Lillie Devereux Blake

Lillie Devereux Blake (born Aug. 12, 1833, Raleigh, N.C., U.S.—died Dec. 30, 1913, Englewood, N.J.) American novelist, essayist, and reformer whose early career as a writer of fiction was succeeded by a zealous activism on behalf of woman suffrage.

Elizabeth Devereux grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in New Haven, Connecticut, was educated in a private school and by tutors, and in her youth was a belle of New Haven society. In June 1855 she married a lawyer, with whom she lived in St. Louis, Missouri, and New York City until his death, an apparent suicide, in May 1859. Left penniless, she turned for support to writing, a field in which she had already made a small beginning with the publication of a story in Harper’s Weekly in November 1857, followed by other stories and verses and a moderately successful novel, Southwold (1859). Under sundry pseudonyms she was soon turning out stories and articles by the score for newspapers and magazines. She also completed four other novels, two of which were serialized in the New York Mercury and two of which were published in book form. In 1866 she married Grinfill Blake.

About 1869 she became interested in the movement for woman suffrage, and many of her stories after that date reflect that interest, notably those collected in A Daring Experiment (1892). Blake became a popular lecturer and served as president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association from 1879 to 1890 and of the New York City Woman Suffrage League from 1886 to 1900. Although in those posts she led several unsuccessful campaigns for woman suffrage legislation at the state level, a number of her campaigns were successful. Her efforts secured the vote for women in school elections (in 1880) and legislation requiring that women physicians be available in mental institutions, that matrons be on hand in police stations, that chairs be provided for saleswomen, that women be employed as census takers, that mothers and fathers be recognized as joint guardians of their children, that Civil War nurses be eligible for pensions, and in 1894 that women be eligible to sit in the state constitutional convention. In 1883 she published Woman’s Place To-day in reply to the Reverend Morgan Dix’s Lectures on the Calling of a Christian Woman (1883). She was active in the National Woman Suffrage Association (after 1890 the National American Woman Suffrage Association [NAWSA]), but her energy, ambition, and attractiveness, as well as her interest in reforms other than suffrage, aroused suspicion if not actual hostility on the part of Susan B. Anthony. During 1895–99 Blake headed a “committee on legislative advice” within NAWSA until Anthony abolished it. Blake failed in an attempt to succeed Anthony as president of NAWSA in 1900, losing to Carrie Chapman Catt, and thereupon withdrew to form her own National Legislative League. Ill health forced her retirement from public activity after 1905.