[TAPE 1, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]

CONSTANCE MYERS:

This is Constance Myers interviewing Mrs. Lucy Somerville Howorth in Monteagle, Tennessee on June 20, 1975. Mrs. Howorth:

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I wish to make a statement similar to the one that I made when Delta State University initiated a series of tape recordings. It is to this effect, that I have made many mistakes, I have committed blunders, I have done things that I wish I hadn't done and not done some that I should have, but I am not the type to go dwelling on errors. I think that life has to be lived positively and affirmatively. If I could learn from a mistake, I tried to do so. Otherwise, it was washed out. This may make my tape sound like a pompous egotist, and if so, it just has to be.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Thank you, Mrs. Howorth. Well said. Can you remember how you first became aware that equal rights for women was actually an issue?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well naturally, I imbibed that with my early sitting at the knees of my mother. One of my earliest recollections is sitting by her desk, she would be writing and addressing envelopes, and I would arrange in little stacks one leaflet of each color. They used to publish these little leaflets in pink and yellow and white and blue and she would want to insert in an envelope a set. My recollection is of playing with those and of course, I learned the colors, I learned to assemble papers in an orderly fashion and a good deal. But I was helping her to do whatever she happened to be doing at the moment in the way of a public cause. I just don't ever remember when I I didn't know that there was a question, because the right to/vote was obviously

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denied to the women. That was all wrong, as far as things went at our home. So, I just had it and I read the books and I read the articles and I attended meetings and I was just absorbed with all of it . . . The Woman's Journal, you'll know that and will have come across it. I used to read it everytime. I was and am an omnivorous reader, I don't care what it is, if it is printed, I pick it up and read it. As a child, I read all of those things that were probably beyond me, but anyhow, it made a dent.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Were you raised in a politically conscious household generally speaking? Was your family aware of many other political issues and involved?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh yes. They were not political in the sense of being candidates. The first candidate in our family was my mother in 1923, but they always knew the candidates, they always knew the issues, they always discussed them. At our dining table, the conversation revolved around public issues, not around local gossip as to who had just gotten married or who_was going with whom or little petty things happening at the school. The conversation was on the level of public activities and issues and what was in the latest newspaper. Our house was full of newspapers. We had the Memphis paper, sometimes the Jackson paper, sometimes the New Orleans paper and sometimes the St. Louis paper.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

What about New York and Washington?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No, I don't suppose that anybody in town took The New York Times. Certainly, I was not aware of The New York Times until I went to college. Oh, I knew that there was such a paper, but I mean for any reading in the scope of it and so on. But when I went to college, I discovered it and have read it ever since all my life. I subscribe to the Sunday paper now.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

In the community of Greenville, were there sufficiently large

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numbers of other people similarly interested in political questions and compatible with your family, let's say?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I wouldn't say that there was any large number, but there were people. I have never found, and I don't know whether in her researches that Mrs. Meredith found out much about a Mrs. Mount, who moved away before I was old enough to know, but who seemed to have had a great influence on the women. I don't know what became of her or where she moved to.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I don't recall that name at all in the suffrage literature.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She is the one who introduced my mother to the homeopathic medicine and she . . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I see. Do you recall her first name at all?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No, I don't. You know, you don't think as you grow up to ask people those things and you get your mind on other things. But she seems to have been one that kind of stirred women up.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Mrs. Mount.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

In Greenville, in the 1880's and 1890's. But I didn't suggest her name, I think, to Mrs. Meredith.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

And she moved away, you believe, because you didn't hear of her subsequently?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No. I have no recollection of ever seeing her. I suppose I did, but it was before I was recalling my observations.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Were your parent's views, then, different somewhat from those that were typical of the community?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

We have to make a distinction between my father and my mother. He was a conventional Virginian who had moved to what was essentially a frontier type of community. It always went hard with him. He joined the Methodist Church,

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there was no Presbyterian Church, but in his thinking and all, he remained a Presbyterian. He was a Scotsman in the sense that that was the dominant element of his heredity. Now, my mother was a native of this frontier community which to him, was rather wild. She had a remarkable mind, as you have discovered, and it ranged over wide areas and she was . . . the Irish is what predominated in her. The give and take and the free mingling with people and the liking and the sociability of informal . . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

And the absence of a reserve?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes. That was in her contacts with people. Her personal character and life were distinctly reserved.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Yes.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

So, she had the adventurous mind and she was a little more willing to take a chance, which is the dominant attitude of these cotton planters who could in one year, make enough off of their crop to pay for their land and many of them were real gamblers, as well as gambling in their lives against flood and malaria and yellow fever and all sorts of things coming in. She was more of that type. So, there was a difference. But insofar as the community interest and being concerned with what developed in the community, they were both concerned.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Did your father disapprove of your mother's suffrage activity?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, that would not be the word, because I don't think that would have gotten far, but he was a man who could not understand. You know, there are men, you have found them, who with the best will in the world, can't understand what it is about. Now, there are other men who do. My husband, he understands and my father never lifted a word in opposition and I am sure that if a vote had come, he would have voted for suffrage for women. But as to

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really understanding the basic reasons for the women's movement . . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

The desire for equal citizenship?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

He thought, you know, "they have everything." It is partially a lack of imagination. That is, the kind of imagination that makes one person understand another person. Not the kind of imagination that can construct a story.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

An empathetic imagination.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes. That's a good phrase.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Although your parents differed, still they doublessly projected a certain image before the community.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, yes.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

A unified image before the community.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I don't think that the rest, my two brothers are dead now and I never discussed this with my sister, but I don't think that they were aware. They left home early and I don't think that they sensed anything of a lack of sympathy or whatever you want to call it, but there certainly wasn't anything publicly. It was getting along happily and satisfactorily.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

There were no repercussions in the community because of the suffrage activity? Or were there?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, at times, yes. There were plenty of rows that went on, you know.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Can you tell about one or two incidents?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I don't know that I can. It's hard to pin those things down, you know. There wasn't any case of open hostility. Now, you are writing in South Carolina, and you have the same thing there, that at the end of the Civil War period, you had the white people who were terribly poor and what you call deprived now, but none of them ever knew that word and didn't have that

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feeling. They had a deep understanding that no one of their own kind would be rejected or severely criticized for anything, no matter what they did, because they had stood together under great tribulations and they would continue to. So, my mother could get away with a great deal that if any stranger had come into town, she would have been. . . ..

