Marie Stevens Case Howland

**Marie Stevens Case Howland** (1836-1921) was a

## Early Life & Education

Marie Stevens was born as Hannah Maria Stevens on January 23, 1836 in the small farming community of Lebanon, New Hampshire.

A bright but poor child who was known by her community for her voracious love of learning, she received most of her schooling from her family. Her brother taught her the alphabet when she was two, and her father taught her to write "on birch bark with a pin". As a child she wanted "above all things the books that were for sale and which my father's poverty placed far beyond my reach."

By age 8 Stevens had to help support her family by selling wild strawberries in her village. Though she had some happy memories of her childhood, such as "the stolen boat, the sails on the Connecticut River, pine stumps ablaze and children standing roasting ears of corn by the fire", she remembered her childhood as "unhappy, neglected."

 After her father's early death when she was 12, she separated from her siblings and moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, a textile center where she likely worked while living with 27 other girls and young women in a boarding house owned by one Reuben Page and his wife.

### **Massachusetts**

#### **Lowell**

Around the age of 15 Stevens made her way from Manchester to Lowell, Massachusetts. Then the "textile capital of New England and one of the wonders of the burgeoning industrial world," Today as the the first large factory town in the U.S., Lowell it is generally considered the "Cradle of the American Industrial Revolution."

 Lowell was attracting young Yankee women and girls from all over the region who were "lured by the highest wages offered to female employees anywhere in America." Local company owners

> "boasted about the operatives' contentment, and hailed the opportunities for self-improvement available to them through literary circles and lending libraries. Women operatives were housed in substantial brick boarding houses, whose sober and well-proportioned facades hid crowded accommodations. Boardinghouse keepers enforced a strict work regimen, promptness at meals, and weekly religious observance."
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These boardinghouses of teenage girls and young women averaged 25 boarders with 4-6 to a bedroom. An unforseen consequence of this type of communal living within the context of such an industrial center was that "the closely knit community of female workers living together created new values, solidarity and political activism," and it was that "social and political cohesion, which supported their involvement in the strikes of the 1830s and 1840s." As Lucy Larcom, a 'mill girl' from Lowell said:

> "Home-life, when one always stays at home, is necessarily narrowing.... We have hardly begun to live until we can take in the idea of the whole human family... it was incalculable help to find myself among so many working-girls, all of us thrown upon our own resources, but thrown much more upon each other's sympathies..."
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Conditions in textile factors were described in 1845 by another 'mill girl' in her complaint against "the long working hours (5:00am to 7:00pm, with half-hour breaks for breakfast and dinner) and the foul air, filled with lint from the looms and smoke from kerosene lamps." (Stevens herself worked 13 hour days as weaver) Unsurprisingly, these conditions lead to an organized push back by the collectively-living mill girls. They criticized "capitalists and politicians" in their publication *Voice of Industry*, and they organized campaign such as that for the ten-hour day and testified in state hearings on their working conditions.

Stevens arrived in Lowell in the early 1850s, when the radical spirit of the female workers had been on the decline for a few years, thanks to the fed up factory owners switching from the "robust young women" of New England to the lower paid and unorganized immigrants (particularly the Irish). She also didn't live in a boardinghouse with other young women, as she had finally been reunited with her mother and older brother and was living with them. However it would have been impossible to work as a mill girl in Lowell even then and not learn about,and feel a part of, that same radical spirit.

#### **Marie Stevens, writer**

It was also in Lowell that Stevens began her career as a writer. Writing juvenile pieces for the local papers, Hannah Maria Stevens was published under the name Marie Stevens, and from that point forward she went by the name of Marie to everyone, with the exception of a stubborn grandmother.

**Boston**

After several years in Lowell Stevens moved to Boston. According to biographer Paul Gaston, one "not entirely reliable" source claims that in 1853 (when she was 17) she was "a student in the Phrenological office of Fowlers & Wells in Boston, and managed also to learn the art of Phonography [Pitman shorthand], being able at 18 to report a sermon or speech very thoroughly."

## **New York City**

#### **Five Points**

By 19 Stevens was living on her own in New York City. After trying a few odd jobs, Marie became a teacher at the Ladies' Home Missionary Society's Five Points Mission. There the society provided "religious instruction, food and shelter, rudimentary job training, and schooling for the young." In particular, as they reported in 1854, their great hope was to save as many children as they could "from the almost certain result of corrupt parental example." The belief that poverty was caused by the ignorance and bad habits of the poor themselves was ubiquitous among the middle and upper classes of that day, and indeed all too much so today.

