Transcript of article from Pacific Northwest Quarterly, January 1983 (in bound archival volume, pp 28-35, Seattle Public Library Periodicals Dept.)
LAURA HALL PETERS
Pursuing the Myth of Equality
Barbara Cloud
Citizens of Washington were no strangers to social movements during the 19th century. Whether radical or reformist - and attempts to make a distinction have sometimes obscured the continuity between such movements - efforts to change the nature of society were woven into the social fabric of the period. Woman suffrage, temperance, labor, communitarianism, and populism were among the causes that occupied Washingtonians. Scholars have studied local manifestations of these various activities but largely as independent episodes in history, with little attention given to themes they shared and the ways in which they were connected.
One reason for the neglect of continuity was, as Carlos Schwantes has pointed out, a tendency to focus on isolated, often violent incidents, such as the anti-Chinese riots in the 1880's and, decades later, the clashes involving the Industrial Workers of the World. Emphasis on the dramatic has thus overshadowed the general themes that such occurrences evidence. This situation is changing. For example, Charles LeWarne's work on communitarian colonies and Schwante's own studies of labor take longer and broader views of their subjects; still, they generally only touch on the interrelationships of events.
The present essay begins to forge the missing links between the social movements that so absorbed Washington residents in the late 19th century. By focusing on a single person, a woman prominent for three decades in virtually all the efforts for social change, it provides a foundation for a study of these movements in a larger ideological or philosophical framework.
Now almost forgotten, Laura Etta Crane Hall Peters was widely known in her day because of her connection with the major social movements of the territory and state: woman suffrage, temperance, Knights of Labor, Chinese expulsion, populism, and communitarianism. She also believed in spiritualism, which, though not a reform movement in itself, was practiced by many 19th century activists. Few individuals in Washington were so consistently associated with so many causes. Unfortunately, despite her high level of activity - or perhaps because of it - Laura Peters apparently did not record what she thought about her involvements. We have evidence that she was a spirited woman, not given to minding the hearth, and that she was interested in writing; but so far as we know, she left no cache of letters or diaries that might reveal her thoughts and emotions as she played her role in Washington history. Newspapers of the day often mention Laura, yet her name rarely appears in the records and memoirs of her contemporaries. Hence, although it is possible to trace from her various activities the development of her social consciousness, the reasons for that development are obscure.
On the surface Laura Hall Peters was an unlikely candidate for radical/reform activity. Her early life was not much different from that of many Washington Territory residents. She was born in Fountain County, Indiana, in 1840, the fourth of five children of Daniel M. and Catherine Rogers Crane. Her father was typical of the restless breed of Americans: he moved from his native New Jersey to New York to Indiana, working at odd jobs, including the canals, en route. In Indiana he married and settled down on a farm, but in the 1850's he decided to go farther west to try his luck in Iowa. By 1860 he had established himself in southwestern Adair County as a farmer with real estate assets totaling $2,000. If not wealthy, he was comfortable.
In Iowa, Crane's daughter Laura met and married a young Adair county schoolteacher, Isaac M. (Ike) Hall, who was originally from Warren County, Indiana. Ike was 1 of 10 children in a relatively cultured household - the senior Hall was described as a skillful musician and genial gentleman, as well as a competent physician and minister - and the young man appealed to Laura's developing sensitivities. In fact, the Halls made a double conquest in the Crane family: Ike's brother Walter married Laura's sister Sarah.
In 1864, prompted by the old wanderlust combined with the desire for a fresh start in a new place, a desire occasioned by the turmoil of the Civil War, Daniel put his Iowa farm up for sale and with Catherine headed for the Pacific Northwest. There, instead of returning to the farm life, the Cranes settled in the village of Seattle where Daniel went to work as a turner in Henry Yesler's sawmill. In the next 22 years, Daniel became a landowner as well as a millworker, accumulating some choice real estate in Seattle and building two impressive houses on Fourth Avenue.
