CHAPTER FOUR

Alice Stone Blackwell and the Armenian Crisis of the 1890s

WINNING THE VOTE for women drew on the energies and talents of three generations of activists: the “founding mothers” who began the movement in the 1840s and 1850s, a middle generation who joined up in the 1880s and 1890s, and a final cohort who propelled the movement to victory in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Sometimes the passing of the torch from generation to generation was a literal transition from mother to daughter. Elizabeth Cady Stanton passed on her passion for women’s rights to her daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch, who became a significant suffragist in her own right, especially in New York State. Alice Stone Blackwell had an even stronger family legacy: both of her parents, Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell, were lifelong reformers and women’s rights activists.

Nowhere is this family connection clearer than in the Woman’s Journal, the weekly suffrage organ edited by the wife-and-husband team and later taken over by their precocious only child. Established in Boston in 1870 as “a weekly paper devoted to the interests of woman, to her educational, industrial, legal and political equality, and especially to her right of suffrage,” the Woman’s Journal (as would the Woman’s Exponent two years later in Utah) had an influence that far outstripped its limited subscription base. For most of its history, the publication remained independent of the major suffrage organizations, which meant it received no outside funding, despite its vital role in connecting individual suffragists with news of the wider women’s movement. Instead, it depended on subscriptions and donations to keep itself afloat—a constant battle.¹

Because of its precarious financial status, the Woman’s Journal was always looking for ways to increase subscriptions. One promotion offered a button featuring Lucy Stone’s portrait attached to a bright yellow ribbon. There was no need to explain “I take her paper”—the association would have been self-evident to supporters. Distributed some time after Stone’s death in 1893, this 1.3 × 3.25 inch portrait is based on an image from 1855, when she was thirty-seven and recently married. Wearing this badge would have been a fine way to demonstrate public allegiance to the cause.

Alice Stone Blackwell probably had an additional motive for commissioning this keepsake beyond building support for the Woman’s Journal: ensuring that her mother received her proper due as a suffrage pioneer. She had no intention of letting Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s and Susan B. Anthony’s legacies overshadow her mother’s.

WHAT IS THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE doing in a book of suffrage stories? Throughout the 1890s, Alice Stone Blackwell prominently featured coverage of the deepening crisis in Armenia on the front pages of the Woman’s Journal. Blackwell’s advocacy was part of a nationwide engagement with what became America’s first international human rights crusade. Given Boston’s long abolitionist tradition, it is not surprising that its concerned citizens took the lead. At its epicenter were women associated with the woman suffrage movement, most notably Alice Stone Blackwell, Julia Ward Howe, and Isabel Barrows. Women’s rights and human rights went hand in hand.²

Nineteenth-century Americans had long felt a strong connection to Armenians, the largest Christian Aryan minority living under Ottoman Turkish rule. Concentrated in a mountainous region in western Asia near Mount Ararat—often represented as the site of the original Garden of Eden—Armenians endured the role of a persecuted religious minority at the hands of successive waves of conquerors. The most recent conquerors, the Ottoman Turks, had sacked Constantinople, the seat of the Byzantine Empire, in 1453. As the Turks consolidated their rule over the succeeding centuries, Armenians found themselves legally designated as “infidels” by their Muslim overlords. When Armenians began to agitate for more rights for non-Muslim minorities in the 1890s, they came up against one of the worst despots the world had ever seen. Sultan Abdul Hamid II, “the bloody Sultan,” decided that the way to deal with the Armenian problem was to annihilate its population. Between 1894 and 1896, approximately two hundred thousand Armenians were killed—half massacred by the Sultan’s troops and henchmen, the other half dead from disease and famine.

This campaign of state-sponsored terror, which would be taken to even more extreme ends in the Armenian Genocide of 1915, provoked the first international human rights crusade to address the misery and suffering inflicted on the Armenian minority. Spearheaded by the Boston-based United Friends of Armenia as well as the National Armenian Relief Committee, groups raised massive amounts of money in the United States and Europe to bring humanitarian relief and medical supplies to devastated Armenian communities. In 1896, Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross (and the person who likely introduced the phrase “starving Armenians” into the American lexicon), led the first international mission of that organization to Turkey. That year, Congress passed the Cullom Resolution condemning the Sultan for the massacres, “the first international human rights resolution in American history.”³