Five Points itself was the most notorious area of New York City at this time. Charles Dickens himself had visited a decade prior and claimed that the "filth and wretchedness" of Five Points matched the worst London's slums and that "from every corner, as you glance about you in these dark retreats, some figure crawls half-awakened, as if the judgement hour were at hand." Five Points did indeed teem "with bars, dance halls, houses of prostitution-- and desperate people."

As a teacher who often found herself "ministering to the waifs brought in... out of school hours," it was there in Five Points that Stevens "came to learn frightening new lessons about the degradation of poverty and the meaning of hopelessness."

#### **Theatre & Ada Clare**

In the fall of 1855, while working in Five Points, Stevens made her amateur debut on the New York Stage. Though no acting prodigy, this venture would prove to alter the course of her life, as it was there she met and became close friends with fellow 19-year-old and future "Queen of Bohemia," the dazzling Ada Clare. This friendship with help sustain both women through the rest of their lives.

Ada Clare presided over Pfaff's Cellar, the favored gathering place for the Bohemians. While Stevens only recalled one visit to Pfaff's and claimed to not be one of the "Bohemians", she was friends with them all and saw most of them weekly at Clare's "informal, unconventional literary receptions" at her home on 42nd Street.  Stevens would in fact go over "on Sat. night" before the Sunday salons "and shared her room & bed."

#### **The Club & The Unitary Household**

In the same year, Stevens began to visit The Club, the radical salon of the flamboyant Fourierist and Individualist Anarchist Stephen Pearl Andrews. It was here that she was exposed to endless discussions on the principles of Free Love, which proponents declared was "the opposite of slave love; it meant that women should be liberated from male domination, free to form marriage on the basis of love, dissolve it in the absence of love, and offer or withhold their bodies on their own terms." These ideals of willing association and autonomy for women shaped much of her future reform work.

Through The Club she met her first husband, Lyman W. Case, and together they moved into The Unitary Household ("Unity House"), another project of Andrews, and there she met the man who would, with Case's blessing, become her second husband, Edward Howland. Not long after their marriage, divorce proceedings were begun, and Stevens moved out of Unity House.

#### **Public School & Normal School**

After leaving Case and the Unitary Household, Stevens moved into her own place, and brought her younger sister Ada to live with her. Still a teenager but already a divorcee and new mother, Ada kept house and kept Stevens company during the busy next few years.

 Now working in the public school system instead of the Five Points Mission, Stevens spent 2 years of Saturday mornings at the Normal School. She later called her studies "the happiest part of my life up to that time". She graduated with "highest records" in July 1859.

 From teaching she spent a short time as an elementary school assistant principal before At 21, in 1857, she was appointed the principal of Primary School Number 11 (CONFLICT?: *Did she become principle before she graduated Normal School?*), located in a "rough quarter" of the city, according to Howland.

## Marriage

#### **Lyman W. Case**

It was at The Club that Stevens met her first husband, the radical lawyer, Harvard alum, and devoted Fourierist from Connecticut, Lyman W. Case. Though she was 19 and he only a few years older, he acted as her mentor and teacher. According to Stevens he "was always coaching me in speech, manners, movements...& and I was very grateful for the pains he took." She later remembered how he put her "through the course of logic of the Fordham school for priests, using a Latin text book when I did not know a hundred words in Latin." It was Case who helped Stevens begin to form a "comprehensive world view, a system of thought into which she could fit her remarkable experiences, her increasingly penetrating insights, and her emerging reformist sensibilities."

 And it was likely Case who introduce Stevens to Fourierism, another powerful piece of the puzzle for the life she would go on to lead. Fourierism likely appealed to Stevens for many reasons, not the least of which was it's idea of uniting, not dividing, of capitalists and laborers, and idea quite compatible with a young woman who "shied away from violence and deplored revolution." Soon after their marriage in 1857 the newlyweds moved into an urban cooperative living project based on the practical application of Fourierist teachings, a new project of The Club's founder Stephen Pearl Andrews' and called the Unitary Household. (aka Unity House).

#### **Edward Howland**

While living in the Unity House, the 23 year old Stevens met an old Harvard classmate of Case's, Edward Howland, a young journalist and fellow Fourierist from Charleston. He had accompanied Henry Clapp Jr., the editor of Howland's new publication the *New York Saturday Press* to visit the house one evening. As one biographer reported (from Marie's recollections),

> "There was piano music, Marie recalled, and everyone began dancing, marching around the 'big old double parlors.' Her partner was the guest brought by Henry Clapp. They kept dancing. 'At length someone pulled my skirt to remind me that the march had ceased and all were seated-- all but Edward Howland and myself who ere quite lost to all the environment."
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True to his Fourierist belief of "passional attraction," Case recognized that his wife experience something exceptional that night. After the guests had gone home, Case said to her, "Marie, you have met your destiny... No lying, Marie. You have met the man of all men whom you need." With Case's blessing, it was decided to pursue a divorce so that Stevens could be with Howland, with whom she did spend a long and happy life. Case remained a friend to both Stevens and Howland until their deaths.