CONSTANCE MYERS:

That's the whole story, I think.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

You see, her father had. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

He had been outstanding in the community.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Her father had been a colonel in the Civil War. He had been one of the four men in Mississippi who signed a declaration of freedom from the carpetbag rule and called on the other citizens of Mississippi to throw off the yoke. His daughter could do no wrong, really. They would mutter and wish that she wouldn't stir up the women and stir up the temperance work and try to close the saloons and this, that, and the other.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

This is the same story that I found in South Carolina, of course. Do you recall if your mother ever told you how she became interested in women's rights?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No. And I don't know that she pinned it to any one thing. Now, she had said that Frances Willard, who came to Mississippi and inspired Belle Kearney and inspired my mother and other women, that when she said that the women couldn't get anything done until they had the right to vote, then I think that is really what pinned my mother's mind to that point, that that was basic.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

The vote wasn't to be an instrument for further reform?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No, and that, I think, a lot of people ought to understand. It would be used as an instrument for reform, but it was a basic right. My mother had a great sense of justice and so did these other women.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

A twofold purpose, as a basic right and as an instrument.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Then, after you got it, you would use it. But she was a bit like I am, people would say something about how they are going to use the vote and I said, "Nobody asked my brothers how they could use the vote and I have the right to use mine exactly as I please." It is nobody's business. She had a legal mind, her father offered to let her come into his law office and read law, which was an outstanding thing to do.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Why did she not do that?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She didn't do it, she said, because she felt that she should go back to Greenville, her father was living in Jackson, but her grandmother lived in Greenville and was getting old and feeble and she was the only descendant of that particular grandmother and therefore, she wanted to spend as much time as she could with her. That is the reason that she gave, and I assume that it was the reason. There might have been reasons of a more philanthropic type, she was religious and she had what you call now a sociological urge to do some good and that reading law in her father's office and then doing some pure law business, that was a little more on the side of pure business than her nature would respond to.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

What about her children?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, of course then, she was not married.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

That's right.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She had an interesting little episode. I don't think that I told Mrs. Meredith this. When she was a girl, must have been about fourteen, she was on a steamboat, going from Greenville to Vicksburg to there take the train back home to Jackson and there happened to be on the steamboat a member of the faculty of Vassar College. This, I guess, was about 1876 . . . when was Vassar founded? In the '70s, wasn't it?

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I don't recall which decade.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well anyhow, this member of that faculty tried to persuade her to go to Vassar to college. Something about her just flashed. So, she told her father about it and he said that she could. And again, she said that the reason that she didn't was because of this grandmother, that she felt that this grandmother would feel that she was deserting the South or something. In later years, she sometimes played with the idea of how different her life might have been if she had gone.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Something of this anecdote appears in the papers up at Radcliffe. There is a reference to her loyalty to the South and to Mississippi, rather than to the grandmother.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

If she wrote anything herself, she would have left her grandmother out, because you see, that was what she considered a strictly personal relationship which she would never have gone into except in conversation with someone like me, you know.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Yes. I wonder when she first became aware that there were women's organizations to promote suffrage and equal rights for women? Do you have any recollection?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I don't know, but I think that she first ran into it through the home mission work of the Methodist Church, in which she was very much interested. She went to some meeting at which she met the leaders and I think that she read the newspapers and all. But Frances Willard, I think, is the one that really converted her to activity and shifted her major activity from the Methodist Church and the women in the church. But she used to boil at that even in the early days, because when she went to one of the first of these meetings, she found out that the bishops were insisting on the right to tell them how to spend the money and she didn't like that one bit.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

One anecdote that I think comes from your papers was the one that

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Anne Scott repeats in her book, The Southern Lady, about the minister worrying about women's prayer groups, "I wonder what on earth they will pray for." [laughter]

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I ran across that, it was actually in a book. I have seen it attributed to several things, but I picked it up in New York when I was with the YWCA. You see, that was another issue, could the women meet without the minister being present? I was just burned up once in Washington. They asked me to go an Episcopal church, unknown they wanted to talk about forming a business and professional women's group and would I come and tell them something about how to do it and so on. I got there and here was this minister, the rector of the church, and I asked one of them, "Does he intend to come to all your meetings?" "Oh, well yes."

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Did you ask why?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I knew why, but I said, "You aren't a group of children and you should run your own affairs."

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Yes, I know that you knew why, but sometimes this brings the question right out and makes them state it.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

That's true, of course, all of the churches, I think, were pretty much that way and now, I don't think that the Methodists do and maybe the others don't.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I think that women have a great deal more freedom to function without male supervision in the churches these days. You were born, virtually, with the suffrage association in Mississippi.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, July 1, 1895.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I think that the suffrage association was born in about March and I think that Carrie Chapman Catt came and toured the state.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She came, whether that year, I do not know, but the records

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would show.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

She came that year, I've forgotten the month, but it's a significant fact, I think.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I heard Mrs. Catt make her last speech at the Cause and Cure of War, when it was dissolved and then I went to New York when they had that big tribute to her.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Was this the Women's Centennial, or something of that sort? I read the newspaper account of that and saw her picture there and read that she was disappointed with the manifesto.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Or declaration, I believe.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

They had something, yes. It was all cooked up to honor her, really.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

She deserved it.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She did, she was a very able and inspiring person.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Do you know if the question of women's voting had ever been raised in an official deliberated party in the state of Mississippi before 1900?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, it was raised. I don't recall now, I don't have any notes with me, but it was raised in the constitutional convention of 1890.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Was it raised in 1868, by any chance?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I don't know. I would doubt it.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

But it was raised in 1890.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

It was raised in 1890, now. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Do you recall what individual brought the question to the body?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No, but all of that has been written up somewhere. Did you run across an article written by a woman out in Texas about four years ago on Mississippi and the suffrage movement?

