Margaret Pearmain Welch (1893–1984): Proper Bostonian, Activist, Pacifist, Reformer, Preservationist

Margaret Pearmain Welch (1893–1984)

Proper Bostonian, Activist, Pacifist, Reformer, Preservationist

Elizabeth F. Fideler

Margaret Pearmain Welch (1893–1984)

Proper Bostonian, Activist, Pacifist, Reformer, Preservationist

Copyright © 2017 Elizabeth F. Fideler. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Personnae

Introduction

Chapter 1: Childhood Pleasures

Chapter 2: Family Matters

Chapter 3: Young Adulthood—Sowing the Seeds

Chapter 4: Divorces, Remarriages, and Social Life

Chapter 5: Activist, Pacifist, Reformer, Preservationist

Chapter 6: Advocating Monetary Reform —Her Way

Chapter 7: Margaret Welch, Penelope Turton, and the Religious Society of Friends

Chapter 8: Elderhood—A Self-fashioning

About the Author

Bibliography

Preface

This is the biography of a Proper Bostonian who defied the mores of her social set and got away with it. Best known as a debutante, dancer, world traveler, and hostess, Margaret Pearmain Welch was also an indefatigable writer, lecturer, lobbyist, fundraiser, and opinion shaper— grande dame as well as proverbial little old lady in combat boots (footwear more appropriate to confrontation than tennis shoes). The woman I came to think of as my Margaret when researching her life was nowhere near as famous as Margaret Fuller (the brilliant Transcendentalist) or Margaret Sanger (the intrepid birth control pioneer), but she was, like them, an astute lobbyist for causes she believed in and just as determined to think for herself and just as willing to risk flouting social convention. This remarkably vital woman represents the social history of a large class of women whose time, place, and way of life have all but disappeared. Her story deserves to be better known.

Margaret Welch left to the wider public a legacy spanning reproductive rights, monetary reform, Quaker pacifism, Waltz Evenings, roadside beautification, and much more. One of the first environmental activists to preserve open space in northwest Framingham, Massachusetts, she also left behind not only woodlands and fields in the 87.1-acre Welch Reservation when she passed away in 1984 but also the historic 1787 Nixon House and barn and the Friends Meeting in Framingham, which she co-founded.

While Margaret was raised on Beacon Hill and owned a fashionable Louisburg Square residence at #20 for nearly sixty years, I knew Margaret as an elderly country gentlewoman who lived for part of every year barely a mile from my house on the very same road. In 1975 when my husband, two children and I moved to that part of Framingham, we were invited to join members of a conservation group called the Sudbury Valley Trustees on a hike through the SVT lands to post boundary signs on a beautiful fall day. We accepted with enthusiasm. After a couple of hours of tramping through the woods with about a dozen hikers, however, our children grew tired and cranky. The white-haired woman in her eighties who was part of the group did not appear tired at all. Wearing sensible shoes and a smartly tailored wool suit, she stepped confidently over stones, fallen branches, and tree roots. I need not have worried how she would manage; she clearly was unafraid of tripping and falling. In fact, she knew the terrain extremely well; she had donated all of it to SVT. And that included the large parcel of land directly across the road from her home, which comprised the farm where her dear friend and companion Penelope Turton grew organic vegetables and flowers for forty years.

Planning Margaret Welch’s biography, I thought about many of the older women across the country whom I had recently surveyed, interviewed and written about—strong, independent professional women who were choosing to bypass conventional retirement age and continue in the workforce.¹ They were not famous women, yet their stories and their reasons for staying on the job were timely, interesting, and important. I set out to write the biography of a woman I had actually known (a little) and admired (a lot) from a distance. I would get beneath the tip of the iceberg and tell her story in depth. I would provide a history for a neglected woman,² one who would otherwise have no history since there were few honest historical models of complex individual women.³ For instance, biographer Eugenia Kaledin, indignant at historian Henry Adams’ effacement of his wife in his writings, rescued from obscurity Marian Hooper Clover Adams (1843–85).⁴ And although Annie Adams Fields (1834–1915) filled diaries and books about the eminent literary friends of her husband James T. Fields, (editor of The Atlantic Monthly and a publisher) and herself, those documents revealed to her biographer only the polished image of a perfect Boston hostess and not the private woman.⁵

Thus, I would present an exceedingly interesting woman who was neither a public nor a heroic figure, in contrast with traditional biographies. My purpose: to elicit the shape of a life and catch the lineaments of personality⁶ and, furthermore, to tease out personal and private experiences and capture the sense of what it felt like to be alive, in all the complexity that word suggests, at an earlier time.⁷ A time and a milieu that have almost totally receded into obscurity. A woman who from youth to old age had the gift of seeing and writing about herself in relation to the world she lived in.