Stevends and Howland were married in Sterling, Scotland on August 12, 1865, when he was 33 and she was 29. Their honeymoon was to travel though Scotland on a "romantic journey accomplished on the top of an amonibus," while Howland read Scott's poetry as they "passed places immortalized by that poet of youth and romance."

### **Personality**

Stevens was known to be "cheerful, effervescent--a happy optimist--" and a loyal friend. In her obituary, her friend praised her "superior mental ability"and "remarkable devotion to the cause of humanity." Years after her death, she was remembered by fellow Fairhope residents as "kind of odd," but "in spite of all her oddness, she was a brilliant woman" who "just had her own way of doing everything... she didn't do anything because someone else did it."

## Europe

Stevens resigned her principalship of Public School No. 11 in 1863 and in February sailed to England. Howland was working for the firm of Philes & Company as a scout for old books, and was likely in Europe with her at this time. She summered with Ada Clare on Long Island in 1864 (Howland would visit on the weekends), but was back in Britain in 1865.

That August, with her divorce finalized, she and Howland were married in Sterling, Scotland. The couple had toured Britain and the Continent, and had settled down for short times in London, Amsterdam and Paris.

## America and Casa Tonti

After their travels in Europe, Stevens and Howland moved into a plesant home on the corner of 9th and 22nd. Stevens worked with the stenographic corps of the New York state constitutional convention in the winter of 1867-1868 while Howland wrote a campaign biography of General Grant and worked for Leslie's Illustrated Weekly Magazine. Though both were also writing magazine articles to supplement their income, as Marie said, "not enough were accepted to keep us" and after a "season of much anxiety", the couple decided to quit New York City for the countryside.

## Communities

### **Pfaff's Celar & the Bohemians**

Stevens later remembered to have only visited Pfaff's one time, when she asked Howland to take her. She claimed that

> "she was not one of the coterie of Bohemians, but she knew them all, sharpened her wits in conversation with them, and saw most of them frequently at the Sunday evening "informal, unconventional literary receptions" at Ada Clare's home on 42nd Street."
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### **The Familistère**

Still under construction when Stevens and Howland arrived, They would spend at least one year investigating and writing about the French Fourierist community The Familistère.

### **Casa Tonti**

Returning from France, Stevens and Howland lived briefly on the corner of 9th Avenue and 22nd Street. Howland worked for Leslie's Illustrated Weekly Magazine and Stevens spent the winter of 1867-68 working with the stenographic corps of the New York state constitutional convention. Unable to sustain a life in New York City, the couple moved moved to Hammonton, New Jersey. They first rented a 'barn' from friends, where they lived, entertained, and even took over the local high school and taught from either there or the home that the  couple soon bought. It was a home on 22 acres nearer to the village of Hammonton, which Stevens dubbed Casa Tonti. They would live there for the next 23 years, which Stevens claimed was "the most glorious days of their life."

Inside the Casa, Stevens covered the walls and doors with illuminated quotations, largely from fellow socialists and authors, such as Fourier's "Attractions are proportional to Destinies".

### **The Patrons of Husbandry (The Grange)**

The Patrons of Husbandry order, also called as the "Granger Movement" was "to a certain extent a secret society with lodges (granges), initiations and ritual." It's purpose was to advocate for the freedom of the agricultural producer against injustices such as monopolies, tariffs, politicians, legislation, and railroads. Casa Tonti was the location of the first Grange of South Jersey, and Howland was chosen as Master of the New Jersey State Grange.

### **Pacific City, Topolobampo**

Aka the Credit Foncier Colony. Stevens lived there from 1888-1893.

In May of 1888 Stevens and Howland left New Jersey bound for for Topolobampo, Mexico.

On Christmas day 1890, in the farm and orchard part of the colony, called "La Logia", Howland died of an unknown condition which had been plaguing him irregularly for some time.

### **Fairhope Single Tax Colony**

Stevens arrived at Fairhope on March 1, 1899. The community was only 4 years old and had fewer than 100 residents.  Soon after she wrote to a friend, "You will say this life is idyllic... I sometimes ask myself if I have not awakened to a better world." and "I am beginning to love Fairhope and to feel more at home than I have for many years."