CONSTANCE MYERS:

She's written a number of articles of that nature.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I wondered why she hadn't gotten in touch with me and I started to write and make some comments on some of her comments with which I didn't altogether agree, but then, it takes time to do those things.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

This is Dr. A. Elizabeth Taylor?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I think it is. But in there, she used, as my recollection goes, the constitutional convention and the bringing up the matter of women. She puts it on the stand that it was a possible way of helping to alleviate the effect of the Negro voting. She dwells on that a good deal.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Well, this was a position taking by Belle Kearney and it was a position taken by Kate Gordon, according to the most recent historical literature.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

They did, but what I object to in her article and in these others stressing that, is that when you are in the middle of a fight, you take every argument that you can think of and then after it, if you win that fight, then you begin to trim off what was essential and what wasn't and what you meant and what you just seized on, so that I think both Belle Kearney and Miss Kate Gordon are put in a rather unflattering light in stressing that argument.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

It has been stressed, though, in recent historical scholarship, I think unfairly.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, and also to take people out of the context of their times. Now, as I recollect, my mother never got into that, but I don't think she got into it because of any feeling of what is now called civil rights, but she didn't get into it because she didn't think that it was a good, sound argument. At least, that is what seventy years later, I think.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Did your mother and the suffrage movement have many supporters active in political life, either state or national political life, from Mississippi?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I wouldn't say so. They had more than was generally expected in Massachussetts, for example, but . . . and they had some quite influential people, mostly men, because they were the only influence that counted. But it was always an minority movement. Now, one year, an editor made a charge that nobody was interested in the suffrage activities and that there wasn't anything written about it. So, my mother subscribed to every county paper in Mississippi and I cut out every clipping for about six months and she bought yard goods and I pinned those clippings on and it went all the way around a large room and she took that on her trips to demonstrate the wide interest in Mississippi in what went on.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Was there a state senator, for example, maybe just a single one. This is what I really mean, or maybe a representative, an assemblyman?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well yes, there were several men in the legislature and several in the state senate. Now, you know, I would hesitate to use their names because . . . well actually, this cousin, Vann Boddie, he voted some and helped Mama some and there were several. There was a man from up in Macon and over the state. The movement had some good support.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

And what about in the Congress, from Mississippi?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Of course, Vardaman was possible, I remember that they put him down as possibly voting. The older senators, none of them and Pat Harrison, of course, he was building himself up and was on the popular side as far as Mississippi was concerned, but once women got the vote, Pat Harrison was very helpful and friendly and so on.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I noticed that you had a continuing friendship with him.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Not only I, but a number of women.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

What were these men like that tended to support suffrage? What did they do? Were they attorneys, were they editors, could they use their

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influence? This is a multiple question and that is unfair, but can you characterize them at all in a general way? Or let's do them one by one.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, you take the editor of the paper in Greenville, Mr. L. Pink Smith. Basically, he liked Mama, he was in favor of suffrage, but when the heat was turned on him, he would go and take cover, you see, locally. When whoever was financing that paper or maybe just somebody that he recognized as having a good deal of local influence . . . but they were lawyers and there was a lawyer at home, a very distinguished man, R.B. Campbell. He was always friendly with Mama and helped her and advised her and checked her if she was making a legal statement on anything. He was friendly to her and he never stepped out and made a speech for her, but he may have introduced some speakers sometimes. There was a great deal of friendliness.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Any editorials in support of suffrage?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh yes, there were some.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Was suffrage activity reported fairly?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

In most of the instances, every once in awhile, there would be some unfair reporting, but my recollection is that there wasn't much.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

And there wasn't a blackout on suffrage news?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No, as I said, that demonstration. . . .

[TAPE 2, SIDE A]

[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

. . . didn't need glasses and until you get used to wearing them, you don't like to.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

In addition then, to the men in politics who supported suffrage activities in Mississippi, you had some editorial friends, some editors. . . .

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Now, these were for my mother.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Your mother's supporters.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

You are still back with her.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Right. What about the merchants in the community, the early rising industrialists in the community? Did they take a position and were they vocal at all on this question?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

They probably took a position in private, but insofar as my mother was concerned, they were always friendly. She would go around and she would get all of them to contribute if she was having a public speaker there, to get expenses for renting a hall and that kind of thing. Whether they were for it or against it, she could wheedle money out of them. It was a small, friendly community, you know.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

How big was Greenville, then?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

If you ran across, which you must have, that speech I made at Randolph [Randolph-Macon Woman's College], "From the Surrey to the Atomic Age," I gave the figures there. That speech has it, but I don't recall them, but it was a small community. It was very different from these things now. There wasn't the meaness and there wasn't the fear that is so common now.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I see that Greenville is in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, is it not?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

It's in Mississippi, it's the Yazoo Mississippi Delta. People get confused because technically, the delta is the mouth of the river down in Louisiana.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I don't think that I am confused in this case, because I think of the delta that is formed by the confluence of these rivers.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

It is the Yazoo river flowing southwestward into the Mississippi and this begins south of Memphis. Memphis is on a bluff and about twenty miles

