In researching material for a Founders’ Day program, I looked at some of the program ideas on the P.E.O. International website. The suggestions revolved around the seven very special women we honor, with descriptions and anecdotes that reflect their personalities. Some of those stories are such a part of our legacy they are almost as familiar to us as the Opening Ode. But one of the sample programs had a question in it that really struck me: “Can we imagine seven young women in the present day who could
Amanda Meehan initiate and perfect a like organization with such aplomb and dispatch as our Founders?”
That rhetorical question got me thinking—what was it that made it possible for those particular women to create P.E.O? Why were those girls, ages 17 to 20, ready to create something so new—able to think of a way to solve their own small challenge (making sure all seven of them could be part of the same sorority) by creating something on a broad scale?
There’s a whole pop-psychology field built around the idea that girls like to collaborate and cooperate, and I don’t think it’s necessarily unusual for a group of girls—or any group—to invent ways to mark the special features of their friendship, from code-words to matching t-shirts to friendship bracelets. What was so unusual about P.E.O.’s beginnings is that right away the Founders recognized they wanted it to go beyond their circle of friends, and to be an organization that means something in the world.
So here’s my premise for this article: There was something about Mount Pleasant, Iowa, in 1869 that fostered big ideas. And there was something about those young women that enabled them to connect the big ideas with the values and virtues that are such a part of our P.E.O. heritage. What were the factors that made this special conf luence possible? I believe that a broad look at historical context illuminates why those young women, in that time and place, were able to found an organization that is still relevant today.
The 1860s were a time of tremendous change and new ideas; especially for women. It makes perfect sense that P.E.O. was founded just as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone were formally organizing for the “woman suffrage” movement. This was a time when the country was rebuilding itself after the Civil War—and there must have been a f lavor of new beginnings in the air. As a zeitgeist, that sounds pretty good to me… lots of intelligent women were taking stock of the old order, and striking out for something new.
The world was teaming with new stuff in the 1860s, too, from geopolitical developments to household inventions. The decade was a turbulent one in world history—not just the Civil War here but also upheavals in Europe, Mexico, Japan and elsewhere. Many of these “episodes” reached turning points in the middle of the decade, though, and like the Reconstruction of the South, the efforts to rebuild in these places would lead to a lot of competing social movements. Of course change on that scale is disruptive and can be challenging—in the negative sense—but there’s also a sense of possibility that comes when everything is up in the air. For people with a vision of the world they wanted to see, the fact that everyone everywhere seemed to be caught up in re-invention must have been exhilarating.
Think about this: 1869 was the year that the completion of both the American transcontinental railroad and the Suez Canal were celebrated. Both were projects on a grand scale that took vision, political will and years to complete. I am sure that both projects would have been discussed by worldly people everywhere, including Mount Pleasant. The world could now be navigated in record time, and whether people loved or The P.E.O. Record January–February 2011 9 hated that fact, it surely must have felt like a major transformation. The world would have seemed smaller, and the exotic was no longer quite so far away. A transportation revolution was happening at the domestic scale, too: the bicycle was invented in 1861—and the “bicycle mania” that followed is often written about by social historians in terms of personal independence and freedom. Suddenly, under your own power, you could see much more of your local world. It’s easy to imagine that these developments inspired ordinary people to begin to feel connected to the world in a new and exciting way.
The typewriter and the sewing machine date from this period, as does the Impressionist movement in art. I find it fascinating that instruments of mass-uniformity hit the scene in the commercial sphere just as a freer and less constricted form of art was gaining traction. There was real creative tension between society and the individual, and because of the pace of innovation (the 1850s are considered the start of “the Second Industrial Revolution” ), people were feeling the effects of progress at a very personal level.
Here are some of the patents that hit the scene between 1848 and 1869 (1848 was when several of the Founders were born): the safety pin; an early dishwasher (which was apparently so bad it had to be reinvented a few times before it caught on in the 1880s); rayon; pasteurization; the internal combustion engine; the machine gun and dynamite; the first man-made plastic; and, of course, the typewriter and the sewing machine.
This list shows that innovation was happening almost across the board in the mid-1800s, and these inventions had a lasting impact on daily and commercial life.
And then there were the developments in science. In the mid-1860s, Gregor Mendel presented his work on genetics (to little fanfare, but still!), and in 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev introduced the modern periodic table of elements. People were coming to terms with the world in a new way, and trying to organize a rational system of thought around it. Imagine what it must have been like for our Founders, coming into their own, “inventing” themselves as college students do, at a time of so much change and innovation in science and society.