Alice Stone Blackwell was right in the middle of this growing global crisis.⁴ Born in 1857, Alice grew up in a household suffused by suffrage and reform. She spent her early life in New Jersey before moving to the Boston area in 1869, where her parents bought a seventeen-room home in Dorchester, a fifteen-minute trolley ride into town. A diary she kept at age fifteen was dotted with references to luminaries in her close family network, including Julia Ward Howe, Wendell Phillips, Stephen Foster, Louisa May Alcott, and Frederick Douglass. One guest who failed to impress was Susan B. Anthony, who took notice of her “in quite an embarrassing way”: “I don’t much like Miss A. She strikes me as being tall, sharp, dictatorial, conceited, pugnacious & selfish.” The only word of praise she managed was that Anthony was undoubtedly “plucky.”⁵

The Stone-Blackwell family’s relocation to Boston coincided with the split in the suffrage movement. In 1868, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had started a newspaper called The Revolution (“Women their rights and nothing less; men their rights and nothing more”), but it only lasted for two years. The Boston-based American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Stone, Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe, deemed this an auspicious moment to establish their own newspaper. The Woman’s Journal debuted on January 8, 1870 and remained in print for six decades, never missing a weekly issue.⁶

Lucy Stone had naively thought that running the newspaper might be a good way to combine her childrearing responsibilities with ongoing suffrage advocacy, but the Woman’s Journal quickly turned into more than a full time job. (Emmeline Wells discovered the same thing when she helmed the Woman’s Exponent.) Perhaps it was inevitable that Alice Stone Blackwell would be drawn into its maw. As early as 1879, she confided her concerns about her mother’s burdens to a cousin: “It is a heavy load for poor Mamma—the Journal every week, the general supervision of the suffrage cause in Massachusetts, and the care of this big place, indoors and out,” including “keeping an absentminded daughter clothed and in running order.” As a teenager, she made frequent trips to the journal’s offices on Tremont Place and handled routine chores related to its printing and production. When she graduated from Boston University in 1881, one of only two women in her class, she was already serving as an editor, a position she formally assumed in 1884.⁷

Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Alice Stone Blackwell did not draw salaries for their service to the Woman’s Journal. Luckily, Alice found the task quite congenial: “I can’t think of any line of work open to me that I should like so well.” In 1888, she took on added responsibility for the Woman’s Column, a subscription service of suffrage news that she oversaw until 1904. And like her mother, she participated in the broader suffrage movement both nationally and locally. Blackwell played an especially critical role in the reconciliation of the two rival suffrage organizations in 1890, and she served as recording secretary for the National American Woman Suffrage Association for the next twenty years.⁸

Alice Stone Blackwell’s personal introduction to the Armenian cause came through Isabel Chapin Barrows, a pioneering female doctor who had studied at the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children, an institution which Alice’s aunt, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, had founded. In 1881, she and her husband Samuel June Barrows moved to Boston, where he served as minister of the First Unitarian Church in Dorchester and later edited the Christian Register, the weekly organ of the Unitarian Church. The couple quickly became deeply enmeshed in the cosmopolitan Boston reform community. They grew so close to the Stone-Blackwell family that Alice called her Aunt Isabel and signed her letters “your loving niece.”

In the winter of 1893, Isabel Barrows and her daughter Mabel met three Armenian students at the boarding house in Leipzig, Germany, where they were staying while traveling abroad. The students first caught their attention by politely rising when the women took their seats at dinner, a courtesy that German students had failed to extend. From them, the visitors learned of the terrible conditions in Armenia, where the Sultan was intensifying his persecution of the Christian minority. Isabel Barrows was especially impressed by a theology student named Ohannes Chatschumian, whom she invited to come to the United States to represent the Armenian Church at the World’s Congress of Religions, held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in the summer of 1893 in Chicago. Afterwards, the Barrows invited him to visit their camp at Lake Memphremagog, on the Quebec-Vermont border. As she had been many other summers, Alice Stone Blackwell was one of the other guests.⁹

Although she was at first “foolishly repelled by his foreign aspect,” Alice and Ohannes soon took to each other. Chores at the camp were shared between the sexes, and one night, while doing the dishes after supper, Ohannes told her about the battle of Avarair, an iconic fifth-century struggle in which Armenian warriors valiantly but unsuccessfully resisted a Persian onslaught. Alice spoke no Armenian, and Ohannes hadn’t learned much English, but they connected nonetheless. Sensing their personal and literary connections, Isabel Barrows suggested they try to translate some Armenian poems into English verse together. By the end of the summer the two were inseparable—and also the subject of a certain amount of friendly ribbing from their friends.¹⁰

