestigious university, a famous family name, and a father in the profession. She was already on the radar of some women’s rights leaders. The suffragist Alice Stone Blackwell told Mary Clay, who, along with her sister Laura, founded the Kentucky Equal Rights Association, that she should recruit Nisba. “She would be a valuable acquisition, I think, being a bright girl & a college graduate,” she said. Even Susan B. Anthony, who had formed an unlikely friendship with the Breckinridges when they stayed at the same Washington hotel one winter, reportedly teased Nisba about becoming a lawyer, her “penchant for a professional career” striking Anthony as “a step in the right direction.”

  “I had expected to study law,” Nisba remembered, but her “mother’s health was frail, and the family expenses were high.” The sole law school in Washington open to women, the Columbian Law School, only had evening classes, when she “could be of service at home.” So instead, her father took her to see a family friend who was the superintendent of schools for the District of Columbia. By the fall of 1888, Nisba was exactly where she never wanted to be: teaching school and keeping house for her family. “I had promised myself to be a lawyer and had never thought of teaching,” she later wrote. She blamed herself for her predicament. “I had reasoned in such a stupid way and instead of going to [the University of Michigan] where progressive women like Miss Laura Clay went, I went to Wellesley and devoted myself to Latin and Mathematics,” she lamented.

  It’s not clear, however, that Nisba’s assertion that her family needed her at home was based on actual exigencies. Nisba said she “did a good deal of the housework.” Her older sister, Ella, however, still lived at home—she wouldn’t marry until the following year—and she was hardly overburdened with domestic responsibilities. By Ella’s own account, the only time she stayed home was when she had a cold. She went to an “incredible number” of packed afternoon receptions at the homes of Senate and cabinet members, “seeing all sorts of queer people and consuming unbelievable varieties of creamed oysters, sandwiches and salads.” Then there were the “at homes” of prominent Washington hostesses and the “small, intimate” teas hosted by First Lady Frankie Cleveland. She frequented “fashionable” literary readings and was an inveterate theatergoer, almost always stopping afterward at Harvey’s for “welsh rabbits,” a glass of beer, and people-watching. There were out-of-town-jaunts to White Sulphur Springs, picnics to Cabin John Bridge, twilight walks around the Mall, and army and navy cotillions. “I fear in my scamper after pleasure I sometimes left undone those things I should have done,” Ella noted of her apparently not-too-essential responsibilities at home.

  While helping her mother socially would have been a key duty for a young woman like Nisba, the Breckinridges rarely entertained. Technically, as the wife of a congressman, Issa was obliged to pay social calls each season to all the wives of higher officials—from the president and his cabinet to the Supreme Court, the Senate, and ranking House members—as prescribed by Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, the doyenne of official Washington, in her book Etiquette of Social Life in Washington. Their wives, in turn, were expected to call on Issa, and she was expected to have occasional receptions. As Issa’s frailty excused her from most of these obligations, Nisba wasn’t needed on that front, and Ella relished her role as the family’s designated reception-, wedding-, and funeral-goer. It seems that Nisba had fallen prey to what the social reformer Jane Addams called the “family claim,” in which educated Victorian daughters who had been taught to be self-sacrificing were diverted from their post-college ambitions by their families’ assertion that they were needed at home. Often, noted Addams, such claims were an excuse to camouflage their parents’ discomfort about sending their daughters into the public sphere or allowing them to work for wages.

  Nisba remembered those first years after graduation when she taught math at Washington High School as “hard years.” The conditions in the school were poor and she didn’t particularly relish teaching, although she was glad to be earning money for her perennially cash-strapped family. “The salary was a real contribution to the family income and I greatly enjoyed my first earnings, which I gave to Mama,” she remembered. Nisba found herself stymied in ambitions small as well as large. Having accepted her fate as a teacher, she decided to get a bicycle because the high school was a distance from the family’s rented townhouse on Capitol Hill. A woman riding astride a bicycle was still considered scandalous; just a few years earlier, President Cleveland had issued an edict forbidding the wives of his cabinet members from riding one. Nisba took a few lessons, but when Desha complained that “it was hard enough to have a sister earn her living; it was too much to have her ride a bike,” she gave it up, quick as always to defer to her younger brother, who constantly reminded her that men knew better.

  There were some bright spots. The always adventurous Aunt Mollie joined the family in Washington after spending two years teaching in Alaska, reportedly the first white woman to do so. She loved the equality for women she found on her journey west—she was especially pleased to find that hotels and train stations had no separate waiting rooms for women—but was dismayed at what she considered the immorality of white men and Alaska Native women marrying or, worse yet, cohabitating. “I don’t expect Sodom and Gomorrah were any worse” than Sitka, Alaska, she wrote to the family.