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miles south, into Mississippi, the bluffs run off, disappear and you have this alluvial flat plain, which was flooded annually by the Mississippi River and the Yazoo River. Beyond the Yazoo to the east, the hills begin again.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Yes. I have been reading V.O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation and there is this geographical deliniation of Mississippi political patterns, you know. I was going to ask you a question about suffrage in connection with this geographical situation. Did you find a particular area of Mississippi more receptive to the notion of equal rights for women, did your mother find this?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I think not. I think there were little pockets here and there, as I mentioned, Macon over on the eastern part of the state it was a friendly community. It's in what they called the prairie section. And around Clarksdale, Mississippi, it was quite friendly. That's in the Delta. So, of course, as I said, little pockets here and there. And out somewhere that you would think would be mostly narrowminded, Vardaman and Bilbo types, you would get some friends.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

But there was little crossing over boundaries in most instances, wasn't there, as with other political issues? Do you remember suffrage meetings after the movement was reborn in 1911 or 1912? You were about the age to be aware.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, I went to several of the state conventions and acted as a page and then in the year before I went to college, the spring of 1912, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw came and I went to the state convention where she spoke and then she came . . . well, maybe the convention was in Greenville, but anyhow, she spoke in Greenville. Then when I went on to college that fall, she came to Lynchburg to a meeting and spoke and I arranged, freshman girl that I was, I stirred them up and arranged to have her come out to the college. Now, there's

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where I began to run into this narrow minded business that really burned me up. They wouldn't let Anna Howard Shaw speak in the college auditorium.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Well, it was a touchy issue. This was in about 1912?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

This was the fall of 1912 and I found out, or somebody helped me out, because I was a freshman, that the rule of the college was that the seniors could entertain anybody that they wanted in what was called the Senior Parlor. So, some of the seniors agreed that Dr. Anna Howard Shaw could speak in the parlor and we had a reception for her and we had them hanging out the windows.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

You used your influence with the members of the senior class, I guess.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, my sister had graduated the year before, so I didn't go up there as an unknown. I am still thrilled to this day that when the car came up with Dr. Shaw and she stepped out, I came up and started to introduce myself, she said, "Why child, I know you." You see, she remembered from Greenville.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Can you characterize her? Somehow, can you give a little descriptive paragraph?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, she was one of the most charming people that I have ever known. She was witty and friendly and warm and eloquent. She was the eloquent voice of the suffrage movement so far as I am concerned.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I think that others concur with this.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

And then. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

There has been some critcism of her organizing ability.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, that was the argument used to get her to step down and let Mrs. Catt come in to do the final victory.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Was this a good decisiobn in your view?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, I think that it was, because it was one of those things where Mrs. Catt's friends wouldn't follow Dr. Shaw and therefore to prevent a schism . . . you see this thing time and again in public life, that one leader is not . . . well, Lyndon Johnson, he said that he couldn't bring unity to the country and I think that he was correct. So, he stepped aside. What we got in return was something else, but we will skip that. [laughter] So, that was the thing about Anna Howard Shaw.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

It was a strategic move politically?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

You don't think that the thing could have been achieved had Anna Howard Shaw remained president?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Not if the friends of Mrs. Catt wouldn't have been whole hearted, whereas the friends of Anna Howard Shaw did go whole heartedly.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

It's the first time that I have ever heard it expressed that way. Thank you.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

You see, I was at that convention. You see, my mother was at that time one of the vice-presidents.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I was going to ask you if you had been to a national convention?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, and I was a senior in college and we had this Equal Rights Club, you see, affiliated from Randolph-Macon and so, I went. My mother said that she wanted me to have the experience of a national meeting and I went as a delegate from the Randolph-Macon chapter of the college.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Where was this meeting held?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Washington, at the Willard Hotel. So, I was all ears and eyes and I knew from mother the undercurrents and I watched the whole proceedings.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

This was about 1916, in October?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

October, 1915.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

1915.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I went up . . . it has been very helpful to me, and I hope to other people. I went up the elevator one day and Dr. Shaw was in the elevator. Someone spoke to her and said, "Dr. Shaw, are you ever nervous when you speak?" She said, "Always, my dear. Until I begin, I never know whether I will be able to make a sound."

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Mrs. [Eulalie] Salley had the same experience when she spoke in Aiken, [S. C.] when Dr. Shaw spoke in Aiekn. Dr. Shaw said to Mrs.Salley, who was to address her on the stage, "I'm frightened, I'm scared to death. I am always this way before a speech. Aren't you, dear?" And Mrs. Salley said, "Why heavens, no. I just talk off the cuff all the time."

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I have two theories about that. One is that you do not reach your audience unless you are so tense and nervous yourself, so in the projection, you need that nervous tension. So many young women especially, you know, say, "Oh, I can't get up in front of an audience," so I tell them that. I say that one of the greatest orators of all time had this experience.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

You are talking about Dr. Shaw?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes. Oh, of course you get so that you can stand up in an ordinary meeting and make a motion without getting any nervous fits. I think that probably Dr. Shaw's nervousness was enhanced in the South, because all these people in the Middle West and New England and all were forever warning her, "Be careful down in the South, they are different and you will say something wrong." And so on. That is rather interesting that you ran across the same comment.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

It is. So, you traveled with your mother some for suffrage. Did you travel around the state of Mississippi as she organized?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No, I did not travel with her on suffrage trips. I only went occasionally with her to a convention, or a set meeting. You see, there is a distinction.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Yes, there is. But she did do traveling within the state as an organizer?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, she did quite a bit of it.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

And she did other things too, as an organizer?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I don't know whether this appears in any of her papers, but she and Mrs. McClurg of Greenwood, were on a tour of the state, organizing and speaking and on the train this particular day, it was one of these local trains you know, there was a group of Millsaps College boys. They were on their way to Jackson, they had had a ball game or something. So, they saw the banners that my mother and Mrs. McClurg had, "Votes for Women." So, they began making some remarks and booing and cutting up as students will do. There was the old train "butch" they called him, the man or boy who went around selling candies and pop and so on. Mama signaled this man when he came along and asked him what it would cost to buy everything that he had. This was fifty years or more ago. He said, I think, five dollars or something like that. So, she handed him the money and said, "Take this to those boys back there and give them everything that you have." So, he did and then out came cheers, "Votes for Women. Hurrah! Hurrah!" [laughter]

CONSTANCE MYERS:

What superb political sense she had. [laughter] A question came to my mind when we were talking about your Randolph-Macon days. In 1912, Dr. Shaw wasn't permitted to speak to the student body assembled.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

But in 1915, a chapter of the collegiate Equal Rights Association had formed?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

That's right.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

A lot of transformation had taken place on that campus. When did this happen?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, we formed that as soon as I hit the campus!