In addition, narrating and interpreting my subject’s life fairly meant taking pains to avoid hagiography. That is, the biography gives a complete and impartial picture of my subject, recognizing Margaret’s complexities, contradictions, and tensions at all stages of the life cycle,⁸ including her enthusiasm for pre-World War II Germany. Comprehensiveness alone being insufficient, I have recreated and drawn together the various strands of Margaret’s private life and public experiences within the context of the times. Her earliest ventures into activism, for example, took place within the Progressive Era, a time when women, often divided by class but with a shared belief in social justice, organized large-scale reform movements. Famous female reformers of that era (some of them infamous agitators) challenged prevailing norms of acceptable public behavior to draw authority figures’ attention to their respective causes.⁹ Unlike them in temperament, demeanor, and social position, Margaret nonetheless responded to the same dynamism of changing cultural norms and practices, such as those affecting women’s roles during The Great War and the fight for woman suffrage, the metamorphosis of the New Woman¹⁰ in the 1920s, and demands for reproductive rights in the 1930s and beyond. Even if she did not make headlines like the more radical of the reformers, Margaret was often in the papers. A lifelong activist and protester, she demonstrated a sure grasp of economics during the Great Depression and proved her pacifist convictions during World War II and on into the 1960s and the Vietnam War.

I knew that I had found the right subject for biography when I discovered that Louisburg Square, a novel by Robert Cutler first published in 1917, had been reissued by Forgotten Books Classic Reprint Series.¹¹ Cutler’s concern for preserving a forgotten book set in historic Boston resonated with my determination to keep Margaret Pearmain Welch’s story from being lost.

Fortunately, many excellent sources were available for the research.¹² Across the variety of materials and all of the interviews there was a remarkable degree of consensus, both positive and negative, about Margaret and the people and events in her life. Deciding whether the best approach to the material would be chronological or thematic resulted, as the reader will see, in a blend of the two. Chapters do proceed from Margaret’s childhood to adulthood to elderhood. The interests and issues that consumed her the most in different time periods are generally treated in serial fashion, with liberal use of both flash backs and flash forwards. Shaping the chronology is the overarching theme of the biography: the tug o’ war between fidelity to and breaking with Proper Bostonian values and sacred traditions as they gradually faded away.

It might have been enough to portray Margaret as a private person whose beauty, grace, intelligence, spirit, and social position made her actions, alliances, and personal tragedies quite compelling. What proved even more intriguing, however, is the way those very same attributes inserted her into the public sphere where she was a society-page fixture kept in the forefront by the press, in Boston and much farther afield—much of this occurring in a historical period when venturing outside social norms was scandalous for a Proper Bostonian woman.

Equally intriguing are the parts of her history kept out of the news, some of which shocked even her family and close friends. In our twenty-first-century world where social media and other technological tools allow news, opinions, and photos to circulate instantaneously and fade to insignificance just as quickly, it is instructive to recall one woman’s determined use of pen and ink and typewriter year in and year out to stay connected to thinkers and doers, family and friends, and to prod and persuade legislators and policymakers that her causes were just.

1. Fideler, Women Still at Work.

2. Rollyson, Biography: A User’s Guide,

3

.

3. Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams.

4. Ibid.

5. Howe, Memories of a Hostess.

6. Rollyson,

86

,

210

.

7. Marshall, Why Biography? www.meganmarshallauthor.com.

8. Alpern, et al., eds. The Challenge of Feminist Biography,

11

.

9. For case studies of four of the best known, see: Haman, Wild Women of the Progressive Era.

10. The New Woman, whose dates spanned

1890

–

1925

, tended to be middle or upper class, educated, urban, and of independent spirit even if not economically independent. Examples range from earnest reformer Frances Perkins, secretary of labor throughout FDR’s administrations and the very first woman to head a federal cabinet department, to young pleasure-seeking, fashion-conscious flappers.

11. Cutler, Louisburg Square.

12. Sources included: letters and other documents in the archives at Wesleyan University, Smith College, the Smithsonian Institution, the AAUW, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and the Framingham History Center; genealogical records; newspaper and magazine accounts; Friends Meeting minutes; audiotaped, face-to-face, and telephone interviews; unpublished memoir fragments and family histories and letters; film and photographs; Massachusetts Historical Commission (Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) records; reports; old books; and site visits.