Ike and Laura had started west with the Cranes in 1864 but stopped in San Francisco while their first child, Eudora, was born. When they moved on to Seattle, Ike immediately sought to establish himself as a lawyer, although it is doubtful that he had any formal preparation for the bar, frontier society being somewhat casual about such things. In April 1866 he was admitted to the territorial bar and was soon called upon to defend the accused in two of Seattle's earliest murder trials. Both of those clients were sentenced to hang, but as his knowledge of law grew, Ike developed a reputation for his wit and his ability to get his clients freed on legal technicalities. He served as probate judge and Seattle city attorney in later years and was a member of the local bar association.
Although law was Ike's bread and butter, he was always alert to possible money-making schemes and to political opportunities. About the time of his admission to the bar he bought Seattle's first newspaper, the Seattle Weekly Gazette. Off and on over the next 16 months, alone or in conjunction with partners, Ike offered Seattle a succession of short-lived newspapers, including the territory's first daily, the Puget Sound Daily, which also appeared in semiweekly and weekly versions. The newspapers were avowedly Union Republican in politics, and the party sought to reward Ike for his support by nominating him to be county auditor. When the vote was counted in June 1867, Ike and the other candidate, the variety store owner A. S. Pinkham, each had 140 votes. The two men drew straws to break the tie, and Ike was the winner. Now having the assurance of a regular income, he sold his newspaper.
Ike had been auditor, the principal administrative official in King County at that time, for 11 months when he decided to go to Hawaii. The Weekly Intelligencer's announcement of June 29, 1868, suggests that he was off on a new business venture and that he intended to make his home elsewhere, perhaps in the islands. There is no mention of his wife and family in the note of his sailing, but his intentions presumably were to return for them once he was established.
While he was away, the county fathers declared his post vacant because of his extended absence, and questions were raised publicly about county accounting methods. The criticism reflected directly on Ike, who had been responsible for the county bookkeeping, and it is tempting to speculate that he left town knowing that a storm was brewing. However, he had carefully arranged for a deputy, and all other signs indicate that although Ike may not have been the most competent auditor, he was not a criminal. In any case, by August he was back from Hawaii, talking about settling permanently in Port Townsend; the following year he changed plans again and returned to Seattle, where he was appointed by the legislature to be temporary city recorder in the newly organized city government. He did not seek an office when city elections were held.
Before long Ike was involved in another newspaper. In 1871 he and W. S. Wilson took over the Alaska Times and Seattle Dispatch, formerly published in Sitka, changing the name to the Territorial Dispatch and Alaska Times. Ike declared himself independent in politics, and he said he aimed for a circulation of 1,000, which would make the Dispatch Puget Sound's premier newspaper. However, he did not stay with it long enough to make good either claim. By August he had turned the property back to the previous owner and returned to his law practice.
Laura's life in these early years centered on home and family, with the stress on family because she had little interest in housewifely chores. She was so lax in her management of household affairs that occasionally Ike, fed up with her failure to prepare dinner, would take their daughter to a hotel or restaurant where the two of them would have "a very large and festive dinner, which was always preceded with all the deserts [sic] they liked the best!" Laura was more interested in writing and painting than in cleaning and cooking, but unlike many small-town editors wives, she appears not to have participated in the operation of Ike's newspapers.
While Ike was becoming a part of the establishment, Laura was experimenting with her first reform cause: temperance. Before she was 30, she was an officer in the first Seattle lodge of the Independent Order of Good Templars, and she helped organize the second lodge in the city. Later admitted to the Grand Lodge of the state, she was nominated, but not elected, to its second highest office, the highest post a woman could expect to hold. She also worked for the organization of other lodges around the state. Although Ike first joined Laura in supporting the local lodge, temperance was not to his taste. Despite his Good Templars activity, he became known in the territory for his heavy drinking and the ability to hold his liquor. A contemporary recalled:
"Hall was an astute lawyer, given somewhat to over indulgence in alcoholic beverages; I worked in a drug store in the late 60's and early seventies, and have many times in the morning got out the bottle of ammonia for him to sniff, as he said to clear up the fog. He had the faculty of clear thinking even when his legs would scarcely support him."
