Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth.
First Woman In The United States Senate
Felton, Rebec[c]a Latimer. Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth. Also addresses before Georgia’s legislature woman’s clubs, women’s organizations and other noted occasions. Atlanta, GA: 1919.
8vo.; green cloth, stamped in gilt.
First edition of Felton’s scarce, privately printed autobiography. Krichmar 4650. A presentation copy, inscribed on pencil on the front endpaper: For Mr. J.A. Miller from The Author Rebecca L. Felton May 1, 1928. With a small newspaper obituary affixed beneath: “Mrs. Rebecca Latimer Felton, of Georgia, was the first woman to go to the senate. She was appointed October 3, 1922, by Governor Thomas W. Hardwick to fill the vacancy at the death of Senator Thomas E. Watson. She served only two days before a permanent successor was named.” Someone—likely, Felton—inserted in pencil the “c” missing from her printed name on the title page.
In this memoir, Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835-1930)—reformer, journalist, and the first woman seated in the United State Senate—covers her Civil War experiences as well as her suffragist endeavors. Both she and her husband shared in the anti-Black sentiment of the period, and though they opposed secession they nonetheless supported the Confederacy; they also believed that women and children were among the greatest casualties of war and fifty years later fought Woodrow Wilson to keep the United States out of the Great War.
A graduate of Madison Female College in 1852, Latimer met her husband, W.H. Felton, when he delivered the address at her graduation. While helping to manage her husband’s career as a lonely conservative in Georgian politics, Latimer maintained interest in political and social causes herself—a member of several woman’s executive boards, she spoke frequently and wrote regularly for the tri-weekly edition of the Atlanta Journal for almost three decades.
[T]hrough this medium [she] exercised considerable influence in formulating public opinion in Georgia…Among the first to advocate equal political rights for women, an ardent temperance fighter long before prohibition became a national question, a champion of penal reform in Georgia, Mrs. Felton was generally to be found on the side of civic righteousness and progressive legislation. In her well-known book, My Memoirs of Georgia Politics (1911), she left unflattering accounts of may important Georgians with whom she and her husband had contended, at the same time paying tribute to those who she felt were on the side of honest government and clean politics. (DAB, p. 318)
When her friend, a fellow isolationist Thomas Hardwick, died in 1922, she was appointed to fill his seat in the Senate, a symbolic gesture which actually lasted only 24 hours, during which time Felton presented her credentials, was sworn in, and attended two sessions. The day after her death at the age of 95—she survived all five of her children—Senate adjourned early in tribute.
In a prefatory note entitled “Why this book was written,” 82-year-old Felton quotes the praise, encouragement, and even the invocation of Boswell’s Life Of Johnson by her Georgia newspaper readers, friends, families, and an unnamed man whose name is “a synonym of lofty integrity and honest purpose.” She finally agrees that there is some value in producing this volume:
[W]hile we have Southern histories concerning the Civil War, compiled from data furnished by political and military leaders, the outside world really knows very little of how the people of Georgia lived in the long ago, before the days of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, cook stoves, sewing machines, kerosene oil, automobiles, tri-cycles and a multitude of other things now in common use.
Though in many regards the embodiment of pre-bellum Southern values, Felton also manifested throughout her long life the traits of the emerging modern woman. A choice copy of an important but little-known feminist.
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