Short and chubby, with a mat of curly hair, Ohannes Chatschumian was a charismatic character and a gifted advocate for the Armenian cause, especially after he picked up English, which he did quickly. With the support of Isabel and June Barrows, he applied to the Harvard Divinity School for the 1893–1894 academic year. When making his case to the dean, Isabel pointed out that he was so “accustomed to simple living that he could subsist on what most Harvard students waste.” Alice also wrote a letter of recommendation, noting his “real avidity for knowledge” and “lovable disposition,” as well as his ability to read fourteen languages by the age of twenty-four. His application was accepted, and he spent a fruitful year studying at Harvard. Alice and Ohannes continued to work on their translations of Armenian poetry throughout the year, and they participated in so many meetings and events that Alice later apologized to her family for inflicting “so much of my Armenio-mania on you.”¹¹

At the end of his time at Harvard, Ohannes returned to Leipzig to finish his degree. Alice continued to work on the volume of poems, which was published under her name in February 1896, featuring a dark green cover with a colorful coat of arms depicting historically significant Armenian symbols, such as Noah’s Ark and Mount Ararat.¹² Alice knew little more than the Armenian alphabet, so she relied on rough translations into French and English by her Armenian friends, which she then rendered into English verse without trying to match their original meter. Alice was as captivated by the poems’ beauty as she was by Ohannes’s passion for his cause, and she wanted American readers to experience it first hand. As she explained in her preface to the volume, “as the beauty of the Armenian girl is often conspicuous even in rags, so it is hoped that the beauty of some of these Armenian poems may be visible even through the poverty of their English dress.”¹³

Alice Stone Blackwell had a clear political purpose in publishing the poems: “that the sympathy already felt for the Armenians in their martyrdom at the hands of the Turks would be deepened by an acquaintance with the temper and genius of the people, as shown in their poetry.”¹⁴ No more than two Armenian poems had previously been translated into English, so these sixty poems fulfilled the goal of bringing them to a wider audience. Blackwell later collaborated on volumes of poetry in translation from Yiddish, Russian, Hungarian, and Spanish. In 1917, she published an expanded version of Armenian Poems to raise funds for Armenian refugees displaced by the 1915 genocide, when close to 1.5 million Armenians (between half and two-thirds of the population) perished in a state-sponsored campaign of extermination that is still denied by the Turkish government.

Ohannes Chatschumian never had a chance to see the volume of poetry he inspired. His health, never robust, declined after he returned to Germany, where he grew increasingly weak from consumption. He died in Leipzig on May 16, 1896, at the age of twenty-seven. In his letters to friends and benefactors in Boston, he had tried to downplay his condition but when it became clear that he was gravely ill, Isabel Barrows and Alice Stone Blackwell rushed to book passage to Germany to see him. When their boat docked in Le Havre, they received the news that he had died days before. Instead of visiting the young man with whom Alice had formed a deep bond, and whom Isabel Barrows considered practically a son, the two women oversaw his burial arrangements and the disposition of his few belongings.¹⁵

Later in life. Alice Stone Blackwell told her suffrage compatriot Edna Stantial that “if Ohannes had lived they no doubt would have been married.” The two definitely had a brief romance—the only “real affection” Alice ever admitted towards a man in her entire life.¹⁶ It is unclear whether a marriage was seriously considered, but it seems there was no formal engagement or even informal understanding when Ohannes returned to Leipzig in the fall of 1894. Lucy Stone had just died the year before, and Alice would not likely have deserted her father and all her family connections to take up an uncertain residence abroad. She must also have worried that the Woman’s Journal might not survive without her steady editorial hand.

Other factors undercut the potential marriage. In addition to the large gap in their ages—when they met, she was thirty-seven to his twenty-four—Alice had previously exhibited a strong pattern of crushes on other women dating to her school days. She also considered herself “betrothed” to Kitty Barry, the adopted daughter of her aunt Elizabeth Blackwell, with whom she would share a home at the end of her life. So perhaps marriage wasn’t exactly in the cards, but the romantic spark was undeniable, if brief.¹⁷