In 1874 Laura filed for divorce, charging that Ike was a "habitual drunkard" who went on "sprees" of several weeks' duration. He neglected his family, she contended, and threatened her life when he was drunk. The court mediated a reconciliation and the marriage lasted another nine years - through the birth of their third child, Luella, (a son, Frank, had been born in 1866). In 1883 Laura went to court again, and this time there was no reconciliation. Ike was found guilty of cruelty, personal indignities to and iniquities against his wife, and their marriage was dissolved.
The unhappy marriage and eventual divorce undoubtedly had a significant impact on Laura. Although divorce in frontier Seattle imposed less of a stigma than divorce in proper Boston, Laura nevertheless found herself on the fringes of society, looking for a way to regain her standing in the community. Not one to go into seclusion, weeping into her hankie and hoping for sympathy, she aggressively pursued old interests and developed new ones, forcing fellow Seattleites to pay attention to her. Further; her subsequent choice of activities reflects Christopher Lasch's observation that "unhappy homes commonly left a passionate sense of the wrongs of woman, a sense of the sisterhood of suffering."
For example, an interest in woman suffrage, which began about the same time that her marital problems started, survived and was strengthened by the divorce. In November 1871 Laura was among Washington residents who listened to Susan B. Anthony and the Oregon suffrage leader Abigail Scott Duniway expound on the merits of giving women the vote, and her name was on the list of people who sponsored an equal suffrage convention in Olympia. At the convention she was appointed to the constitution committee, together with Anthony and others - her first exposure to serious reformers. Those early efforts for woman suffrage were lost, but the issue was revived repeatedly during the next 40 years. Although Laura was preoccupied with her marital problems during the successful suffrage campaign of 1883, she was on the first mixed jury in King County following the approval of that legislation. After the three-man, three-woman jury quickly found the male defendant not guilty of assaulting a female, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer commented: "This demonstrates that King county ladies can serve on juries and come to an agreement with very little ceremony, but as to whether they relish the duty, the particular ladies in question are best calculated to decide."
The 1883 law was overturned by the court in 1887, and Laura Hall's was among the loudest voices of protest heard in Seattle. At a meeting of woman suffrage advocates she declared:
"I have been in a number of meetings, and have heard the votes ring out loud and clear for woman suffrage. I was paralyzed when I saw the Post-Intelligencer extra announcing that our rights had been taken from us, and I have hardly got over my paralytic shock yet….I believe we should go into the war and fight against the war on women. If we show we are in earnest the men will help us."
Showing that she, at least, was in earnest, on her own initiative she had 100 copies of a pro-woman suffrage petition printed, later asking fellow suffrage supporters to reimburse her the $4 cost. "I want this association to endorse my act, and then request every lady and gentleman present to sign it." Her request was met, and she was named to an executive committee to plan a public meeting. When the gathering was about to adjourn without planning the public protest, Laura burst out: "My goodness alive! Don't let us go until we arrange for that indignation meeting. I am so indignant that I am uncomfortable, and cannot stand it much longer."
At a subsequent meeting, held on March 2, some women moved that the press be banned; Laura, however, noting that the only reporter present was the one from the Post-Intelligencer who had used her indignation to poke fun at the suffrage movement, demanded that he be allowed to stay providing that he submit his story for approval prior to publication. The ensuing discussion, which the paper reported almost verbatim, afforded another opportunity to ridicule the movement:
"Mrs. Laura E. Hall - …Now, since that report of our last meeting was published in the Post-Intelligencer, I have received letters from Chicago, New York, and other places, and while I could not be called a very sensitive person, I don't like so much notoriety. Now I was reported as saying 'My goodness gracious!' and I don't believe I used that expression.
