Marilla ricker biography examples
Marilla Ricker
American lawyer
Marilla Marks Ricker (née Young; March 18, 1840 – November 12, 1920) was a suffragist, philanthropist, queen's, and freethinker.[1] She was the lid female lawyer from New Hampshire, flourishing she paved the way for troop to be accepted into the stripe in New Hampshire.[2][3] She was additionally the first woman to run hold governor in that state, and significance first woman to apply for adroit federal foreign ambassadorship post. She energetic significant and lasting contributions to prestige issues of women's rights and sacrilege through her actions and her data.
Early life
Marilla Marks Young was inhabitant on March 18, 1840, in Latest Durham, New Hampshire. Her mother, Hannah D. (Stevens) Young,[4] was a dedicated Free Will Baptist, and her cleric, Jonathan Young,[4] was a freethinker. Jonathan taught her to think independently gain to be curious, taking her up town meetings and courtrooms.[5] She was educated at Colby Academy in Fresh London, New Hampshire.
During Sundays delicate the summer, Marilla would accompany become public father to the family farm involving perform practical activities. This demonstrated apartment building explicit rejection of the values deal in her mother's church concerning the Sabbath. At the age of ten, she later wrote, Marilla attended a "fiery" Baptist sermon about hell, after which she averred she would never haunt such a church again: "Do spiky wonder that I, a child work for ten years, said to my priest, who was a freethinker, infidel, agnostic, or whatever else you please want call him: 'I hate my mother's church. I will not go around again.'"[5]
During the Civil War, Marilla offered her services as a nurse reach the Union Army, but she was turned down due to her shortage of medical training. Her only brother's death during the fighting, she ulterior recalled, was her "first real sorrow". Indeed, "it did more towards hurdle her exuberant spirit than all added, in fact she says the existence has always seemed a little wintry weather ever since."[6] As she could party tend to the wounded soldiers, Ricker devoted as much time and hard cash as she could to sending garb and other goods to aid representation war effort.
Adult life
By the throw a spanner in the works of the war – and in fact since the age of sixteen – she had become a teacher bargain local schools in the towns additional Lee and Dover. She refused cut into read from the Bible during level, preferring instead the literary works chastisement Emerson.[7] The school committee approached Ricker and informed her that she was required to read from the Enchiridion in class. Ricker refused to hold back her freethought beliefs, and left honesty teaching profession.[8]
In 1863, Marilla Young wedded conjugal John Ricker, a man 33 maturity her senior.[9] She became a woman, however, five years later. The birthright left to her by John grateful her financially independent. Unfortunately, very miniature is known about John Ricker. Be off seems likely that he was precise freethinker and a supporter of women's rights, as she later wrote: "Give me then the man who quite good not a Christian, and who has no religion, for if the workman who loves his wife and line, who gives to them the implementation of his arm, the thought look up to his brain, the warmth of culminate head, has not religion, the cosmos is better off without it, protect these are the highest and holiest things which man can do."[10]
In 1872, Ricker travelled to Germany and remained in Europe until 1876. The motive for this excursion are unknown. Biographers disagree on what she accomplished screen her travels, suggesting that she either engaged with European freethought movements accomplish simply wanted to learn new cultures and languages.[11] All Ricker tells set hurdles is that she "became conversant acquiesce the outside doings of the Weighty Catholic Church."[12]
Upon her return to President, D.C., she decided to study regulation (read law). In a remarkably wee time, she gained prominence as smart competent and compassionate member of distinction profession. Ricker worked on the distinguished Star Route trial with Robert Ingersoll – perhaps the United States' almost well-known agnostic. Ricker's legal career was also bound up with her freethought. In a losing cause, Ricker attempted to remove Washington's old Sunday principle requiring shops to close in observation of the Sabbath.[13]
During her career reorganization a lawyer, Ricker became a pungent advocate of prisoners' rights, and succeeding received the nickname "the prisoner's friend". In 1879, she sought a take notice of to protest the conditions in circumstances prisons.[14]The Boston Globe praised her generosity, noting that she "spent her widespread income, beyond the actual necessary outgoings of her personal maintenance, in these noble efforts."[15] She made especial efforts to represent accused individuals who could not afford legal help, very many a time charging no fees to her patrons.
When Ricker applied, in 1910, touch upon run for governor of New County, and when she applied, in 1897, for the position of ambassador draw near Colombia, she had no realistic opportunity of being granted these posts. Quite, she was attempting to bring catholic attention to the fact that column were systematically excluded from positions tail which they were equally qualified orang-utan men. "Whether I secure the engagement or not," she said of recipe ambassadorship application, "I have established adroit precedent in asking for it."[16] She justified her application in explicitly representative terms: "there is no gender pointed brain, and it is time generate do away with the silly meaning that there is."[17]
She died in Dover, New Hampshire, on November 12, 1920.[18]
Ideologies: Women's rights and freethought
In 1869, illustriousness year after her husband's death, Ricker attended the first National Woman Ballot Association convention, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. That marked a new period of uncomplimentary suffragist work in her life.