## Writing

* Writing for popular press about the Familstere
* Translation of the Familistere book, Social Solutions
* 1874 - humorous feminist novel satirizing traditional morality & involving a soccial palace in a New England town. (The Familistere/Papa's Own Girl)
* Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly
* Integral Co-operation (1885, published over the name of Albert Kimsey Owen)
* Wrote weekly columns of exerpts from her books and served as associate editor for the Fairhope newspaper.
* https://books.google.com/books?id=VUDrNpaHsSIC&pg=PA123&lpg=PA123&dq=%22casa+tonti%22+marie+stevens+case+howland&source=bl&ots=wUP\_tTzPMk&sig=WXiHuFReTla48tzG8mysh2Ifm5o&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjPkoPBsOLYAhVQ0WMKHQwCBIMQ6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&q=%22casa%20tonti%22%20marie%20stevens%20case%20howland&f=false

## Death & Legacy

Stevens died on September 18, 1921 at The Pines, her Fair Hope Single Tax Colony home. She was 85 years old. Her funeral service was aptly given in the intellectual center of Fairhope, the library which she had built for the previous 20 years, both as donator and librarian. Her friend and the editor of the Fairhope newspaper sang "Only Remembered by What We Have Done" at the service, a favorite of progressive reformers, which goes

> "Only the truth that in life we have spoken, only the seed that on earth we have sown; these shall pass onward when we are forgotten, fruits of the harvest and what we have done."
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There was a Marie Howland Room in the Fairhope Public Library in Alabama until the library was moved to a new building in 1983.
Only a few years later, however, a determined Fairhope librarian butted heads with the (all male) city fathers on her decision to include a best-selling book on 'lovemaking techniques'. A reporter from the New Yorker covered the story and criticized the city since the library itself was started by

> "a nineteenth-century free thinker who had lived for a time in a cooperative rooming house of a New York free-love advocate, had written a novel considered too sexually outspoken for the Boston Public Library, and had begun the Fairhope collection with books she hauled back from a utopian community of credit foncier zealots in Topolobampo, Mexico."
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## Further Reading

* Gaston, Paul M. *Women of Fair Hope*. NewSouth Books, 2012. .
* Hayden, Dolores. *The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Houses, Neighborhoods and Cities*, 1981.

## External Links

* Marie Stevens Case Howland at FindAGrave

## References

1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.26 1.27 1.28 1.29 1.30 1.31 1.32 1.33 1.34 1.35 1.36 1.37 Gaston, Paul M. *Women of Fair Hope*. NewSouth Books, 2012.
2. ↑ Seymour, Camden (Spring 2009). "An Industrial Revolution". *National Parks Magazine*. American National Park Service. Retrieved 2009-06-14.
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Eisler, Benita, ed. The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1845). New York, 1977. as quoted in Gaston, Paul M. Women of Fair Hope. NewSouth Books, 2012.
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Hayden, Dolores. The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Houses, Neighborhoods and Cities, 1981.
5. ↑ *Granit State Free Press*, June 19, 1874. as quoted in Gaston, Paul M. Women of Fair Hope. NewSouth Books, 2012.
6. ↑ Howland, Marie "Biographical Sketch of Edward Howland," p. 3 as quoted in Gaston, Paul M. Women of Fair Hope. NewSouth Books, 2012.
7. ↑ Marie Howland to Edmund Clarence Stedman, April 21, 1907. as quoted in Gaston, Paul M. Women of Fair Hope. NewSouth Books, 2012.
8. ↑ Howland, Marie, "Biographical Sketch of Edward Howland," pp. 7-9, 43047, 72. as quoted in Gaston, Paul M. Women of Fair Hope. NewSouth Books, 2012.
9. ↑ *Marie Howland obituary*. Fairhope Courier, September 23, 1921. as quoted in Gaston, Paul M. Women of Fair Hope. NewSouth Books, 2012.
10. ↑ Howland, Marie, "Biographical sketch of Edward Howland," pp. 30-31) as quoted in Gaston, Paul M. Women of Fair Hope. NewSouth Books, 2012.
11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 11.7 “Report 1849-1913: Issued on the Sixtieth Anniversary for the Use of the Class and Its Friends. Commencement, 1913.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913.
12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Kessler, Carol Farley. *Daring to Dream Utopian Fiction by United States Women Before, 1950*. *Utopianism and Communitarianism*. Syracuse University Press, 1995.
13. ↑ Fairhope Courier, May 1, 1899. as quoted in Gaston, Paul M. Women of Fair Hope. NewSouth Books, 2012.
14. ↑ Trillin, Calvin. “*U.S. Journal: Fairhope, Ala*.” *New Yorker*. New York City, June 1979. as quoted in Gaston, Paul M. *Women of Fair Hope*. NewSouth Books, 2012.