Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  Nisba spent the spring trying to build a law practice and going to Chicago to defend her master’s thesis. She handled a few cases of “special women’s interests” steered her way by friends of her father, but work was scarce. Then, out of the blue, deliverance. Marion Talbot offered her a doctoral fellowship that a male student had given up. Nisba packed her bags for Chicago and never looked back. In 1901, she became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, and in 1904, the first woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School. “I am growing quite famous as your father,” Willie wrote proudly, just months before he died. His remarkable daughter had made him rethink his views on women and work. In a 1902 editorial, he questioned why an intelligent, capable young woman like Nisba shouldn’t be able to enter any field she wanted. He called “the system which differentiates so sharply between the activities of a man and a woman” a “perverted one,” and said he had come to see “the strange new demands made by women” not as an upending of the social order, but “part of the development of the new social conscience.”

  It was as part of this new social conscience that Nisba Breckinridge would make her mark as a pioneering feminist social scientist. Along with her colleagues Edith and Grace Abbott and working in tandem with an influential circle of Chicago social reformers, she forged a new field that combined social science and social activism, a “social politics” that provided the impetus for many progressive-era reforms involving women and children. For the rest of her remarkable life she straddled academia and the real world, as at home in a classroom, where she taught a generation of social service professionals, as she was at Hull House, where Jane Addams was now a good friend. Her work on the economic status of women in the first decade of the 1900s was groundbreaking, shining a light on entrenched patterns of inequality in women’s employment. She criticized legal restrictions on women’s work as serving states’ interest in limiting women “to the bearing and raising of children” and advocated for a minimum wage to lift women from poverty. She studied juvenile delinquents in Chicago, highlighting the role of poverty and social conditions rather than inherent immorality in bringing young adults into conflict with the law, and was especially concerned about helping young women whose “virtue is in peril.” She campaigned against “moral courts” that entrapped and humiliated prostitutes and spearheaded the transformation of the Chicago Orphan Asylum into a more modern, noninstitutional social service agency. It was as if, even unconsciously, Nisba was trying to undo many of the conditions that helped create her father’s downfall.

  Nisba was especially consumed with the question of how women could reach full equality in society, especially economically, while meeting their demands as mothers. Her work on juvenile delinquency led her to advocate for the establishment of “mother’s pensions”—state-sponsored aid for impoverished widows—laying the intellectual groundwork for what would become Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or “welfare,” and epitomizing a new approach to alleviating the root causes of poverty. Nisba supported Margaret Sanger and her efforts to provide women with access to birth control and was a vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, noting the link “between lack of political equality and this double under-payment of women workers.” She was active in labor reform activities through the Women’s Trade Union League and helped organize a garment workers’ strike in Chicago. The daughter of Willie Breckinridge studied race-based housing discrimination in Chicago and helped found the Chicago Urban League. The granddaughter of Robert Breckinridge studied substandard housing in the city’s teeming immigrant slums and founded the Immigrants Protective League. To Nisba, it was all interconnected in a great web of social justice: “An attempt to give a course on the subject of the legal and economic status of women raised questions of trade union organizations, of the immigrant girl, of the working mother.”

  Somewhere along the way, Nisba’s ill health disappeared, her life “a hectic round of meetings, conferences, interviews, campaigns and causes.” She didn’t take vacations and she didn’t mind. “I came to the university in poor health and without professional equipment and found here a situation so democratic with reference to sex, age, and color,” she remembered in an address at an alumni dinner in 1938, that she decided never to leave Chicago without “a round-trip ticket in [my] pocket.”

  Still, Nisba fought her own battles with discrimination. Despite graduating at the top of her classes, the prestigious academic appointments that flowed to her male classmates didn’t come her way. For years she was employed only part-time by the University of Chicago. When she engineered the affiliation of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy—where she was dean and created a pioneering curriculum for the training of social workers—with the University of Chicago in 1920 to create the School of Social Service Administration, she was made only an assistant professor despite a half-dozen influential publications to her credit; she wouldn’t be made a full professor until 1925.

  When the Great Depression came around, however, Nisba’s work was vindicated, as the need for social welfare programs became clear and the social service professionals she had trained were in demand to staff newly created social welfare agencies. Still, she saw much work to be done, especially in ensuring an adequate living wage for families and child care for working women. “If we come out of the depression with a truly national program of adequate relief and skillful service, a truly national insurance of child care and child welfare,” she said, “we shall have wrung something infinitely precious from the experience.” It was the capstone of her career when in 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed her as a delegate to the seventh Pan-American Conference, making her the first woman to represent the United States at an international conference.