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Yes, but it had to be chartered by the administrators.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh no, not then. This was a simple day. [laughter] We were a subversive group, but we operated and I set out part of the bulletin board for announcements, a big cardboard poster where you put announcements of meetings of the Mississippi Club and the Literary Club and this, that and the other. So, I got a corner of that and I kept news items up there steadily and of course, there were a group of girls.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

You were behind the organizing?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

But there were others?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, we had quite a nice group.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I mean, that initiated this project, that set up that chapter?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

And of course, I had a legal turn of mind, I didn't know what it was, but anyhow, I wanted to get us officially established. I knew that we were subversives, you see. But the student government at Randolph-Macon, they had a very strong student government association and so it adopted a rule that organizations should be set up on a points system and that one person could only have an office in so many points. In other words, if an organization rated one point, being president of it would be one point and the rule was that you couldn't have more than ten points. That prevented one particular person from holding all the offices.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

And diverting too much attention from school work, too.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, it was one of these kind of democratic moves and equalizing things in distributing honors and responsibilities. Of course, if one girl was president of everything, none of them got any attention from her. So, I had gotten on the student government by that time and when they drew up the list of what would have so many points, I got the Equal Suffrage group, whatever they called it, to be put on that list. So, from then on, we were a legally recognized group by the student government and the faculty could go hang as far as I was concerned, because we would fight to the death for the right of the student government to recognize organizations.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

How do you account for this? In those papers up at Radcliffe, there is a little list of your accomplishments, your memberships in those early school years and any affiliation with a college Equal Suffrage club doesn't appear. There is no reference to it. The Franklin Literary group appears, and a number of other things appear, but not any reference to this. I didn't know you were a member.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I was the sponsor of it. It wasn't in the annual, ever, I don't think. That's my recollection and I wouldn't be positive, my annual has been lost, so I haven't looked at one. But we had quite a lively one. I remember that Cole Blease was an awful governor of South Carolina, and one day he announced that he was pardoning 1800 or something like that and so, I took that and made a big poster. "All of these men can vote, but the South Carolina woman can't."

CONSTANCE MYERS:

About the same time, he was involved in the firing of the first woman physician hired in the state mental institution, seeing to her firing. I see that you had a similar incident take place in Mississippi. Can you tell about that?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I don't know, I remember that it happened, but I don't recall anything about it. We had another thing at Randolph-Macon and that was Mary

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Johnston. Of course, she was a very strong suffragist. So, we finnagled an invitation to her to come and speak on American literature. You see, they couldn't refuse to have this outstanding Virginia author and so she spoke to the assembled student body. Of course, we had engineered this and we explained to her what the situation was. So, she devoted about two sentences to the development of American literature and then made her suffrage speech, her standard suffrage speech.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I think that Ella Harrison reports similar events down in Mississsippi, when she was organizing down there.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, yes.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

A person would be engaged to address a group on a literary matter and then would go off into suffrage.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

So, we knew a good deal about subversive activities. [laughter]

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Tell about some of the Mississippi suffragists. We've mentioned Belle Kearney several times. What background did she spring from?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, she sprang from a background of one of the strong Mississippi families. Her father was a distinguished man and was pretty well wiped out by the Civil War. I knew Miss Kearney very slightly and when you read that speech, you will see the little that I know about her.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

You saw her a few times.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, yes. I saw her. I saw her and went in and congratulated her the day that she was sworn into the state senate and I saw her after I married and moved to Jackson. She was spending most of her time in Jackson, so I saw her with some frequency.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Was she a professional woman, or was she simply an inspired. . . .

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No. Have you read her book, The Slave-Owners' Daughter?

CONSTANCE MYERS:

No.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I gave a copy to Radcliffe. They are out of print and hard to find.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Well, it is probably available near where I live.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

It would be available from. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

From interlibrary loan.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes. But she had practically no formal education and I think that she was sixteen when she organized her little school. She herself said that she only went to school through the third grade. But of course, her home was a home of culture and had probably a good library and so she organized that little school and then she went to Jackson to hear Frances Willard. So, that was where she found her niche and became a professional member of the staff of the WCTU, eventually.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Oh, she went from WCTU into suffrage, too.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Back and forth. But she was a professional worker and she was the first American woman to take a world wide lecture tour and then during World War I, she went over to. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

What did she talk about on that lecture tour?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She talked about . . . I don't know, I never have read one of her speeches, but I would assume that she talked on civic subjects and women and the part women should play and probably the evils of alcohol.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I wonder what kinds of audiences she addressed?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I don't know. I would think that maybe her reports are up there in the WCTU papers in Evanston. Her papers must be there.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Probably.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She wrote voluminously. I know that my mother would occassionally get a letter from her. My mother was very telegraphic in her style and Miss Belle was very flowery.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Well, what about Mrs. Ben Saunders? Do you remember her?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, I loved Mrs. Ben Saunders.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

What was her first name? I think that she was president of. . . .