Acknowledgments

My deepest appreciation to all those who assisted with the research for the biography: Fred Wallace and Ruthann Tomassini of the Framingham History Center; Marilyn B. Manzella, genealogist and historian of the Framingham Friends Meeting; David Myers, Sharon Frame, and Sara Sue Pennell of the Cambridge Friends Meeting; archivists Suzy Taraba, Leith Johnson, and Jennifer Hadley at the Wesleyan University Library, Special Collections; archivist Kathleen Banks Nutter at Smith College’s Sophia Smith Collections; Suzanne Gould, AAUW’s archivist & records manager; Ellen Shea at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Steve Russell, Lena Kilburn, and Mark Contois at the Framingham Public Library; the Sudbury Valley Trustees organization; and staff at the Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge and the Wayside Inn in Sudbury.

I am equally indebted to those who shared their memories of Margaret Welch with me. Family members included: Mary E. Welch (Mrs. E. Sohier Welch Jr.); Robert S. Nielsen; Elisa Pearmain, Claire Pearmain, Bill Pearmain, Sandy Thomson, and Peter Thomson; William Clift; Sarah Schur­man Eberly and Peter V. Schurman; Diana Childers Stewart; and Peter Childers and Michele Childers.

And it was my good fortune to learn from Tom Sadtler of the Framingham Friends Meeting; David Ferrini and Barry Barton, current owners of the Nixon House; Laurie Evans-Daly and Dick Daly, previous owners of the Nixon House; Beacon Hillers Steve Judge and Elizabeth (Biddy) Owens; Margaret’s former neighbors George and D. D. Harrington, David Whittemore, Libby Bartlett, Sarah Anne (Murray) Mahoney, and Edith Overly; Governor Michael S. Dukakis; John H. Emmons Jr. and William Efthim of Welch & Forbes, LLC; and Nina Kornstein, Peter Doherty, and Laurie Whittier of Stearns Farm.

I benefitted from the encouragement of early readers of the manuscript: Betty Funk, Beth Beloff, Jan Hively, and Debra Samuels. Honest feedback from my favorite historian Paul A. Fideler was not always easy to accept but invariably proved valuable.

Personnae

Ames, Blanche Ames (artist, co-founder of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts)

Bartlett, Libby (neighbor)

Barton, Robert Childers (double first cousin of Robert Erskine Childers, married to Rachel A. Warren)

Bassett, Richard (friend of E. Sohier Welch)

Bowditch, Ebenezer (founder of the Millwood Hunt)

Bowditch, Elfriede Sophie Kohring (Manfred’s second wife)

Bowditch, Eliza Ingersoll (Margaret’s older daughter, married first to William Bond Wheelwright, then to John V. Rough, then to Robert Axel Nielsen)

Bowditch, Harold (older brother of Manfred Bowditch, second husband of Nancy Brush Pearmain)

Bowditch, Henry Pickering (father of Manfred and Harold)

Bowditch, Manfred (Margaret’s first husband)

Bowditch, Mary Childers (Molly, Margaret’s younger daughter, married first to Kenneth W. Winsor then to Kenart M. C. Rahn)

Bowditch, Nancy Douglas Brush (Margaret’s sister-in-law, widow of William Robert Pearmain, married to Harold Bowditch)

Brentani, Piero (Suzanne Clift’s lover)

Brush, George de Forest (artist, father of Nancy Douglas Brush Pearmain Bowditch; married to Mary Mittie Brush)

Brush, Gerome (brother of Nancy, close friend of William Robert Pearmain)

Childers Stewart, Diana (daughter of Robert Alden Childers, granddaughter of Robert Erskine Childers and Mary Alden Osgood; married to Prof. Zeph Stewart)

Childers, Erskine Hamilton (son of Robert Erskine Childers and Mary Alden, grandson of Nonna/Margaret’s Aunt Margaret Osgood)

Childers, Michele Javsicas (married to Dr. Roderick Rory Childers, son of Erskine Hamilton, grandson of Robert Erskine Childers and Mary Alden)

Childers, Peter G. (son of Dr. Roderick Rory and Michele Childers, grandson of Erskine Hamilton)

Childers, Robert Erskine (married to Mary Alden Osgood)

Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain, author)

Clift, Anne/Suzanne (Margaret’s great-niece, daughter of Anne and William Brooks Clift Jr., granddaughter of Jack and Barbara Pearmain)

Clift, William (Margaret’s great-nephew, son of Anne and William Brooks Clift Jr., grandson of Jack and Barbara Pearmain)

Douglas, Major Clifford Hugh (Social Credit co-founder)

Dukakis, Michael S. (governor of Massachusetts)

