"But I Do Clamor": May Wright Sewall, Teacher and Activist

While preparing for classes one day on the third floor at Indianapolis High School (later to become Shortridge), a teacher who had come to the city with her husband in the 1870s was interrupted by a distinguished visitor: Zeralda Wallace, widow of Governor David Wallace and president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s Indiana chapter. Wallace had come to the school to ask the teacher, May Wright Sewall, to sign a petition in favor of temperance Wallace planned on presenting to the state legislature.

As Sewall prepared to add her name to the document, her eye caught some words indicating that those who signed did not intend to “clamor” for any additional civil or political rights. “But I do clamor,” Sewall exclaimed to Wallace. Throwing the paper on the floor, Sewall stalked out of the room, “vexed in soul that I had been dragged down three flights of stairs to see one more proof of the degree to which honorable women love to humiliate themselves before men for sweet favor’s sake.”

Sewall’s anger at Wallace faded over time, and the two joined forces to found the Indianapolis Equal Suffrage Society. The Society came about in large part due to the “open contempt” showed to Wallace by Hoosier legislators when she attempted to present her temperance petition to the Indiana General Assembly. One lawmaker even went so far as to tell Wallace that since women held no political power, her document “might as well have been signed by 10,000 mice.”

To ensure that women’s voices would indeed be heard by those in power, Sewall worked tirelessly on behalf of rights for women in the United States—and around the world—during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She served as an invaluable ally to such national suffrage leaders as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and gave the woman’s movement an international focus through her pioneering involvement with the International Council of Women and the American National Council of Women. By the turn of the twentieth century, Harper’s Bazaar magazine claimed that Sewall had “an ‘eternal feminine’ following of 5,000,000 in eleven countries.”

           

Sewall’s work on behalf of suffrage for women was just one of the many reform and cultural endeavors she became involved in during her life. Described by one Indianapolis acquaintance as “a large woman of sturdy carriage,” Sewall played a significant role in the cultural and social life of the capital city. At first with her second husband, the Harvard-educated Theodore Lovett Sewall and later alone, she operated the influential Classical School for Girls, located on the southeast corner of Pennsylvania and Saint Joseph Streets.The Sewalls’ residence served as a cultural showcase for the city, hosting a variety of nationally known literary and political figures. Every Wednesday in the home’s drawing room approximately one hundred to two hundred people of all types gathered to discuss the issues of the day. “This salon is distinctively the social and literary centre of all Indiana, and, for that matter, many a distinguished traveler from around the world had enjoyed this rare hospitality,” noted Harper’s Bazaar. Another journalist who visited the house’s library marveled over the fact that more “schemes for social progress have been conceived in this room . . . than in any other room on this continent.”

A bold statement, but not surprising considering Sewall enriched the city’s intellectual life through her efforts to form such organizations as the Indianapolis Woman’s Club, the Art Association of Indianapolis (the forerunner of the Indianapolis Museum of Art), the Indianapolis Propylaeum, the Contemporary Club, the Ramabai Circle (a group working to aid women in India), the Alliance Francaise, and the Indiana branch of the Western Association of Collegiate Alumnae.

In addition to all this, and her work at the school, she also found time to edit the woman’s page in the Sunday edition of the Indianapolis Times from 1882 to 1885. No less an authority on life in Indianapolis than Booth Tarkington boldly claimed that in company with Benjamin Harrison and James Whitcomb Riley, Sewall “would necessarily have been chosen (in the event of a contest in such a matter) as one of the ‘three most prominent citizens’ of the place.”

These efforts by Sewall to improve life for people were not merely parochial in nature, but international as well. In addition to lecturing widely across the United States on behalf of woman’s rights, she also strove to win people’s support for another cause: world peace, an effort she called her “absorbing ideal.”

Although sometimes women had to fight to protect their homes and families, Sewall said that “no woman within civilization has ever been found who did not see in war . . . a menace to the whole spirit of the home, a menace to the children born and reared within the home; hence no woman within civilization who does not see war to be her constitutional and inevitably relentless foe.” The only battle to which a woman could give her heart, she continued, “is that war whose object it is to slay war and establish peace.” Following the motto “My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind,” Sewall promoted the cause of peace through membership in the American Peace Society and through her work with both the National Council of Women and the International Council of Women, both of which adopted peace programs after intense lobbying by Sewall.

When war broke out in Europe in 1914 and many peace advocates believed their efforts had been for naught, Sewall persevered. To her, the conflict “seemed a proclamation to the women of the world that some action by them which would assert the solidarity of womanhood was imperative.” In 1915 Sewall organized and chaired an International Council of Women Workers to Promote Permanent Peace at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. To instill pacifism in young people, she called on textbook publishers to eliminate jingoistic language and to replace it with calls for brotherhood. She also implored mothers to remove toys that might “bring into a child’s mind the thought of military pomp and show, of warfare, with its contentions and its glories.”

Sewall died on July 22, 1920, just a short time before the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, was ratified—something she always had faith would happen. Unbound by tradition, Sewall endeavored to do all she could for causes still being fought for today—education, woman’s rights, cultural enrichment, and world peace. The lasting legacies of her many works can still be seen in Indianapolis. 2018 marks the 143rd anniversary of the Indianapolis Woman’s Club, the Propylaeum remains as a place for women to gather and discuss the day’s issues, and the Art Association of Indianapolis has grown into the internationally-respected Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Fellow women’s rights advocate Grace Julian Clarke offered the finest eulogy for Sewall and what she represented to women in Indiana, the United States, and the world when she said: “I never left Mrs. Sewall’s presence without resolving to be more outspoken in good causes, more constant in their service, without a fresh resolve to let trivial concerns go and emphasize only really vital interests.”