William Lloyd Garrison on Non-Resistance.
[Garrison, William Lloyd]. Villard, Fanny Garrison. William Lloyd Garrison on Non-Resistance. Together with a Personal Sketch by His Daughter, Fanny Garrison Villard...New York: The Nation Press Printing Co., Inc., 1924.
8vo.; frontispiece portrait of William Lloyd Garrison; blue cloth, stamped in gilt; fine.
First edition of the only book by suffrage activist Fanny Garrison Villard, a biography of her father, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. A presentation copy, inscribed: For dear Mrs. Laflin, with love from Fanny Garrison Villard Sept. 15, 1927. Thorwood.
Fanny Garrison Villard (1844-1928), suffragist, pacifist, and philanthropist, was the only daughter of William Lloyd and Helen Eliza Garrison. Fanny, who grew up in a radical household, absorbed her father’s progressive views on abolition and women’s rights. Educated at the Winthrop School in Boston, she became a piano teacher and in January 1886 married Henry Villard, a 30-year-old German immigrant and journalist. In 1896 the couple purchased an estate in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and both became heavily involved in philanthropic endeavors. Among the charitable organizations to which Fanny Villard donated both time and money were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, the Woman’s Exchange, the Consumers League, and the Working Women’s Protection Association. She served on the boards and helped fund-raise for Vassar College, Barnard College and Harvard Annex, later Radcliffe College; she was also a major contributor to the Hampton Institute, the educational and vocational training center for black students in Virginia. (For more about the Hampton Institute, see in this catalogue under “Education.”)
After her husband Henry’s death in 1900, Villard was free to pursue her political interests full- time. She became an active member and founder of the suffrage cause, lecturing on street corners and before legislative gatherings for the passage of the 19th-Amendment; she served as auditor and head of the legislative committee of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association; president of the William Lloyd Garrison Equal Suffrage Club; and in 1915 with Jane Addams, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and others organized the Woman’s Peace Party, the first American feminist pacifist organization.
In her only book, William Lloyd Garrison on Non-Resistance, Villard pays tribute to her father and to the dual ideals of feminism and pacifism which her family so highly prized. It contains a memoir of her father; articles by colleagues; and a detailed bibliography. Throughout, Villard struggles to capture the uniqueness of having been raised in so progressive a household, by so remarkable a father:
...The company that frequented our house was so delightful that I never realized until I was fully grown that my father’s devotion to the cause of the slave made him socially ostracized. I consider it great fortune to have listened to discussions on important reform movements of the day by such men as Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, the saintly Samuel J. May and his cousin Samuel May and Theodore Parker–and such women as Maria Weston Chapman–the grand dame of the Anti-Slavery cause–Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony and the gifted Grimké sisters from South Carolina–all pioneers in both Anti-Slavery and Suffrage–as well as hosts of other interesting people. To us came advocates of Temperance, of the Abolition of Slavery, of the Women’s Rights Movement, Free Religious Thought, Prison Reform, and Non-Resistance...Many distinguished reformers from Great Britain paid homage to my father and were entertained at our home, always simply, as though they were members of the family. It would be impossible to express the joy that my four brothers and I felt in such an environment... ( pp. 9-10).
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