Efthim, V. William (Bill, retired partner, Welch & Forbes)

Fiske, Connie (Mrs. H. Gardiner Fiske, neighbor)

Forbes, F. Murray Jr. (business partner of E. S. Welch)

Gurdjieff, George Ivanovitch (spiritualist, pedagogue)

Hall, Henry S. Jr. (neighbor, Millwood Hunt member)

Hall, Lydia (Mrs. Henry S. Hall Jr., neighbor, Millwood Hunt member)

Hampden, Paul (acting general secretary, American Social Credit Movement)

Hinckley, Lizzie (Margaret’s aunt, Sumner Bass Pearmain’s sister)

Judge, Steve (architect, Beacon Hill resident, onetime boarder at 20 Louisburg Square)

Kornstein, Nina (Stearns Farm board member)

Laughlin IV, James (Social Credit adherent, publisher of the New Directions imprint)

Manzella, Marilyn (Framingham Friends Meeting member and historian)

Morison, Samuel Eliot (Margaret’s friend, naval historian, Harvard professor)

Munson, Gorham (head of the American Social Credit Movement, editor of New Democracy)

Murray/Mahoney, Sarah Ann (neighbor)

Nielsen, Robert Axel (Margaret’s son-in-law, Eliza’s third husband)

Nielsen, Robert S. (Margaret’s grandson, son of Eliza and Robert)

Nixon, Capt. Thomas Jr. (builder of the Edmands Road house in 1787 that became Margaret’s country home)

Nyland, Willem A. (head of the National Social Credit Association)

Orage, Alfred Richard (Social Credit co-founder, editor of The New English Weekly)

Osgood, Gretchen (Margaret’s first cousin, daughter of Hamilton and Margaret, married to Fiske Warren)

Osgood, Dr. Hamilton (Margaret’s uncle, married to Margaret’s Aunt Margaret; dearest friend of Sumner Bass Pearmain)

Osgood, Margaret Pearmain (Nonna, Margaret’s aunt, Sumner Bass Pearmain’s sister)

Osgood, Mary Alden (Molly, Margaret’s first cousin, daughter of Hamilton and Margaret, married to Robert Erskine Childers)

Overly, Edith (neighbor, daughter of Lydia and Henry S. Hall Jr., Millwood Hunt member)

Pearmain, Alice Upton (Margaret’s mother)

Pearmain, Anne (Margaret’s niece, daughter of Jack and Barbara, married first to William Brooks Clift Jr. then to Peter Thomson)

Pearmain, Barbara Pierce (Margaret’s sister-in-law, first wife of Jack Pearmain)

Pearmain, Claire Porter (mother of Elisa Pearmain)

Pearmain, John D. (Jack, Margaret’s older brother)

Pearmain/Hovestadt, Elisa (daughter of Claire and Bob Pearmain, Margaret’s great-niece)

Pearmain, Margaret (married first to Manfred Bowditch then to Edward Sohier Welch)

Pearmain, Mary Alice (Polly, Margaret’s niece, daughter of William Robert Pearmain and Nancy Brush Pearmain)

Pearmain, Peter Pierce (Margaret’s nephew, son of Jack and Barbara)

Pearmain, Sumner Bass (Margaret’s father)

Pearmain, William Robert (Robert, Margaret’s older brother)

Pearmain, William Robert (Bob, Margaret’s nephew, son of Jack and Barbara)

Pennell, Sara Sue (Cambridge Friends Meeting member)

Rahn, Kenart M. C. (Margaret’s son-in-law, Molly’s second husband)

Robinson, David (compatriot of Robert Erskine Childers, uncle of Penelope Turton)

Rough, John V. (Margaret’s son-in-law, Eliza’s second husband, father of Valerie)

Rough, Valerie (Margaret’s granddaughter, daughter of Eliza and John; married to David H. Schurman)

Sadtler, Tom (Framingham Friends Meeting member)

Sanger, Margaret (birth control pioneer)

Schurman, Peter (Margaret’s great-grandson, son of Valerie and David)

Schurman/Eberly, Sarah (Margaret’s great-granddaughter, daughter of Valerie and David)

Strauss, Pamela (Framingham Friends Meeting member)

Thomson, Peter (ex-husband of Anne Pearmain Clift, father of Sandra Thomson)

Thomson, Sandra (daughter of Anne and Peter Thomson, Margaret’s great-niece)

Turton, Brigit Penelope Meysey (Penelope, daughter of Meysey S. and May)

Turton, Constance Robinson (May, mother of Penelope Turton)

Turton, John DeMeysey (brother of Penelope)