Industrialization had a very personal effect on women, too; in the late 1860s, there was a thriving industry in mass-producing corsets. Corsets were needed to give women the hourglass figure fashion demanded. The 1850s/60s were when “tight-lacing” corsets really took off—think of Scarlett O’Hara’s 16” waist. That wasn’t the norm, but women did rely on corsets and crinolines to create the fashionable figure and support the weight of the dresses. It seems obvious that corsets didn’t do much for women’s physical health, considering how internal organs were “rearranged.” And plenty of historians have also written about the sociological meaning: women in the Victorian era were bound up and caged, dependent on men and unable to be “natural.”
Of course, being “natural” doesn’t seem to have been a wide-spread value in the Victorian era. For instance, many Victorian parlor games involved trying to make someone else lose their poise, especially by laughing. For instance, to play “Poor Pussycat,” one proper Victorian guest—“it”—would crawl on all fours, sit at someone else’s feet, look up at them and meow. The other person had to say, “Poor Pussycat!” with an absolutely straight face. If either person cracked a smile, they’d trade places, and the latter became the new pussycat. In another one, the “Laughing Game,” one person says “Ha.” The next says “Ha Ha.” And so on… until somebody actually starts to laugh, and is out of the game. Self-control (and equipoise) was understood to be something that takes effort.
Here’s something else to consider. “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management” came out in 1861—“The most famous cookery writer in British History.” The book wasn’t just for cooking however, it covered all aspects of running a Victorian household, and was widely known in America as well as Britain. In the preface, Beeton wrote, “I have always thought that there is no more fruitful source of family discontent than a housewife’s badly-cooked dinners and untidy ways.” No pressure! That this book came out during the formative period of the women’s suffrage movement is also telling. There were plenty of women who agreed with Mrs. Beeton, that a woman needed to spend her best energy in the domestic sphere.
However, 1868 was the year “Little Women” was published. You probably haven’t read it for a while, but I’m sure you still have the impression that I do—the characters are intelligent women who managed to be both independent and beloved. The book was a runaway success—the first printing of 2,000 copies, which was huge, sold-out quickly. The themes in the book include education for girls, service to others, female economic independence and sisterly love. Sounds a little familiar!
The 1860s and 70s were also a time when various reform movements swept the country, led by men and women who reached celebrity status through speaking engagements. The “camp meeting” format spread from religious gatherings in open spaces to lectures in town halls around America—and many of these reform movements were led by popular preachers. A charismatic speaker would give a lecture, and one speaker after another would continue on the theme. The abolitionist movement and the women’s suffrage movement both used the format, and we know that the Mount Pleasant Opera House/Union Hall attracted Frederick Douglass, Bronson Alcott, Anna Dickinson, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton as speakers. Our Founders probably heard some of these speeches. By all accounts, these events were hugely important in generating excitement around the reform movements, and inspired many women to embrace change.
So that’s the larger context that our heroines inhabited. Our Founders probably had a foot in both streams—they were well-bred young ladies; the brief sketches written by one of their contemporaries shows them to be social, fashionable products of the era. They lived in a world with a strong line between private and public behavior, and between ideals of equality for all people and female responsibility for domestic bliss. But we also know that many of our Founders were avid readers, and Franc Roads in particular has been written about as an early feminist, and apparently counted several of the most famous reformers as friends during her lifetime. It’s my guess that living in a time when a woman’s life was so carefully controlled and scripted, but when the whole world seemed to be in the midst of reinvention, must have been part of why our Founders were able to imagine something beyond their horizons.
From what I’ve read, it sounds like Mount Pleasant was rather perfectly designed to foster that spirit in our Founders. The town was founded in 1835—census records from 1859 state that the population was just over 3,400 (750 voters) and had grown “with unprecedented rapidity” in the four years before that, “owing, no doubt, to the many facilities which it possesses over other inland towns, in the way of building material, railway communications and educational advantages.” It cites the intersection of major rivers and the presence of Iowa Wesleyan University as examples of these advantages.