  Nisba would be the last of the prominent Breckinridges. Nevertheless, eight decades later, when the U.S. government scholar Stephen Hess ranked the top ten American political dynasties for the Washington Post, the Breckinridges came in at number eight, not far below the Adamses and above the Tafts and Bayards.

  Nisba wasn’t the only Breckinridge woman who changed the world for other women. Sometime during the brutal primary campaign of 1894, her prickly, hotheaded brother Desha fell in love with her friend Madeline McDowell. It was an unlikely pairing. Desha was known as a swell, albeit one so charming that the daughter of a wealthy senator and the niece of a Supreme Court justice pursued him, and was vehemently opposed to suffrage and progressive politics. Madge McDowell was, according to Nisba, “able, eloquent and public spirited,” enraptured with suffrage and socialism. She had hoped to join Nisba at the University of Chicago, but had to give that dream up after her foot was amputated to cure long-simmering tuberculosis of the bone. More fox than hound, she led Desha on a merry chase for four years, going to country club dances with other beaux and teasingly sending him A Bachelor’s Christmas as a gift one year.

  When Desha and Madge finally married in 1898, the transformation was unmistakable: Desha was converted to Madge’s politics. The Herald became the most prominent southern voice for progressive reform. Drawing on Nisba’s work and her connections in Chicago, Madge became the leading progressive reformer in Kentucky, undertaking an exhausting succession of “municipal housekeeping” projects: kindergartens and playgrounds for the poor, industrial schools for black and white students, a model school for the “Irishtown” slum of Lexington, laws to ensure that children went to school instead of work.

  But it was as the most prominent southern suffragist that Madeline McDowell Breckinridge became best known. Even after tuberculosis moved into her lungs, she rose to a leadership position in the National American Woman Suffrage Association and undertook a grueling succession of speaking tours. A pro-suffrage pamphlet titled A Mother’s Sphere that she wrote for the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, which represented one million middle-class women, helped convince that organization to officially endorse suffrage in 1914
, which was a major turning point in the mainstreaming of the movement. When Kentucky ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in January 1920, it was Madge who was standing behind Governor Edwin Morrow as he signed the resolution in recognition of her decade-long effort to promote suffrage in Kentucky. On November 2, 1920, she cast her first vote for president of the United States. Three weeks later, she died of a stroke at age forty-eight, her frail body worn out by incessant work and her indomitable spirit perhaps dimmed by the revelation that her beloved Desha had been having an affair with her friend Mary LeBus, which had long been the gossip of Lexington—especially after Desha made a hasty exit down the fire escape of the Phoenix Hotel in his pajamas after LeBus’s husband showed up—the lessons of the father, apparently, not having been learned by the son.

  Nisba memorialized her beloved “sister” in a book about her work “toward a more modern, a juster, nobler life.” It was one of more than ten books she wrote in her lifetime, including Marriage and the Civil Rights of Women and Women in the Twentieth Century.

  Nisba never slowed down. Students recalled her hurrying to her office every day well into her seventies, a sprightly Victorian specter in a long, dark dress. She was nearly eighty when she finally sat down to write about her life. For all her accomplishments, she seemed torn about the choices she had made. She wondered if she would have had a “more honest and simpler” life if she had never left Kentucky, as if she could have changed her family’s fate by stifling her own abilities. Having lived most of her adult life in the “women’s halls” of the university and outlived all her immediate family, including Desha, Ella, Curry, and Robert—who spent twenty years wandering the globe after he jumped ship and didn’t return home until 1914—she seemed to regret never having had a family and home of her own. She mused about her long-ago beaux and the women they married who “made happy gracious homes.” The question of whether “the access of women to the satisfactions of life must either require celibacy or continue to be vicarious or indirect through a husband” haunted her. Neither the social conditions nor the technology—in the form of modern methods of birth control—had existed throughout much of her life to make combining marriage and a professional career possible, but Nisba worried that she had been “afraid of life,” and indeed it seemed that she never allowed herself to believe she was good enough, either in her work or her personal life.

  Time and again she tried to tell the story of her life, and time and again she stopped and restarted—fragments on paper, the years between Wellesley and the University of Chicago a confused blur. She could remember the long-ago buttonholes her Grandma Desha made her practice, but little of what happened in those painful years between 1890 and 1895. She was ashamed that she never reconnected with her aunt Mollie, although, she noted, she “died in a way she would have liked, ‘with her boots on.’” And Mollie Desha did drop dead on the street in Washington in 1911 as she was hurrying between meetings, and was buried not by her family, but by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who honored her profusely—her remains were the first to lie in state in DAR’s Memorial Continental Hall in Washington.