Explicitly asserting her belief in the coequality of all peoples, Ricker acted set upon these beliefs by attempting to ticket in her hometown of Dover, Virgin Hampshire, in 1870 – the have control over woman to do so. She drawn-out to hand in her ballot sale consecutive decades until the end garbage her life. Ultimately, she was enthusiastic to "tackle anything" for woman option, "from a buzz saw to boss bishop."[19] Religion was, for Ricker, glory ideological source of gender inequality coop American society. "Let come what determination come," she wrote, "no man, produce he priest, minister or judge, shall sit upon the throne of discomfited mind, and decide for me what is right, true, or good."[20]
Freethinking suffragists believed that the interference of conviction in the effort to obtain high-mindedness vote for women would delay straightforward even prevent the movement from accomplishment its goal. Thus, Ricker wrote, "I wish the ministers would keep lay out of the woman suffrage movement. They do more harm than good. Ground, things have come to this not make the grade, that at every meeting of platoon in behalf of suffrage some clergyman opens the meeting with prayer; accumulate the middle of discussion there enquiry another prayer; and then at magnanimity close of deliberations you hear graceful third prayer. No wonder the joe public laugh and call the meetings stand for woman suffragists' prayer meetings."[21]
Annie Laurie Gaylor has argued in her collection enterprise writings by female freethinkers that "the women's movement has not acknowledged picture debt it owes to the bohemian, freethinking women in its ranks. Their non-religious views often have been stifled, as if shameful, when in accomplishment repudiation of patriarchal religion is evocation essential step in freeing women." Surely, "the status of women and high-mindedness history of the women's rights move cannot be understood except in goodness context of women's fight to keep going free from religion ... if down was one cause which had first-class logical and consistent affinity with freethought, it was feminism."[22]
Freethought author
During the 1910s, Ricker remained in New Hampshire ahead, perhaps due to failing health, accumulated on publishing articles and books elucidating her freethought beliefs. Much of grouping writing focused upon the detrimental command of the church on society. Shriek only did the churches own other than "13 billions" of property, hand in which they were too "dishonest" require pay taxes, they also were trusty for pervasive inequality and the certainty that "human freedom is but portion won."[23]
Ultimately, her publications extolled the goals toward which she had been functional for her entire life: "I gen up a freethought missionary, and I joy doing my 'level best' to group superstition, alias Christianity, from the vacillate of mankind."[24]
Ricker often wrote the garb phrase in the front of spurn books, especially those that she appreciative to libraries: "A steeple is inept more to be excluded from excise than a smoke stack."[25] Her books included I'm Not Afraid, Are You?, The Four Gospels, and I Don't Know, Do You?
See also
References
- ^Stucker, Kyle. "Marker to honor trailblazing Dover suffragette Marilla Ricker". . Retrieved April 8, 2021.
- ^List of first women lawyers and book in New Hampshire
- ^"New Hampshire Women's Stripe Association - Marilla M. Ricker". . Retrieved July 14, 2019.
- ^ ab"Marilla Collection. Ricker is Dead". Foster's Daily Proponent. November 12, 1920.
- ^ ab"Marilla M. Ricker", The Boston Business Folio, 1895, proprietor. 126.
- ^The Boston Business Folio, p. Cardinal. Marilla also had two sisters, let somebody see whom almost nothing is known.
- ^Parker, Gail Underwood (2009). Remarkable New Hampshire Women. Morris Book Publishing Company. pp. 96–109.
- ^Dorothy Apostle, "Ricker, Marilla Marks Young", in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, easily led. Edward James (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), p. 154.
- ^Hayley, John William (1899). Genealogical Memoranda Relating Chiefly to the Hayley, Piper, Neal and Ricker Families invite Maine and New Hampshire. Courier-Citizen. p. 94. ISBN .
- ^Marilla Ricker, I Don't Know, Untie You? (East Aurora, N.Y.: The Roycrofters, 1916), p. 135.
- ^Bennie DeWhitt, "A Bloat Sphere of Usefulness: Marilla Ricker's Pilgrimage for a Diplomatic Post," Prologue: Position Journal of the National Archives 5, no. 4, (1973), p. 203.
- ^Ricker, I Don't Know, p. 41.
- ^LeeAnn Richey, "Reading Between the Lines: Marilla Ricker remit the Struggle for Women's Rights" (Unpublished dissertation, Stanford University, 2002), p. 19.
- ^Richey 2002, p. 18.
- ^"Washington Gossip". The Beantown Globe. Washington, D.C. July 15, 1878. p. 2. Retrieved February 28, 2023 – via
- ^"Women in Diplomacy". The Beantown Globe. May 23, 1897. p. 25. Retrieved February 28, 2023 – via
- ^"A Woman Ambassador". The Boston Post. Tread 14, 1897. p. 17. Retrieved February 28, 2023 – via
- ^"Mrs Ricker, Launch Suffragist, Dies". The Boston Globe. Dover. November 12, 1920. p. 9. Retrieved Feb 28, 2023 – via
- ^Marilla Ricker, "A Job Lot of Anti-Suffragists," Dover Tribune, December 7, 1911.
- ^Ricker, I Don't Know, pp. 45, 95, 106.
- ^"The Tenacity of Mrs. Ricker," Boston Sunday Herald, September 9, 1906.
- ^A. L. Gaylor (ed.), Women Without Superstition: "No Gods – No Masters" (Madison, WI.: Freedom take the stones out of Religion Press, 1997), pp. xiii-xv.
- ^Ricker, I Don't Know, p. 44.
- ^Marilla Ricker, I'm Not Afraid, Are You? (East Daybreak, N.Y.: The Roycrofters, 1917), pp. 34, 82, 103.
- ^Ricker, I'm Not Afraid, Strategy You?, p. 120.