1328 South Fourth Street (Woman's Club of Louisville and Susan Look Avery)
The Woman’s Club of Louisville and Susan Look Avery
In 1890, Susan Look Avery gathered 39 extraordinary women in “mutual sympathy and counsel, and united efforts to further reform and improvement in the community in which we live” and founded the Woman’s Club of Louisville. By World War I, Louisville was noted as having perhaps the best organized group of women in the nation. Their record of accomplishments is long and include education, legal aid, and importantly, suffrage - the Club asked all its members to support Suffrage in 1912.
The Woman’s Club of Louisville (WCL) currently comprises three buildings: Frazier House, used for committee meetings and social gatherings; the Carriage House, housing a consignment shop that carries all sorts of interesting things either donated or on consignment, with proceeds going toward charity; and the Clubhouse, which has an auditorium, dining hall, lobby, two parlors, and offices. After 130 years, the Club is still going strong with an active membership of around 500, and still accepting new members. WCL focuses on charitable as well as educational work. From September to May, they hold weekly luncheon meetings on various subjects, and have many additional activities such as book clubs, a movie club, and various fund-raisers, as well as volunteering at Heuser Hearing and their adopted school, Engelhardt Elementary.
The Woman’s Club founder, Susan Look Avery, was born in 1818 and raised in upstate New York. She was well educated for her time, and married Benjamin Franklin Avery in 1844. After a few years in Virginia, they moved to Louisville in 1847 to establish Avery Plow Works. The family eventually settled into a mansion at the corner of 4th and Broadway, where the Heyburn Building stands in 2020. After the death of her husband in 1885, Susan focused her energies on those issues which had always been important to her, but had been overshadowed by her duties as wife and mother. These included free trade, currency reform, anti-imperialism, temperance, pacifism, and most importantly, woman’s suffrage. In 1889 Susan started the Louisville Equal Rights Association (LERA), which later became the Louisville Suffrage Association. Susan was a lifelong member and served as president in 1895 and 1897 and chaired several committees. She was a prominent early member and officer of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA) and often represented them at national meetings. The National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), to which she often donated, named her an honorary Vice President and lifetime member in 1889.
Susan’s eldest daughter, Lydia Coonley Ward, had moved to Chicago and joined the Chicago Woman’s Club. While visiting, Susan joined Lydia at those meetings and decided that something similar should be established in Louisville. On March 1, 1890, she invited 38 other women to her home to join in her efforts to affect change in Louisville. Young Patty Semple was elected the first president. This club was created to take action; they quickly had many successful campaigns including appointing matrons for jails in Louisville, getting shop owners to provide seats for shop girls so they did not have to stand the entire day; and lobbying to raise the state’s age of consent from 12 to 18. They also were very involved in the passage of the Married Woman’s Property Rights Act of 1894 or the Weissinger Act, which granted married women the right to write their own will, control property in their own name, and maintain some rights to children upon divorce. The WCL joined the General Federation of Women's Clubs the following year, where Susan was granted a lifetime honorary membership. WCL members were instrumental in forming the Kentucky State Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1894.
Along with all her organizational work, Susan was a respected writer, published in Harper’s Weekly, Figaro and The Woman’s Journal. Well known to other suffragists, Susan hosted many of them, as well as other notable reformers, at her summer home in upstate New York, including the entire NAWSA board in the summer of 1900. National figures Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw headed a group of women to visit on her 80th birthday.
Susan did stand apart from many suffragists of her day, noting: “I believe in genuine democracy - equal opportunities for all, and special privileges for none.” Susan strongly supported the admission of Colored Woman’s Clubs into the General Federation of Woman’s Clubs, which was decidedly white, going so far as sending a letter of support, which was to be read aloud at the 1902 convention. When it was not, Susan published a pamphlet supporting the admission. Frequently quoted as saying, “If it is bad for the ignorant and vicious to do ill -- it is worse for the educated and the honest to do nothing.” Susan worked to the end, keeping two secretaries busy even after she was mostly deaf and blind. Her greatest strength was her personal influence. She believed that people would eventually come around to her way of thinking, so she respectfully stood for her beliefs and debated with everyone who would listen, right up to the end. Susan Look Avery died at age 97 on February 1, 1915 in New York.
As soon as public health permits, The Woman’s Club will feature an exhibit on many of the women in this online exhibit, along with others who were active in the Club in the early years. Titled Changing the World: The Woman’s Club of Louisville, it should run through 2021 and possibly beyond. Susan Look Avery, Kate Avery, Patty Semple, Mary Lafon and Alice Castleman are just a few of the powerful early members to be featured in the exhibit. To learn more, please visit: https://www.wclouisville.org/.