  Willie got Mollie a job in the Interior Department, and she once again found herself at the cutting edge of employment opportunities for women. After the Patent Office’s ill-fated foray into hiring women clerks in the 1850s, it took the manpower shortage of the Civil War to bring women back into the government. The Treasury Department hired women to trim sheets of currency so that young men could have “muskets instead of shears” in their hands. As the federal government grew by leaps and bounds after the war, hiring women was an economical way to round out the workforce while providing jobs to needy war widows. “The truth is that these ladies were put into the Departments of Government as clerks because they were cheaper,” said one senator. Women clerks received only about three-quarters of what men made, but the average salary of nine hundred dollars a year was by far one of the best-paying jobs available for women. Like Mollie, many female clerks came from formerly well-off families that had fallen on hard times—not a small number from the “war smitten and impoverished South.” Also like Mollie, many had worked previously as teachers, but, as one civil service applicant put it, teaching jobs “pay such miserable prices that it is almost starvation.”

  For Mollie, older than Nisba and more self-assured, with no immediate family to answer to, Washington was a revelation. The city was a
lready gaining a reputation as a “special center” for professional women and women in public life, according to Ellen Hardin Walworth, who was on her way to becoming a noted historic preservationist. “The women who are leaders in literature, art, Science, and patriotism congregate here,” she wrote. Indeed, even flighty Ella remembered the incredible procession of women “heroines and pioneers” she regularly saw about the city: Clara Barton, “gentle and benign,” who “came to Washington to seek national recognition for the Red Cross”; Frances Willard, the head of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which was at the time the most powerful women’s organization; and the suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Dr. Anna Shaw. Susan B. Anthony was in Washington the better part of most winters for the annual meeting of the National Woman Suffrage Association and to lobby Congress for women’s suffrage, making the Riggs House on the corner of Fifteenth and G Streets her headquarters. It was there, before they rented their first house in Washington, that she became friendly with the Breckinridges. Like most Democrats, Willie didn’t support suffrage, but would nonetheless share his legislative knowledge with Anthony, helping her “plan her conferences with other members of the House of Representatives” and make “final arrangements for a hearing before some committee,” Nisba said. Knowing that Issa was a woman “who had all the rights she wanted,” Anthony would “share with Mama her knowledge and skill in the areas of fancy work or sewing” as she and Willie plotted legislative strategy.

  Mollie quickly became a mainstay among the women’s organizations that were exploding in Washington in the early 1890s. From the District Woman Suffrage Association, to the Woman’s National Press Association, to the Colored Women’s League of Washington, to Pro Re Nata, an organization established to teach women about parliamentary procedure so they could run all the organizations they were founding, Washington was a city of women organizing and networking like never before. In 1890, Mollie founded Wimodaughsis (“union of women”) with Susan B. Anthony’s niece Lucy Anthony. It was soon the city’s premier women’s club, offering lectures on everything from political science to art and night classes in practical skills like typing and shorthand to help working girls get ahead. Under Mollie’s energetic direction and fundraising, Wimodaughsis rented its own building with meeting rooms and offices with the objective of giving women the same networking opportunities that men had at the large downtown hotels; the National Woman Suffrage Association, the District suffrage and temperance organizations, and the women’s press club had offices there.

  As with her experience in Alaska, however, it proved difficult to excise the southerner from Mollie Desha. She got into a nasty fight with Anna Shaw and the other northern suffragists on the board of Wimodaughsis when she tried to block an African American woman from taking a typing class because her enrollment would entitle her to attend the club’s social functions. Mollie said the southern women she recruited would never countenance “colored and white ladies [being] placed on the same social footing,” and she was afraid black women would bring “colored men to the entertainments,” which, to her, was self-evidently impossible. “I feel I have been treated outrageously,” she told the Washington Post after she and a number of her friends quit the organization when the board voted it had neither the legal nor the moral right to deny admission to black women.

  Undaunted, Mollie poured her energy into another organization, as she had, the Washington Post noted with some admiration, “the executive ability of a Yankee.” The journalist Mary Lockwood had just written a scathing letter in the Post after the newly formed Sons of the American Revolution denied admission to women. “Were there no mothers of the Revolution?” she asked incredulously. Mollie was “determined that the contribution of women should not be ignored,” said Nisba, as her great-grandmother Katherine Montgomery had ridden dispatches for Gen. George Washington through the wilds of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, once escaping pursuing British soldiers through a “daring feat of horsemanship.”