Mrs. Wood - Oh, yes, you did, Mrs. Hall, I remember that very distinctly, you were discussing the indignation meeting very earnestly, when you used those words. The paper was right about that.
Mrs. DeVoe - If a reporter stays, I'll leave.
Mrs. Laura E. Hall - I move to reconsider my motion, as we can better spare the reporter than Mrs. DeVoe."
Indignation prevailed but briefly. In 1888 women again received the vote, only to have it taken away almost immediately by the courts. In the early 1890's the movement reorganized, and Laura became vice-president of the state Equal Suffrage Association. In 1896, as the Populists moved to make good on their promise to pass an equal suffrage bill (a promise that Laura, as a member of the platform committee, helped extract), she was appointed by the association to lobby the legislature and help steer the bill through both houses. In fact, according to Anthony's History of Woman Suffrage, she personally rescued the bill from oblivion by reminding the Speaker of the House to recognize the representative who wished to present the measure - this on the day before the end of the session. When the bill was finally passed, Laura claimed to have been "duly sworn in as special messenger, and [to have] very proudly carried the bill to the office, where Gov. John R. Rogers affixed his signature to it and declared it law." The measure was subject to a statewide vote, however, and lack of organization resulted in its failure at the ballot box the next year. Laura did not live to see equal suffrage return to Washington, and although the national leaders recognized her efforts at the time, her work has since been generally overlooked.
In Washington, as elsewhere, it was not unusual for people to be interested in both temperance and woman suffrage. The two reforms were so closely associated that there was fear that talk of prohibition would drive away drinkers who would otherwise support suffrage. Laura Hall, however, did not restrict herself to these issues. In the mid-1880's she joined the Knights of Labor largely because that organization advocated equality of the sexes, as well as cooperative institutions and government ownership of utilities. The Knights admitted women to membership and counted among its members not just wage earners but also housewives, professional people, small businessmen, and farmers. Her millworker father was a Knight; her son, Frank, and nephews Walter A. and Fred M. Hall were printers, and because printing was one of the first crafts to be organized in the Northwest, she was familiar with the concept of unionism. About this time, too, a distant cousin, Peter Peyto Good, a New York judge interested in working-class problems, arrived in Seattle. He immediately showed an interest in the activities of the Knights and probably influenced Laura in that direction.
Her membership in the union was closely allied to her involvement in the anti-Chinese agitation of 1885-86. The Seattle Daily Call, a newspaper started by her son and nephews, was the semiofficial organ of the Knights, which in the Pacific Northwest was unusually influential in local affairs and more outspokenly radical than its counterparts elsewhere. Knights and their supporters saw the Chinese, who had moved into Puget Sound labor markets after completion of the northern transcontinental railways, as a threat to white labor. The Halls believed that the Chinese were displacing honest white workers and therefore, in the words that appeared repeatedly in the Call's columns, "The Chinese Must Go!" The Call made no pretense of journalistic objectivity where the Chinese were concerned, but its support of labor went well beyond that issue. After the Chinese were expelled from Seattle, the Call continued to thrive, still espousing the workingman's cause.
The anti-Chinese agitation encouraged by the Knights and the Call brought together Laura and other middle-class people who felt the pinch of Washington's depressed economy. Active in the movement to counter the perceived Chinese threat were members of the prolabor Liberal League, which Laura's father headed. Crane was not directly associated with any of the actions that resulted in violence, a declaration of martial law, and the indictment of 15 people, including Good, for conspiracy, but he chaired meetings, signed a bond to guarantee ship passage for a number of Asians, and eventually testified for the defense in the conspiracy trial.
His influence on Laura cannot be overestimated. Although the 75-year-old Crane had accumulated considerable real estate, he never really identified with the propertied class in Seattle, which included people like Judge Thomas Burke, who benefited by employing cheap Chinese labor. Something of the spirit that made Crane willing to take risks - be it to move westward, support woman suffrage as early as 1871, or participate in unionism - invested his daughter, who was also heavily involved in the anti-Chinese affair.