Turton, Meysey Somerset (married to May, father of Penelope)

Warren, Fiske (husband of Margaret’s first cousin Gretchen Osgood)

Warren, Rachel A. (Margaret’s cousin, daughter of Gretchen and Fiske Warren, granddaughter of Margaret and Hamilton Osgood; married to Robert Childers Barton)

Welch, Barbara Hinkley (E. Sohier’s first wife, later Barbara Wolcott)

Welch, Barbara (daughter of E. Sohier and Barbara)

Welch, Charles Alfred (E. Sohier’s grandfather)

Welch, Edward Sohier (Margaret’s second husband)

Welch, E. Sohier Jr. (son of E. Sohier and Barbara, married to Mary Eddison)

Welch, Francis Clarke (E. Sohier’s father, married to Edith Thayer)

Welch, Francis C. (son of E. Sohier and Barbara)

Welch, Holmes Hinkley (son of E. Sohier and Barbara)

Welch, Margaret Pearmain (daughter of Sumner and Alice Pearmain, married first to Manfred Bowditch, then to E. Sohier Welch)

Welch, Mary Eddison (wife of E. Sohier Welch Jr.)

Wheelwright, Bond Edward (Margaret’s grandson, son of Eliza and Bond )

Wheelwright, Peter Wilder (Margaret’s grandson, son of Eliza and Bond)

Wheelwright, William Bond Jr. (Margaret’s son-in-law, Eliza’s first husband)

Whittemore, David (neighbor)

Winsor, Kenneth W. (Margaret’s son-in-law, Molly’s first husband)

Winsor, Margaret Pearmain (Susie, Margaret’s granddaughter, married to William L. Delcuze)

Wittenborg, Dick and Harriet (Framingham Friends Meeting members)

Introduction

Born in 1893 and raised on Beacon Hill in Boston and in bucolic Framingham with carefree summers spent in Dublin, New Hampshire and in Europe, Margaret Pearmain matured into a quintessential Boston matron living on exclusive Louisburg Square as well as into a country gentlewoman whose home—the Nixon House—was built by a Revolutionary War soldier. Although untouched by financial hardship even during two World Wars and the Great Depression, Margaret experienced great personal losses and sorrows along with all the advantages she enjoyed.

To mention Boston’s Beacon Hill is to conjure up the State House, illustrious historical figures, distinctive Federal-style row houses, streets paved with cobblestones, brick sidewalks, gas-lit streetlamps, hidden walled gardens, and gracious afternoon teas. One description of a series of Sunday afternoon teas given by an elderly Beacon Hill resident in the mid-1970s fits Margaret Welch perfectly. For the hostess with the heirloom silver tea set, " . . . indulging her perversities had become her great amusement. She enjoyed an argument. She would seat perhaps a dozen suitably conservative people around her large mahogany tea table and then throw out some remark like, ‘I feel we have been being unreasonably rude to the poor dear Russians.’ She would then sit back and bask in the fireworks."¹³

Boston’s old and wealthy families were concentrated on fashionable Beacon Hill. Dubbed The Brahmin Caste of New England by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,¹⁴ they were descended from English Protestant elites, attended the right prep schools, colleges, and clubs, patronized the arts and supported charities, and spoke with a distinctive patrician accent (think Katharine Hepburn). The lifestyle of the old upper crust was discreet and inconspicuous; Brahmins were dignified and mannerly. Scandal and divorce were simply unacceptable. To Holmes, who lived in their midst, they were an untitled aristocracy shaped by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation [with] a distinct organization and physiognomy.¹⁵

While Margaret was definitely born into privilege, nineteenth- and twentieth-century social ranking would not have placed her in the very highest echelons occupied by Brahmins like Cabots, Lowells, Lodges, and Saltonstalls. For, as the popular refrain put it, the Lowells talked only to Cabots, the Cabots talked only to God. The great wealth of families like those was tied up in trusts; her second husband managed some of those trusts. Admittedly, this was a distinction without much of a difference, for wealth management rewarded him handsomely.

Cleveland Amory, whose own upbringing and Harvard education gave him an inside view of upper-class life in early twentieth-century Boston, coined (or adapted) one of the best-known and apt phrases to define social mores among the elite: The Proper Bostonians. In a book with that title, Amory described how a member of a First Family in Boston "lives in a world of special privilege. For him the minor inconveniences of life are all but by-passed. If he lives on Beacon Hill he will probably have a view of the Common or perhaps a fenced-in park of his own, such as on fashionable Louisburg Square, where the twenty-two so-called proprietors or homeowners have practically no responsibility to their city at