Frances Kellor and Mary Dreier
Frances Alice Kellor (1873-1952) may not have been “out” in the way we mean it now, but she is recognizable to any modern lesbian looking at a picture of her in her tailored suit and necktie, and she was recognizable to the numerous late nineteenth and early twentieth century women social reformers who gathered at places like the Women’s Trade Union League and the Chicago Women’s Club, where lesbians made political alliances and built community.
Born in Ohio, Frances was forced to grow up quickly when her father abandoned the family during her early childhood. They moved to Michigan, where her mother worked as a laundress. Young Alice, as she was called then, was a tomboy from the start, loving competitive sports and contributing to the family table by hunting small game with a slingshot and rifle. Her masculine clothes and hairstyle caused some of her neighbors to mock and reject her. Nonetheless, she would continue to wear men’s clothes frequently throughout her life, regardless of the consequences.
Coming from poverty, it did not seem that education was in the cards for Frances, but she was both ambitious and lucky. She had to drop out of high school to earn money and took a job as a newspaper typesetter, which she quickly parlayed into a position as a reporter. She also met some wealthy women, Mary and Frances Eddy and Celia Wooley (1848-1819), who paid for her to go to law school at Cornell University, where she was the only woman in a class of 98 men. At Cornell, Frances founded the women’s rowing club and argued for women to play the same rules as men in basketball (a reform that wasn’t instituted until 1970). She also switched her name from Alice to the more gender-neutral Frances.
After graduating with a law degree in 1897, Frances found she was more interested in uncovering the social and political roots of crime than in arguing court cases. With the help of her rich friends and a scholarship from the Chicago Women’s Club, she moved to Illinois to study sociology at the University of Chicago. She supplemented her income by working as a gymnastics teacher and basketball coach and became lovers with Gertrude Dudley, director of women’s athletics at the university. Proving that “an army of ex-lovers cannot fail,” the two later collaborated on the pioneering 1909 book Athletic Games in the Education of Women.
Before long, Frances became one of the country’s most progressive thinkers about how poverty and oppression resulted in high incarceration rates for African Americans and women. In addition to writing papers and books on the subject, she also lived and worked at Hull House, where she met other lesbian social activists, such as Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith. In 1903, while travelling to New York to research her studies on women’s employment, she met Mary Dreier (1875-1963), a suffragist and women’s labor activist from a wealthy German immigrant family.
While Frances came to her reform work through her experience of surviving poverty, Mary was a daughter of privilege who attended the New York School of Philanthropy, the first higher education program in the United States in the field of social work. She had been introduced to the idea of social reform by Leonora O’Reilly (1870-1927), the daughter of impoverished Irish immigrants who became an important figure in the women’s suffrage, labor, and settlement house movements. Leonora may have been one of Mary’s first crushes—she had a big influence on Mary’s political development and Mary used her wealth to provide Leonora with a salary for life.
But when Mary met Frances, the two were immediately drawn to each other, and when they were apart, Frances wrote to Mary, “The colors and sunlight make me hungry for you.” She moved to New York to live with Mary in 1905 and they remained together until Frances died in the early 1950s. They supported each other in their social activism as their careers progressed—from 1910-1913, Frances was the first woman to serve as chief investigator for the Bureau of Industries and Immigration of New York State, where she worked to fight anti-immigrant xenophobia and in 1911 Mary promoted women’s labor rights as the only woman appointed to the New York State Factory Investigating Committee, established after the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire.
In the 1930s, as economic depression gripped the U.S., Frances and Mary became strong supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (1882-1945) liberal New Deal policies. They also became close friends with Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), wife of Franklin, and mother of five children, who was also involved in an intimate relationship with a woman journalist, Lorena Hickok (1893-1968). Eleanor had a fairly large circle of lesbian friends that included suffrage activists and educators Nancy Cook (1884-1962) and Marion Dickerman (1890-1983).
Nancy and Marion were a couple who were “adopted” during the mid-1920s by Roosevelt, who may have just been discovering her own lesbianism when the three first met. Eleanor built a cottage she named Val-Kill on a secluded corner of the Roosevelt family estate in Hyde Park, New York. She intended the cozy dwelling to be a private retreat for herself and Nancy and Marion. The three of them also set up Val-Kill Industries, an innovative factory that employed local people to make furniture and other items in the traditional colonial style. Lorena, whose relationship with Eleanor began to heat up during the early 1930s, didn’t get along with Nancy, and, perhaps prompted by jealousy, drove a wedge between Eleanor and her two friends. By 1936, the factory was closed, and the friendship considerably cooled.
In 1933, however, Eleanor, Nancy, and Marion were still behaving like family as they took a trip to Maine together and stopped for a visit with Frances Kellor and Mary Dreier at their summer home at Fernald Point on Mt. Desert Island. There is a video of all of the women on the Amberjack II with FDR and sons at Fernald point. Mary had acquired the house in 1928, buying it from a descendant of Tobias Fernald, who built it in the early 1800s. There is a video of all of the women on the Amberjack II with FDR and sons at Fernald point. [See more about this visit at the site for the Western Segment of the Lesbian History Trail.
Located on fertile land at the edge of a large, protected harbor, the point had been home to settlements of indigenous people including the Wabanaki, who reaped the bountiful harvest of seafood there for thousands of years before the discovery of the island by European colonists. In 1613, the area became the site of the first American mission of French Jesuit missionaries. Although the Native people were tolerant of the Jesuit’s attempts at conversion, within a year the mission was destroyed by a colonial competitor, an English naval captain named Samuel Argall (c.1572-1626). After purchasing the Fernalds’ house, Mary remodeled it, adding a studio at the back, and named it Valour House to commemorate the courage of the ill-fated Jesuit settlers.
When Eleanor arrived at Valour House, she was not pleased to learn that her husband and sons were due to arrive for a party on their yacht the Amberjack the next day. She huffed to a friend, “I don’t dare tell Nan, but this is not my idea of a holiday!” Possibly she did not like the Roosevelt family invasion of her precious private time with lesbian friends.
Frances died in New York on January 4, 1952, and Mary remained alone for the rest of her life. She was at her summer home at Fernald Point on August 15, 1963, when she had a pulmonary embolism and died. She and Frances are buried together in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Further reading about Frances and Mary:
Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt, the Defining Years, 1933-1938, Volume 2. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Faderman, Lillian. To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done For America - A History, Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflen, 2008.
Fitzpatrick, Ellen. Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform. New York. Oxford UP, 1990.
Franzen, Trisha. Spinsters and Lesbians: Independent Womanhood in the United States. New York: NYUP, 1996.
Streitmatter, Rodger. Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters Of Eleanor Roosevelt And Lorena Hickok. New York: The Free Press. 1998.