Lillie Devereaux Blake
From Philosopedia
Blake, Lillie Devereaux (12 August 1833 - 1913)
Blake, nee Elizabeth Johnson Devereux, was born into a wealthy family in Raleigh, North Carolina. She came into money as a young woman and married a handsome attorney in 1855, one who freely spent her fortune before shooting himself in 1858.
As the young mother of two daughters, she had to turn her "scribbling" into a way to support her family with her pen. In 1861 she became a war correspondent. By 1882, 500 of her stories, articles, speeches and lectures, plus five novels, had been published. She earned about $3,600 over a lifetime of writing.
In her Woman's Place To-Day (1883), she included the following:
- Every denial of education, every refusal of advantages to women, may be traced to this dogma [of Original Sin], which first began to spread its baleful influence with the rise of the power of the priesthood and the corruption of the early Church.
At 35, she turned her energies almost exclusively toward working for women's rights. Protesting Columbia University's exclusion of women on behalf of her daughters, she could not budge the opposition of Dr. Morgan Dix, rector of Trinity Chapel.
In 1883, she encountered her theological foe again, when he embarked on an antisuffrage lecture series. Blake responded immediately by scheduling her own nationally-noted lectures, including one on "Woman in Paganism and Christianity." Rev. Dix, she said, was "a theological Rip Van Winkle, who has slept, not 20 but 200 years."
“I live to redress the wrongs of my sex,” Blake wrote as a teenager in 1849. In 1873 she protested against Columbia University’s exclusion of women, and in 1893 spoke to the International Congress of Women, which was held in connection with the World’s Columbia Exposition. Appointed in 1895 to head a “Committee on Legislative Advice” by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), she fought in 1899 her removal by Susan B. Anthony as illegal. When Anthony retired, Blake was encouraged to run for the group’s presidency but withdrew before the vote “for the sake of harmony.”
She campaigned for the rights of women prisoners ("Is it a crime to be a woman?"), and achieved many reforms. A friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she served on The Woman's Bible revising committee. For 11 years, she ran the successful New York State Suffrage Association, defeating an antisuffrage governor, winning the right to vote for rural women at elections of school trustees, and getting women admitted as census-takers.
In 1910 she was placed in a sanitarium and died after breaking her hip in 1913. Gaylor has described Blake as “a Deist at most.”