  For Nisba, it seemed, her own story was inextricably linked to that of her father. “I have wanted to write an account of my father, but I seem unable to make a beginning of a biography of him, while I cannot speak of myself without speaking at length of him,” she wrote. Again and again she began: “W.C.P. Breckinridge…, My father…,” only to cross it out or divert the story to some illustrious ancestor, as if writing the words would unearth truths too painful to bear. She tried to reach some understanding of what had happened, of the betrayal, the deceit, of what a lifetime’s work must have told her was exploitation. “As I look back, now, I see how complicated and difficult a burden my father carried,” she wrote, with the family’s money woes and Issa’s frail health. But still the story would not come. For Nisba, who died on July 30, 1948, at the age of eighty-two, and was hailed by the New York Times as an “outstanding figure in the field of social service,” her father would always be the circle that would not square, the hole in her heart that would not heal.

  * * *

  Madeline Pollard, it turned out, was neither friendless nor ruined. She said after the trial that she would show that a “thoroughly disgraced woman can, by true penitence and absolute reform, succeed in getting and retaining the respect of the people about her,” and it seems she was right. Madeline, who now styled her name as “Madeleine,” returned to New York in the fall of 1896 after her first sojourn to Europe. As expected, she hadn’t received any money from Breckinridge. By the spring of 1897, the Washington Post reported that she was living in London “in good circumstances” and “studying with the view of engaging in literary work.” By 1901, she was living in Oxford, where she told census takers she was a “writer of fiction.” It was in Oxford that she met a wealthy Irish-born widow named Violet Hassard. By 1911, the two friends were living together, with Madeline calling herself Madeleine Urquhart Pollard, appropriating the name of a Scottish clan that hailed from near Loch Ness. The two would be friends and traveling companions for the rest of her eventful life, which continued on its Zelig-like romp through history.

  Madeline spent a good part of the mid-1920s in the Paris of Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald and just about anyone else who was worth knowing in the literary world. She traveled to Egypt as the “Tutmania” craze gripped the western world following the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb. She visited Italy, Switzerland, Holland, Spain, and Algeria, always returning with Hassard to their home in London. She traveled home to the United States every few years, returning to New York in 1928 with Margaret Thorne Tjader, who was now widowed and provided Madeline with a home base at her estate in Darien, Connecticut.

  Madeline never wrote her book. She also never lost her taste for reaching out to well-known men. In 1936, she wrote to Nobel Peace Prize–winner Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University and the head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to thank him for his support of Anglo-American friendship at a time when some Americans were criticizing the growing ties between the United States and Great Britain. “I am sure that it is providential that you should be in England just now,” she told him. “I thank God for you in the heart of our national life and the world movement towards the better understanding between nations.” She did not, however, invite him to come see her.

  “I have asked a question with my life, it cannot be answered in a day,” Madeline said when the dust from the trial was still settling. Had she ever answered it? We will never know. One thing is certain: Madeline Pollard lived life wholly on her own terms, neither afraid nor ashamed, and in her own way helped create a new world for women as surely as Nisba Breckinridge did. She died on December 9, 1945, in Devon, just six months after her friend Violet. According to the records, she was seventy-nine at the time of her death, which meant she was still claiming to have been born in 1866, although on one of her voyages to the United States she gave her birth year as 1867.

  Except for one time. On one of Madeline’s very last transatlantic trips, on the S.S. Olympic from Southampton to New York in 1931, the original entry of her name on the passenger list is crossed out and reentered. Maybe it was an overly persistent immigration officer, maybe it was the forgetfulness of age, maybe it was karma, but the corrected birthday that appears on one of the last official vestiges of Madeline Pollard’s existence: November 30, 1863.

  Madeline Pollard said she was a seventeen-year-old student when Col. W.C.P. Breckinridge “accosted” her on a train and later took “liberties” with her during a carriage ride. (Photograph from The Celebrated Trial: Madeline Pollard vs. Breckinridge)

  Congressman William Campbell Preston Breckinridge was a former Confederate officer and the scion of a legendary Kentucky political family who rose to become one of the most powerful men in the Democratic Party. (Photograph by C. M. Bell, courtesy of the University of Kentuc
ky Archives)

  Madeline Pollard “startled the whole country” when she sued Congressman W.C.P. Breckinridge for fifty thousand dollars for breach of promise to marry in August 1893, exposing herself as a “ruined” woman and launching a sensational scandal. (New York World, August 13, 1893)

  Madeline Pollard as she appeared during the five-week trial in the spring of 1894 that challenged a system of sexual morality based on shaming women and excusing men for predatory behavior (Photograph by C. M. Bell, Library of Congress)

  Jane “Jennie” Tucker in New York in 1893 after she left home as part of the first generation of working women, only to find herself embroiled in the Breckinridge-Pollard scandal when she was hired to spy on Madeline in a home for “fallen” women (Photograph by Edward Dana, courtesy of Historic New England)