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, she was. She was the president of. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

All I have is Mrs. Ben F. Saunders.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She married again late in life and I saw just about a month ago, ran into a niece of hers and she said something . . . well, I believe that she was down there at the Historical Society and she asked me if I remembered Mrs. Saunders, her aunt. I said, "Oh, of course." She apparently, this niece, regretted this late marriage. Mr. Saunders died fairly early and Mrs. Saunders was a widow a long time. She was a very bright person and she had a good deal of business ability. She was not one of these national, outstanding leaders, you know, but she was deeply interested in the suffrage movement. She was a woman of considerable means.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

It seemed to require that when you virtually had to foot the bills yourself.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, you had to foot all the bills yourself. She came to me, consulted me as a lawyer, to draw her will at one time and of course, I didn't have to know how much property she had to draw the will at that time, but she was a woman of great charm and she was quite attractive to men in an entirely dignified way. That meant that they didn't like to oppose her wishes.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I see here a reference to Mrs. Mount, a Mrs. Thomas Mount, but her own first name doesn't appear and she is from Vicksburg.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, she left Greenville and went there, I guess.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I just wanted some comments about these women and the backgrounds they came from, what you can recall. I have a reference to a Mrs. Charlotte Pittman, for example. Did you know Mrs. Pittman?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No, I don't recall her at all.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Mrs. Ella Biggs?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I have a vague recollection of her, but nothing that would help you.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I think that she did the publicity at the very outset of the organization. Miss Fanny Clark?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Now, that's not the Clark that I remember, but Clark is not an uncommon name.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Mrs. Mabel Pugh from Yazoo City?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I have a vague recollection, but I couldn't throw any light on her. I tell you, you can't go running everywhere, but the archives in Mississippi have been given the papers of Mrs. Lilly Wilkinson Thompson, who was in and out as president and those papers probably have a good deal of correspondence with different ones.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

The interesting thing that I am seeking, really, is your characterization and the kind of thing that you might say about these women so that I can get an idea of their background. I would imagine that they are similar to the women who were active in South Carolina.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I would think so.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

There is a pattern there.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

There is. They are all people of good social position, you know, and mostly of moderate means, as I remarked earlier. The custom of the period was that if you had the background of loyalty to the Confederacy in your family, then you were accepted even if you couldn't always buy your own ticket.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

How did Mississippi educators stand on the question of suffrage?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

A few of them were friendly, but most of them were not.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

The President, for example, of Mississippi State College for Women?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Of course, Whitfield, when he went in, was more friendly and eventually very friendly. He was president for six or eight years, but I don't think that they looked upon him for much help.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I wonder if the national leaders were permitted to speak there and how often, if at all?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I don't know. I do know that a good deal of effort was made to try and get an invitation to somebody to try and speak at some of the colleges, but I don't recall.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

When were women first admitted to Ole Miss? I was going to ask you about the views of the Chancellor of 01e Miss and then I thought that I had better see if women were students there at that time.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

It is my recollection that the University of Mississippi was the first state university to admit women. If it was not the first, it was the second.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I have a notion that Mississippi was the first state to open a state college for women.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Mississippi State College for Women, which was originally named I&C, Industrial Institute and College, was the first state supported institution for college education for women. [Presently Missippi University for Women]

CONSTANCE MYERS:

That's what I thought.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

And Mississippi was the first state to charter an institution to grant degrees to women and that was in 1819 and the compilers of one of these encyclopedias of education couldn't believe their eyes when they read that. So, they wrote it up as Missouri and Missouri was not a state at that time.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

That's quite a joke on them.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I ran into that when I was working up a speech in Washington, and I went over to the AAUW headquarters, where I spent a good deal of the time anyhow, and I knew they had this encyclopedia and I wanted to verify it and they had it wrong. [laughter]

CONSTANCE MYERS:

That's a real joke.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Isn't it. [laughter]

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Mississippi has another first for women and this is married women's control over property.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh yes, and there too. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

It always surprises people when I make reference to this fact in talks.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

But what they do is, they say, "New York," which I think was two years later, maybe four years later, enacted a similar law and that the New York law was broader and therefore it. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

This is Constance Myers continuing the interview with Mrs. Lucy Sommerville Howorth of Mississippi, the interview taking place at Monteagle, Tennessee on June 20, 1975.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

. . . and she was entertained by. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Your mother went to North Carolina and was entertained.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

At Dr. and Mrs. Archibald Henderson's, whom you may recall, was the great biographer of George Bernard Shaw, and a very distinguished member of the faculty. I do not recall the purpose of the trip, except that it was a suffragist trip and she enjoyed it very much and enjoyed the Hendersons and

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continued a sort of a friendship with them from then on, maybe once a year exchanging letters or something. But she came home laughing about it, that the maid was in her room cleaning and she began talking to the maid and the maid said, "You is the smartest person that has ever been here. You know what people are thinking before they know it themselves." So, that amused my mother but it also shows the impression that she could create.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I'll bet that you have a storehouse of those anecdotes.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, there are a good many, you know, incidents where she did some little stunt.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Can you recall her talking about organizing in the different states?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She would come home always with some interesting tidbit, you know, and discuss personalities. She had quite a bit of wit. She was wonderful company when you got to know her. She was one of these people that would not open up to the occasional public. There was a lady here who owned a cottage who was the daughter of Judge Mayes in Jackson, who a contemporary of my mother's father. The two families had been well acquainted, but she happened not to have known . . . my mother who was older than she, and she told me once that she was walking along out here and she saw my mother on this porch and she thought, "I hear such things about her being so fierce and stern and hard to get along with and this and that. My father liked her father and our families were good friends. I am going in and call." So, she did. Well, my mother, you see, knew who she was and knew the family and so on and she was in a good mood and they had a wonderful time swapping stories and telling jokes on people they knew. After that, Miss Mayes said . . . she was Mrs. Mary Mayes Sanders, she said, "I went regularly to see your mother because she was the best company that I ever knew." She told me that once in Jackson and she said, "Everytime I go to Monteagle, one of the first visits I make is to your mother." So, that is the contrast, you see, of people who didn't like her views and. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