She was one of those to whom Clarence Bagley referred when he wrote some years later that the anti-Chinese demonstrations brought out "every socialist and anarchist who could walk or steal a ride to Seattle…Long-haired men and short-haired women were noticeable by their numbers and their noise." The tableaux of torchlight parades, showing women and children starving and in chains allegedly because of "competition with cheap labor," must have appealed to Laura's dramatic nature. She visited the Chinese to investigate the manner in which they lived, raised money for the defense of the agitators, and testified at the conspiracy trial.
Working with Laura and others to effect the expulsion of the Chinese was her cousin, Peter Good, a man whose vision extended beyond the immediate labor issue. An effective speaker at the anti-Chinese rallies, Good talked not only of restoring the white workingman's opportunities but also of building a model city where people would work cooperatively. His ideas of communitarian organization in which all would be equal, no person could employ another, and each would work for the good of all, caught the attention of George Venable Smith, a Seattle Lawyer who had the organizational skills Good lacked. Smith, too, was active in the Chinese expulsion movement, and in Smith's office, he, Good, and Laura exchanged ideas for a utopian community while they laid plans to rid the region of the Asians. Good's death early in 1886 - friends claimed it resulted from treatment while he was imprisoned in connection with the Chinese riots - left the communitarian proposal in the hands of Smith, who proceeded to found the Puget Sound Cooperative Colony with himself as President and Laura Hall a member of the board.
Here Laura truly came into her own. As corresponding secretary and education officer for the colony, she was responsible for publicity, and when the colony almost immediately started a newspaper, Model Commonwealth, in order to propound its message, she was the first editor.
Unfortunately for our understanding of Laura's perspective on the communitarian experiment, editing Model Commonwealth gave her relatively little opportunity to use her creative talents or to speak her mind. Most of the newspaper space was devoted to reprints from similarly minded publications, Knights of Labor organizing materials, letters form potential colonists, and official colony documents. Nevertheless, some sense of her taste and ideals shows through in the aphorisms she selected as fillers: "If you would rise in the world, you must not stop to kick at every cur that barks at you as you go along"; "He is wise who does not repine for what he has not, but rejoices in what he has." It was probably Laura who stressed the need for "something that would do away with the morbid, selfish, eager, grasping spirit of a desire for wealth" and remarked that the poor had nothing to lose and everything to gain by joining the colony.
She was responsible for a column directed at children, and she undoubtedly took pleasure in writing about the colony's view of women: "We are, as colonists, equal with our brothers." She said the colony offered relief to oppressed and suppressed women, who might, by working only four or five hours a day outside the home, earn "an equitable right to all the luxuries of life." Equal suffrage and equal pay for equal work were part of the colony's prospectus. She also pointed out that cooperative kitchens would relieve homelife drudgeries, offensive smells, and smoky kitchens, solve the servant problem, and offer greater economy and variety of food. Problems with servants were eliminated by the colony's refusal to allow one person to hire another.
Attracted to the Puget Sound Co-operative Colony by its ideals of equality, Laura also appreciated its view of religion. There were to be no churches on the Port Angeles site; colonists worshiped God according to their consciences. The leaders encouraged members to follow the best moral teachings of Christ but to eschew the ritual and what they saw as the pomp and show of organized religion. Laura, who had attended church in her younger years, had ceased calling herself a Christian by 1886. Her turn from traditional Christianity cannot be traced on available evidence, but it is reasonable to imagine that moralistic Seattle churchgoers shunned the divorcee and made her feel unwelcome within the churchly sanctum. It is also likely that Laura, her sensitivities toward social injustices heightened by her various activities, believed that Christianity had not lived up to its promises. In any case, she was not an atheist, or even an agnostic; she was a spiritualist.