  Over the summer of 1890, Mollie met with Lockwood, Ellen Hardin Walworth, and Eugenia Washington, sometimes in the Breckinridges’ front parlor, plotting a new patriotic organization especially for women. Nisba had experience with parliamentary procedure from her tenure as class president and helped her aunt draft the constitution for what became the Daughters of the American Revolution and served as its first recording secretary. Within a year, DAR was one of the most influential women’s organizations in the country, counting among its members Caroline Harrison, the popular wife of President Benjamin Harrison, whose imprimatur “brought in members by the thousands,” as one Washington woman remembered.

  Helping her aunt found DAR was about the only good memory that Nisba had from 1890. First, a typhus epidemic swept through the overcrowded Washington High School, which sent Nisba into a panic. Then an influenza epidemic struck; Willie was deathly ill for two weeks on a trip to Florida. One Saturday morning in the spring of 1890, as Nisba was doing the family’s shopping at the Eastern Market, she collapsed at one of the stalls and had to be carried home. She was “quite ill for some time.” She recovered, but not fully. Never very robust, and weighing a mere ninety pounds, she became “a semi-invalid.” She gave up her teaching job and languished around the house. When asked to update her Wellesley classmates about her life and doings, she wrote: “One word suffices abundantly to tell what I am doing: Nothing, nothing, nothing. Keeping house for my family, and teaching my sister three hours a day make up the meager list of my performances.”

  Her ill health did have one benefit. Concerned over his daughter’s well-being—and, according to her, persuaded by her tears—Willie finally agreed to let her study law. By early 1891, she was studying law in his Lexington office. Then, when a friend of the family’s, Clement Griscom, who was president of the Red Star steamship line, offered to take Nisba and Curry to Europe with him and his wife, Willie decided that a long European tour would be good for Nisba’s health. The sisters left in late April 1891. The plan was for them to do some sightseeing, then spend the winter in Switzerland, where Nisba wanted to study law with a noted professor. “I am glad that you are studying law … You can succeed at anything,” wrote Willie in July 1891, although he reminded Nisba that the main thing was for her to “get stout and strong.”

  Apparently worried that her education had something to do with her broken health, Nisba wrote to her friend Marion Talbot, the head of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, and asked for a study the organization had done on the health of women college graduates. It held few answers: the survey of some seven hundred women found that 78 percent were in good or excellent health. What was probably ailing Nisba, as Jane Addams could have told her, was her untapped potential. “I have seen young girls suffer and grow sensibly lowered in vitality in the first years after they leave school,” Addams wrote, not from overwork or too much education, but from the lack of work. “She finds ‘life’ so different from what she expected it to be … and does not understand this apparent waste … [of] this elaborate preparation … She is restricted and unhappy.”

  By spring 1892, Nisba and Curry were in Paris. By her own account, Nisba was crabby and annoyingly pious; she spent most of her time with her nose in law books. Her father wrote from Lexington, “The law practice here is not what it was years ago,” noting that if it were, he’d be tempted to go back to law full-time. “I believe I went into public life solely from a sense of duty and stay in it for the same duty, but perhaps this is self-delusion and I am like others,” he wrote. It was apparently financial pressures that made him reconsider public service. His prediction that Ella’s suitor, Lynman Chalkley, wouldn’t be able to support a wife turned out to be correct. Lynman struggled to find work as a lawyer, and Breckinridge found Ella, pregnant with her first child, living in a filthy, crowded hotel. He paid for Ella and Lynman to move to a “more wholesome” location. Robert, as usual, was in trouble. Willie found himself paying ninety dollars here, one hundred dollars there to cover Robert
’s debts and eventually paid to pack him off to India. Then there were the expenses that didn’t show up on any ledger. On February 14, 1891, right before Nisba left for Europe, William Tecumseh Sherman died, and a certain unreconstructed clerk praised his death. As a result, she lost the job Breckinridge had gotten her at the Interior Department. Willie was keeping up a grueling lecture schedule to make ends meet. He told Nisba that if she added up all the days he was away speaking, “you will find that I was occupied more days than I was really absent, which is doing pretty good for a fat fellow my age.”

  If there was one bright note, it was that he and Issa seemed to have found a contented companionship as empty nesters. With their house in Lexington rented out, Ella married, and Robert, Nisba, and Curry gone, they stayed in a boardinghouse and enjoyed the freedom to come and go as they pleased. Willie wrote to Nisba about cozy late suppers of fried chicken and tomatoes at corner cafés. They gushed over their first grandchild, Preston Breckinridge Chalkley, Ella’s little boy. For the first time, Issa accompanied Willie on some of his trips as he lectured throughout the Midwest about tariff reform. Willie wrote to Nisba besotted by the beauty and fecundity of the countryside they passed through and said he was glad to have a chance to see less-prosperous parts of the country, as it “gives me a better idea of the distribution of wealth and power of America.”