"Fierce." That's the first time that I've heard that adjective.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh boy, you get into a debate with her, she could chew you up and spit you out so fast. Like that Negro woman said, she knew what people were thinking before they did.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

This was native ability, innate ability?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Sure. She knew when a speaker got up what that speaker was going to say and she had a devastating reply before he sat down.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Did she have formal academic training?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh yes, she had a bachelor's degree.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

All right. I didn't know that.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, she went first, she was sent when she was about twelve years old . . . you see, a very bright child, I'm sure you have found, is as much a problem as a very dumb one. She had a stepmother who was a very fine person, but the stepmother had five children of her own who were younger and here was this little girl who was, I imagine, forever into something. So, when she was twelve years old, she was sent her to Whitworth College in Brookhaven, Mississippi. She always said that was where she got her real education and she was about to graduate there when she was, it seems to me, fourteen. The president of the college told her father that that was entirely too young to allow her to graduate. So then, he sent to Martha Washington College in Abingdon, Virginia and there she stayed, I don't know how many years, I think she was in the class of '78 or '79, something like that. I gave a book to Radcliffe on the history of Martha Washington College, which is no longer in existence. The president of the college when she graduated was Dr. E.E. Hoss, who became a bishop in the Southern Methodist Church and who had a cottage here at Monteagle and that was a lifelong friendship. He respected

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her mind from the very time that he met her. So, she had training, they taught elocution and they taught what we now call public speaking.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

But she didn't go into teaching or into one of the professions, did she?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No, you've got to remember the 1880's.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Oh, I know.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

But she did . . . now, I think you can tell what a girl has deep in her, whether she begins early to want to be financially independent and she got a position as a sort of tutor in Greenville of a family . . . I can't think of their name right now. [Mr. & Mrs. Pollack] The man was the president of the Grumble bank and had two daughters. He later went to New Orleans to be president of a bank there and they moved down there. That put her back with her grandmother in Greenville and she did this tutoring.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Which is teaching.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, she was a strong teacher. We always had wonderful cooks, but she would take a field hand and make a wonderful cook out of her and never go near the kitchen. I never saw her in the kitchen.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

But tell them how to prepare it?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, and after it was on the table, after the meal, she would call her and say, "Now, this needed a little more of this and a little more of that." But she never went near the kitchen.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Isn't that something? The more I know of your mother, the more remarkable a person she appears.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

As I say, she was wonderful company and she read beautifully. She won a medal at Martha Washington for reading and she could project her voice over several thousand people in an audience.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Had she been a man, she would have gone into political life or in the educational field.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, she would certainly have been in the Senate. Of course, that was unheard of.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

What kind of home background did she spring from? What was her home like?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Her home was like most of those post-Civil War homes. She was born in 1863 and her mother died the first of January, 1866 and her father was practicing law in Greenville. He had come to Greenville along about 1854, or something like that, and read law with her maternal grandfather Abram Fulkner Smith and formed a law partnership in 1856 and he was practicing law when he joined the Confederate Army in 1862. So, he came back to Greenville and then her mother died and he married again in about a year and that wife died after about a year and then he married Miss Aimee Webb in Montgomery, Alabama. There was a good deal of teasing. He went over to make the commencement address at a college and was invited out to dinner at her house and unknown he fell down the steps and broke his leg. So, there wasn't any hospital in that day. [laughter] So, her mother took him in, you know and took care of him and so, he fell in love with the daughter of the house. She was a very remarkable and fine woman. She came to Greenville and in 1872, he moved to Jackson. So, my mother of course went with him then. Well, as I said, when she was twelve which would have been in '75, she went down to Whitworth College. Except for family vacations in Greenville, Jackson was her home. She was married there and her father was a very prominent lawyer and he. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Did she travel? Or was her travel pretty well restricted to the southern states?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She went to the 1876 exposition, which is now coming to the front, you see and she used to tell of hearing the record, you know, the first phonograph of Edison's there. The little girl, "who had a curl right in the middle of her forehead and when she was good, she was very, very good and when she was bad, she was horrid." She would do that in the squeaky voice of that machine. It was a wonderful thing, you see. It was extraordinary. Then when she married my father, they went to New York and Washington and up there on her wedding trip.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

But she remained eternally loyal. . . .

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She said to me and to my elder sister and I take it to other people, that until she went to a meeting a Boston, and it seems to me that it was about 1920, it wasn't '20, but anyhow it was after World War I, that when she stood on Plymouth Rock, she felt for the first time that she was an American.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Up to that date, she had felt she was a Mississippian, or a southerner?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Was there a chapter of the Southern States Women Suffrage Association in Mississippi?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I don't think so. I don't have any recollection of it.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I keep hearing about that, and I can't pinpoint its location.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I don't recall it.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Do you recall if, when the National American Women's Suffrage Association moved over and became or formed the League of Women Voters, if

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a Southern State's League of Women Voters. . . .

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No, you see, my mother wouldn't have anything to do with the League of Women Voters.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Well, now this is another important and interesting question.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She considered it a fatal mistake. She considered that the women were selling their birthright, so to speak, to go into that, that to make yourself effective, you had to go into a political party.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Which took, I presume, a partisan position on issues?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, and she considered that a very unfortunate development and she blamed Mrs. Catt for allowing that to happen. She never liked Mrs. Catt, really, after that. She wouldn't have said this publicly and generally, because she was very careful to avoid anything like a schism.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Of course, this was the position taken by the National Woman's Party and Alice Paul.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, yes.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

And I wondered if they were active in Mississippi?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No, there were one or two people in Mississippi that took an interest in and affiliated with them, but it was a very skimpy thing and I never heard of any kind of an organization that they had.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Can you recall Alice Paul or Maud Younger or Doris Stephens or Lucy Burns or Mabel Vernon or any of these individuals, if they came down and. . . .