Spiritualism fit smoothly into Laura's way of thinking. Like others in the spiritualist movement, she questioned existing social arrangements while maintaining that society could and would be improved. She shared the spiritualist belief in individual advancement, as opposed to a dependence on God's will, and thanks to her divorce and involvement in reform, to some extent she knew the ostracism that provided a bond between spiritualists generally and reformers. She tended to diverge from the typical spiritualist path, however, in her impatience, her desire to see changes happen immediately rather than in a slow, evolutionary fashion.
Despite the colony's stress on equality, to some members, at least, it soon appeared that some were more equal than others. Smith and his board governed with a heavy hand. Discussion from colonists was invited, but the board had the last word. The colony moved to Port Angeles early in 1887 (Laura and her youngest child, Luella, moved to the site in May); within months opposition to Smith's authoritarian leadership arose. In colony elections in September Smith was returned to his position, but he had to rely on proxy votes from nonresident members for his majority. Most of the local voters - those closest to the situation - supported his opponent, E. B. Mastick. Laura, as part of the Smith faction, was also returned to office.
Soon after the election Laura left her post as editor of Model Commonwealth, although she continued to serve as the colony's education officer. Under Laura, Model Commonwealth had been a relatively moderate proponent of communitarianism, but her successor, Venier Voldo, turned it into a truly radical publication. When four anarchists were hanged in November 1887 in connection with the Chicago Haymarket riots, Voldo called the executions "Murder Most Foul" and invoked the old printer's custom of "turning the rules" to provide a heavy black border of mourning around the pages. This dramatic expression of sympathy for the anarchists antagonized many Washingtonians who were already suspicious of the colony's motives and practices.
Dissent within the colony continued, and early in 1888 the opposition forced a special election. This time Smith and his followers were defeated, but Laura may not have been too upset at losing her office. She had a new interest, one less radical than usual. Among the many people with whom she had corresponded while promoting the colony before its formation was Charles J. Peters, a Fort Worth, Texas, man 13 years her junior. Peters, originally from a Swiss hotel family, was imbued with democratic ideals; e joined the Puget Sound Co-operative and moved to Port Angeles about a month after Laura. He said later that Smith had asked him to assist Laura with Model Commonwealth, and he wrote at least one article for the newspaper. But Peters was quickly disillusioned by the bickering within the colony and went off on his own to purchase land in the Port Angeles area, eventually putting together a substantial parcel, which he farmed. In 1888 he and Laura, now 48, were married, made a trip to Europe, then settled down on the farm that he had named Gyrenbad, after his birthplace.
On the farm Laura had an opportunity to indulge a long-time interest in gardening. As early as 1865 she had shown her enthusiasm for Washington's favorable climate for plants, and she had written at length to her sister in Iowa about her Seattle garden, concluding, "I have a nice snowball & a rose - some wild roses & other wild flowes in a boquet [sic]. The snowball is large & beautiful. Our garden looks schoocum." Still in Seattle in 1886, she had hosted the first colony "sociable," and afterward announced in Model Commonwealth that she was enclosing within the newspaper's pages flower petals from a bouquet that had been brought to the party. These were to inspire colonists to develop gardens that were ornamental as well as useful when they settled on the site at Port Angeles, "where the hours of labor will be few enough to allow…some time for the cultivation of the beautiful."
In middle age, Laura no longer went out of her way to avoid domesticity. For example, the cultivation of strawberries interested both Peterses, who managed to obtain some plants in 1892 with the help of N. G. Blalock, president of the Washington World's Fair Commission. Their success was crowned by a first-place award for strawberry preserves in the local fair.
Laura also continued to take part in the Port Angeles community. She enjoyed singing and had some talent for it. Almost immediately after her arrival in Seattle in 1865, she had been invited to join a local church choir, and later, in 1887, at the colony's first Fourth of July celebration, it was Laura who sang "that glorious old patriotic song, 'The Star Spangled Banner.'" She and her daughter Luella sang duets in community get-togethers, and both appeared in local theatricals in the 1880's.