Without question, Ohannes Chatschumian’s exposure of the horrors and tragedy of Armenian history to Alice Stone Blackwell had a major impact on her editorship of the Woman’s Journal. The weekly paper provided prominent and in-depth coverage of the Armenian conflict, averaging one or two articles in every issue at the height of the crisis in 1895 and 1896. Practically the entire issue of April 6, 1895 was devoted to Armenia. As editor, Blackwell ran a range of stories and eyewitness accounts that brought the genocide home to her American readers. The coverage included historical sketches, poems (often translated by Blackwell herself), book reviews—Frederick Davis Greene’s The Armenian Crisis in Turkey got especially prominent attention—and appeals for funds. Alice Stone Blackwell even introduced a resolution on Armenia at her father’s seventieth birthday celebration—and then wrote up the event for the paper.¹⁸

The Woman’s Journal coverage looks remarkably modern. It focused on civilian casualties and systematic damage to the institutions that bound communities together, such as churches and other charitable organizations. Especially striking was its emphasis on the massacres’ toll on Armenian women. In a two-part article on “The Women of Armenia,” Ohannes Chatschumian mentioned the “barbarous” custom of picking out Christian girls for Muslim harems in Turkey and how girls sometimes disfigured themselves “to escape the lascivious search of the soldiers.”¹⁹ Repeated references to how women had been “outraged to death”—a euphemism for rape—as well as brutally killed or maimed demonstrated a sensitivity to how women civilians were targeted victims in civil wars.²⁰ The focus on the violation and sexual subjugation of women simultaneously played into the trope of the superiority of Western civilization over the supposedly barbarous and backward customs of the offending Turks. Since civilization was coded as white and Christian, this stance further reinforced the denigration of Muslims and their religion. Ohannes Chatschumian likely realized that readers of the Woman’s Journal would respond affirmatively to stories of the Armenian horrors when they were framed through the Western imperial gaze.²¹

For both Alice Stone Blackwell and Ohannes Chatschumian, as well as for many suffragists, there was a clear connection between women’s rights and human rights. “For me there is no distinction between the freedom of Armenia and the entire freedom of women,” Ohannes wrote to Isabel Barrows. “These both kinds of freedom rest on the same principle.” In “An Armenian View of the Woman Question,” one of the last pieces he published before his death, he wrote, “We see that women have now come to an understanding of their condition, and they are asking for their human rights.”²²

Making those connections had a lifelong effect on Alice Stone Blackwell’s progressive politics. “Talking on religious matters (& many other matters) with Ohannes gave me such a sense of the solidarity of mankind as I never had before,” she told Isabel Barrows.²³ Blackwell remained active in various Friends of Armenia groups and gave generously to the cause, despite her meager financial resources. She also acted as an informal employment agency for Armenian refugees who managed to get to the Boston area, especially nearby Watertown, where a vibrant Armenian community grew up and still exists.

The passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the absorption of the Armenian Republic into the Soviet Union in 1922 did not diminish Alice Stone Blackwell’s engagement with broader political crusades. No longer serving as editor of the Woman’s Journal after NAWSA took it over in 1917, she threw her support behind the newly organized League of Women Voters. In addition to her ongoing involvement with the Armenian community, she worked with the American Friends of Russian Freedom and collaborated with Catherine Breshkovsky on her autobiography and a collection of her letters. An early supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union, she was very active in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, which roiled Boston and the nation in the 1920s. In 1934, she received the annual Ford Hall Forum medal for the citizen of Greater Boston who made the most notable contributions to the public weal.

In what qualifies as a painful historical irony, Alice Stone Blackwell’s strong links to the Armenian community contributed to a last, sad chapter in her life, although one that ultimately had a happy ending. During the depths of the Great Depression, she lost all her savings after investing them with an old friend and trusted business agent, who was Armenian. When Maud Wood Park heard of Blackwell’s near-destitute situation, she put together a committee to raise funds for an annuity. Alice Stone Blackwell’s stature in the feminist community was so iconic that Park was able to recruit Carrie Chapman Catt and Eleanor Roosevelt to join her as national co-chairs. Their successful appeal raised over $17,000 from 1,300 contributors, enough to provide Blackwell with $1,500 a year, until her death in 1950.²⁴

Throughout her long and productive life, Alice Stone Blackwell always strove to live up to her mother’s deathbed admonition to “make the world better.” She drew strength from her brief but incredibly rich relationship with Ohannes Chatschumian—“a young man from the heart of Asia” whose ideas were “so much like those of our best thinkers here.”²⁵ A full century before Hillary Rodham Clinton stood before the United Nations International Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995 to proclaim that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights,” Alice Stone Blackwell was already hard at work trying to make the world live up to that very same ideal.