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Let's go through that list.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

All right. Alice Paul, who was. . . .

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She never came. I knew Alice Paul. She's still living, isn't she?

CONSTANCE MYERS:

She has had a stroke and is very, very ill in Ridgefield Connecticut.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, I'm sorry. No, she never came, to my knowledge. Of course, you see, I was away a good deal of the time. It seems to me that Maud Younger made a southern tour, but I am not positive.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

She came to South Carolina.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

It seems to me that she did. Now, Doris Stephens I don't think ever did. And who else?

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Lucy Burns.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No. I don't think so.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I may have mentioned Mabel Vernon. I just pulled that name out of a list.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Mabel Vernon I am sure never came to Mississippi. I can't be positive, because I was in New York, I was here then and so on. And I wasn't charging my recollection with all these things.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

To your recollection, there was no chapter or branch of the National Women's Party organized in Mississippi?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

You are not certain, are you?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, I wouldn't know positively, but. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

But you're pretty sure.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I'm pretty sure. I think they had one or two people from Mississippi who . . . I know that in later years they had some affiliates, but I think that back there they weren't. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Before ratification. I know that right after ratification that your first law partner was interested in the Women's Party, or so I

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gathered from the notes. Vivian Cook?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Vivian wasn't . . . [laughter] Well, the law partner part was in the University of Mississippi Law School. [laughter] For moot court. Yes, Vivian always . . . I was very fond of Vivian, she died some years ago. She married and I forget her married name.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

I was going to ask you how her career turned out, what she did afterwards. I know that she graduated with distinction.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Well, I'll tell you myself that that was dredged up, but I don't want to, you know . . . Vivian was an attractive person and I was fond of her, but she was young and had to wait to be admitted to the bar because she was not twenty-one and she only had a high school education. She had a grand and glorious time at the University. She hit the law books a little. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

A little lightly?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

This may have been dredged up, but it was noted in some of the papers.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

When she died, it was in the paper then, in the obituary notice and there was something else in that notice that was not a fact in my opinion, but you know, you don't want to be. . . .

CONSTANCE MYERS:

What kind of person was she? What kind of a background did she have? How is it that she decided to go to law school, an unusual quest for a young woman then?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

The distinguished member of their family was a brother of her mother and he was a chancellor at the time and later got to the Mississippi Supreme Court. It wasn't very much later, it might have been at that time and he was sort of the ideal of the family. Her father was a lawyer and he

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was more the county courthouse, tobacco spitting type. But she was devoted to him and he was to her. So, she thought the world of Judge Griffith and of her father. When the Republicans came in about 1920, her father was appointed United States Attorney, district attorney. He offered me a place, not as the assistant but as the next. I would have had to have a clerical title, you see and that wasnt' for me. But it was nice of him and I appreciated it. It seems to me that he was badly injured in an automobile accident. Anyway, Vivian practiced there in Clarksdale.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

How long?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I don't know, because you see, I went to Jackson and I was plenty busy and then I went to Washington. She married and for awhile kind of dropped out and then came back into law practice. I think I had one letter from her and then as I said, she died soon after I got back to Mississippi and I wasn't sure where she was. She was a likeable, friendly person. She was a blond, not a beauty, but attractive-looking. Well, there weren't many with distinction in that class, there were about five.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

You were the only two women. That's why I singled her out to comment on and ask you questions about.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

I took quite an interest in her and did what I could to help her. All the class laughed one day, I knew, you see, that she had been out the__night before and I knew that she hadn't cracked a book. So, that particular class, the faculty member was a fine man, but very methodical and he called on everybody a certain number of times. So, he worked down, he followed the alphabet, he worked down to where she was next. I asked a question and got an argument going and took up the rest of the period. The boys knew what I was doing, they all knew that she had been out at a party.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

That's real sisterhood.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Some of them, you know, had been to the party. [laughter] So when we left the building that day, I said, "Vivian, you go home and you study because you are going to be the first one called on tomorrow and you be sure and know what you are doing." So, she did.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

And she got through all right.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh yes, she got through.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

At any rate, I noticed that she. . . .

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Don't correct that, I mean, I wouldn't go around and do . . . especially now that she is dead.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

She was attracted to the Women's Party. I don't know whether she took a membership card, but she was attracted to it. If I say, "belonged," that would mean a membership card. She was attracted to it and may have subscribed to the periodical, something of this sort. She lured a good deal of literature, I understand, to be sent into Mississippi to The Woman Voter offices. Miss Minnie Brewer says that she was being swamped with literature from. . . .

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, but I don't think Vivian Cook was responsible for that. There were two Vivian Cooks in Mississippi.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Oh?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

The other one, I don't think had anything to do with the Woman's Party. She could have. She was quite an able and skillful political personality. She held one or two state positions. She was from Crystal Springs.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Well, it's very possible that she was the one that was interested in the Woman's Party.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

She might have been. The Cooks were a brilliant family and there were twelve children. One of them, Miss Fanney, was responsible

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for the development of the interest in wildlife consevation and the museum in Jackson there is named for her. She collected so many specimans and left them to the state. Viviam was once state president of the B & PW. She was active in that and in a great many things.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

Not the Vivian that graduated with you?

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

No.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

This is difficult with the same reference to two different people.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes, there is the chance of some confusion. Now, Minnie Brewer was a good friend of mine. Minnie is still living in the hospital, Mississippi Mental Hospital.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

She was the daughter of a governor, I believe. [Earl Brewer]

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Yes. I used to have wonderful times with Minnie. She was one of the smartest people that I have ever known.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

She was mighty enterprising to run that newspaper.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:

Oh, yes.

CONSTANCE MYERS:

And against all the poltiical opposition, I understand.

LUCY SOMERVILLE HOWORTH:<