Fanny Ames
Ames, Fanny Baker (14 June 1840-21 Aug. 1931), charity organizer and women's rights advocate, was born Julia Frances Baker in Canandaigua, New York, the daughter of Increase Baker, a coal measurer, and Julia Canfield. In 1857 she completed a one-term preparatory course in teaching at Antioch College in Ohio. She taught for five years in the Cincinnati public school system before volunteering in military hospitals during the Civil War.
On 25 June 1863 Ames joined the Reverend Charles G. Ames, a Unitarian minister, in a marriage devoted to social reform. They lived in Albany, New York, with a son from his first marriage and two daughters of their own. A third child died in infancy after their 1866 move to California. In 1869 Ames and her husband attended a conference in Cleveland at which the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was founded. When they returned to California, they helped organize what would be California's first state suffrage society. Pressure from within led to affiliation with the National Woman Suffrage Association, a rival of the AWSA. Subsequently, Ames and her husband withdrew their support.
The Ameses moved in 1872 to Philadelphia where Charles held a Unitarian pastorate in Germantown. When an industrial depression struck the city the following year, Ames and her husband spearheaded the charity movement in the United States by founding the Germantown Relief Society. Following the guidelines of the Elberfeld system for the poor, Germantown was divided into eight divisions, each appointing a visiting committee of volunteers that encouraged cooperation among families in need. Money and material charity were provided only in the most dire cases.
When her husband took a job as editor of Boston's Christian Register, Ames dedicated herself to the advancement of women through denominational work. At the 1878 National Conference of Unitarian and Other Christian Churches in Saratoga, New York, Ames proposed the formation of an auxiliary organization dedicated to women's issues. In 1880 the Women's Auxiliary Conference of the Unitarian Church was founded with Ames as vice president. The Unitarian women pledged to make use of their "unused power" at home, "to stimulate denominational faith and work and to spread abroad a knowledge of the distinctive view by which [they strove] to live" (Fifield, p. 8). In 1889 women's auxiliary organizations from 125 branches united to become an independent body, the National Alliance of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women. Ames was chosen to help draft the constitution and was elected a national leader and branch president. She continued to play an influential role in the alliance as a counselor to other women until shortly before her death.
Following the success of the Germantown Relief Society, Ames remained committed to reform in Philadelphia and in 1877 was a founding member and later president (1887-1888) of what perhaps would become the most prestigious women's reform organization of the nineteenth century, the New Century Club. Ames and her husband founded the Philadelphia Society for Organizing Charity in 1878. Following their move to Philadelphia in 1880, Ames took a particular interest in the city's poor children and the institutions that took responsibility for them. In 1883 she contributed to the founding (and was later president) of the Children's Aid Society and Bureau of Information of Pennsylvania. Under state authority, she traveled throughout Pennsylvania for five years, assisting in the organization of county branches, inspecting public institutions or almshouses, and raising money to place almshouse children with private families under the supervision of local volunteer women. After observing those methods that proved beneficial and those that proved fruitless and even abusive, Ames reported her findings to the Board of State Charities. In 1891 she delivered a paper, "The Care of Defective Children," before the National Council of Women. She was selected by Governor William Russell as the first female factory inspector of Massachusetts in the same year.
After making a final move back to Boston in 1888, Ames devoted herself to educational causes while her husband was a minister at the Unitarian Church of the Disciples. From 1896 to 1899 Ames was a member of the Boston School Committee. Because of her prominence in the field of charitable and philanthropic organizations, she was chosen in 1899 as one of the first women to serve on the original board of trustees of Simmons Female College, the first New England school committed to the utilitarian education of women. Simmons was erected in honor of the seamstresses who sewed by hand the clothing that built the fortune of the late John Simmons, the school's benefactor. Ames held various offices in Massachusetts and New England suffrage associations, including presidency of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government. Though no longer an active member, Ames expressed in a 1917 letter to the organization her pride in the active women members for their continuing work to ensure a place for women in American democracy.
Ames died at Barnstable, Massachusetts, of a heart ailment and nephritis. A devoted member of Boston's Unitarian Church of the Disciple for more than forty years, Ames was praised at her memorial service for her allegiance to Unitarianism and the advancement of women's rights, for her contribution to the church as a teacher and organizer, and as an inspiration to other women.
Bibliography
For Ames's involvement with the suffrage movement see the Fanny Baker Ames Papers (Woman's Rights Collection) at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, which includes the eight-page address read at Ames's memorial service on 3 Oct. 1931. Elizabeth C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage vol. 3 (1887), makes brief mention of Ames's contribution in California. For Ames's involvement in Unitarianism and the National Alliance of Unitarian Women, see Emily A. Fifield's A History of Alliance (1945) and Charles Ames's Spiritual Autobiography (1913). Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore include a sketch of Ames in their A Woman of the Century (1893), detailing her charity work in Philadelphia. For Ames's contribution to the founding of the Children's Aid Society see Mary Lesley Ames's Life and Letters of Peter and Susan Lesley, vol. 2 (1909); Frank D. Watson's The Charity Organization Movement in the U.S. (1922); and Children's Aid Society and Bureau of Information of Pennsylvania, First Annual Report (1882-1883). The New Century Club's 1899 pamphlet, New Century Club History, makes reference to Ames's contribution. Kenneth L. Mark outlines the founding of Simmons with reference to Ames in Delayed by Fire, Being the Early History of Simmons College (1945).
Barbara L. Ciccarelli
