A very sad story.

Title

A very sad story.

Description

A sad story... Sarah Ingersoll Cooper made her mark on California as a leader of the 1896 suffrage referendum - a painful defeat. She had already influenced San Francisco by establishing free kindergartens & nursery schools for poor children, a new concept in the 1880s. 🧵

Her schools served 20,000 children of all races & creeds; she was founding president of the Int'l Kindergarten Union. She wasn’t afraid of a fight: in 1881 the Presbyterian church tried her for heresy for rejecting the doctrines of infant damnation and everlasting punishment.

How could she have believed such a thing, when two sons died in infancy & daughter Mollie as a toddler? Sarah Cooper’s surviving child, Harriet, worked as her mother’s secretary. Sarah’s husband, described as “kindly and devoted,” killed himself in 1885 “out of fear of insanity.”

After the suffrage ballot was defeated, Harriet was severely depressed and attempted suicide. “Mrs. Cooper, unwilling to be separated from her, refused the advice of friends and doctors who urged immediate treatment.”

“During the night of Dec 10, 1896, the young woman turned on the gas in the San Francisco room she and her mother shared and asphyxiated them both.” A memorial to Sarah Cooper stands in Golden Gate Park, erected in 1923 in gratitude for bringing kindergarten to California.

Compare to Central Park, which has no statutes of real women - finally changing on August 26! @MonumentalWomen

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 for @crisistextline. 

Creator

Daily Suffragist

Date

02/21/2020

Files

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Citation

Daily Suffragist, “A very sad story.,” Daily Suffragist, accessed March 29, 2024, https://dailysuffragist.omeka.net/items/show/248.

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