Iowa Wesleyan itself was something special. Founded in 1842 as a coeducational college, it is one of the oldest coed colleges west of the Mississippi. There were some women’s colleges, like Mount Holyoke (founded in 1837) but coed colleges were unusual. The fact that it is a United Methodist college is relevant to our P.E.O. origins. “Important to the United Methodist tradition are: education for all, regardless of social standing, ethnic identity or gender; education that appropriately relates faith and reason; education that helps individuals make full use of their capabilities; education aimed at high standards of achievement.” This is the educational ethos that our Founders experienced, and it’s not hard to trace the impact it had on the origins of P.E.O. These were attitudes that were fundamental to Iowa Wesleyan, and proved by its graduates. The first college-level graduate received a degree in 1856. Three years later, Lucy Webster Killpatrick was the first woman granted a B.A. degree from Iowa Wesleyan. It’s a place of other firsts, too: the first woman to be admitted to the Bar Association in the United States, Belle Babb Mansfield, graduated from Iowa Wesleyan in 1866—she was awarded her license to practice law in 1869. Susan Mosely Grandison, the first female black graduate, earned her degree in 1885. Keyroku Miazaki from Tokyo, Japan, who attended from 1890-’91, was the first documented international student. Clearly, this was a forward-thinking place.
The fact that our P.E.O. Founders were students at a college like that says a lot about their circumstances and inf luences. Women weren’t routinely sent to college in the mid-1800s, and our Founders wouldn’t have been there if they hadn’t had the support of their male relatives. Their fathers and families valued their intelligence and encouraged their intellectual development. These young women lived during a time of tremendous social change, and they were lucky enough to have the resources and the support to be able to embrace it.
It seems our Founders, in envisioning P.E.O., were envisioning an organization that expressed their combined ideals for women, infused with the spirit of transformation and innovation that was all around them. Through our projects, P.E.O. promotes education and independence for women. That is a public-minded and bold mission, and reflects the Founders’ idea of bettering the world. Our Objects and Aims, though, were the original Constitution that Alice Bird wrote, and remind us of the traits and habits that idealized womanhood as our Founders saw it. This is about bettering ourselves and helping those around us. It was because they were products of their circumstances that our Founders were able to bring these themes together—personal virtues and public mission—in such a powerful new way. And it is because they were able to create an organization that answered both needs (“with such aplomb and dispatch”), that P.E.O. remains an organization that speaks to women like us, 141 years later.
References
Wood, Rosemary. “The Past is Prologue: The First Constitution.” (Reprinted online from November-December 1994 P.E.O. Record.) P.E.O. International Members Website. http://members.peointernational.org/chapter-resources/first-constitution.php
Mokyr, Joel. "The Second Industrial Revolution, 1870-1914." August 1998.
http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jmokyr/castronovo.pdf
Bellis, Mary. "19th Century Timeline." About.com. http://inventors.about.com/od/timelines/a/Nineteenth.htm
"Mini History of the Corset." VictoriasPast.com. http://www.victoriaspast.com/DressingRoom/corsethistory.htm.
"History of Corsets." Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_corsets
"The Victorian Era." Eras of Elegance. http://www.erasofelegance.com/history/victorianlife.html
Preface to “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.” Mrs. Beeton’s Book. http://www.mrsbeeton.com/00-preface1.html
Alton, Anne Hiebert. Introduction to Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. 1860. Broadview Literary Texts. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2001. 16.
Snider, May Brooks. “Tidbits on Our Founders.” P.E.O. International Members Website. http://members.peointernational.org/chapter-resources/tidbits.php
The Illinois State Chapter of the P.E.O. Sisterhood. P.E.O. in Illinois : a History. Mendota: The Wayside Press, 1953. http://www.archive.org/stream/peoinillinoishis00peos#page/n5/mode/2up
"The City of Mt. Pleasant." Henry Co, Iowa Directory 1859-60. Watson Bowron, Publisher, Burlington, Iowa Accessed online http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~iahenry/59mtpleasant.htm
Elliott, T. Michael et al. "To Give the Key of Knowledge: United Methodists and Education, 1784-1976." A report for The National Commission on United Methodist Higher Education, 1976. http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/36/dc/8d.pdf
“History of Iowa Wesleyan College.” Iowa Wesleyan College website. http://www.iwc.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&layout=content&id=291
About the author
Amanda Meehan joined Chapter AZ, Herndon, Virginia, in 2007. She is a corporate internet director specializing in web communications and enjoys literary pursuits in her spare time. She has an undergraduate degree in English from Kenyon and a master’s in communication, culture and technology from Georgetown. She researched this information and presented it as the chapter’s Founders’ Day program in 2010 because she wanted to explore the reasons for P.E.O.’s enduring relevance to women like herself.