Still, the old enthusiasm for political and social causes remained. Between 1891 and 1893 her husband served as the Clallam County commissioner for the World's Fair Commission, which was responsible for the state exhibit at the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893. Laura threw herself behind the effort, chairing the local women's committee and traveling around the country to garner support for the project. She also continued her involvement in temperance and was more active than ever in the woman suffrage movement.
During the last decade of her life Laura adopted still another reform movement: populism, a logical extension of her earlier interests, particularly in connection with sexual equality. In 1896 when the Populists, Democrats, and Silver Republicans gathered at Ellensburg for their Fusion Convention, at which John Rankin Rogers was nominated for governor, Laura was a member of the Clallam County Populist delegation and the only woman delegate at the convention. She was there mainly to ensure an equal suffrage plank in the platform, and she served on the platform committee, which did endorse such a plank. However, her only reported statements before the assembly dealt with railroad passes for legislators, a subject of some controversy. Laura believed that those who had accepted passes had erred but that they were well meaning and hard working and did not deserve the censure that many delegates proposed. Her generous view carried the day, 210 to 132.
The Populists' support of woman suffrage was undoubtedly gratifying to Laura, but her interest in the Populist movement must have gone beyond that issue because she was on relatively cordial terms with Governor Rogers, who was no great advocate of suffrage. Despite his neglect of the subject - he failed to mention it in his inaugural address even though it was part of the party platform - she was the new governor's "firm friend." In a letter asking him to appoint a Port Angeles resident to a government post, she scrawled in the margin, "Hurrah for Debs!" which suggests the depth of her interest in populism.
In 1902 Laura Hall Peters died after a lengthy illness. By her own instructions her burial was simple. Her coffin, built by a friend, was carried in a neighbor's spring wagon to the Ocean View Cemetery at Port Angeles where services were conducted by a spiritualist minister. On her deathbed, she wanted everyone to feel glad, for "Am I not about to step off into a higher and better life?" Thus, according to her obituary, she died much as she had lived, "radical, aggressive and progressive, strong and positive in her convictions and plain mannered to an unusual degree."
Her death went unnoticed around the state. Despite her occasional celebrity between 1870 and 1900, no memorials honored her; only family and friends mourned her passing. She was nevertheless what the historian Gordon Wrigth calls an "outlier" - one of those who "may not have been typical of their times, nor even especially memorable for the mark they left on history. Yet their careers helped bring to life an age in which they lived." Wright suggests that outliers make their presence felt in periods of "upheaval, rapid change, or severe social stress," that they emerge "from obscurity for a time, spinning in the whirlpools and eddies of events before being sucked under once more."
Indeed, Laura's career spanned a period of extreme social change. During that time the frontier, with its wealth of natural resources waiting to be exploited, disappeared; the agrarian nation became the industrial nation; railroads and the telegraph compressed distances. These and other developments fed social unrest. Questioning the existing order, Americans challenged the "myth of equal opportunity" that, according to Christopher Lasch, had for two centuries been "sufficiently strong to minimize the tensions and resentments" of society. This challenge brought Laura into the eddies of events; it was a common thread in her activities and, therefore, in the movements that she embraced.
Whatever other motives - economic, political, or social - may have induced Laura to join radical/reform movements, the underlying theme of her activities can be traced to that myth of equality, especially as it related to women. Each of the movements in which she participated accepted women more or less equally. Only one, woman suffrage, focused on sexual equality, but in all of them, women worked for improvement of the human condition, female as well as male. Thus, sexual equality was a common link between various 19th century reformers and radicals. Emerging "from obscurity for a time," Laura Hall Peters epitomized that link.
My note:
Written by Barbara Cloud, Asst Prof of Communications, UNLV, as part of dissertation on history of press/communications in Washington
Submitted by Stacey Davis November 3, 2000