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168 & 2. ECS drew attention to conflicts over women’s presence in public, urban spaces and the use of laws against prostitution to limit their mobility. In New York City, women traveling alone on streets in the night were subject to arrest for solicitation and disorderly conduct. As a string of well-publicized trials in police court illustrated, evidence against the women could be weak or nonexistent. When reporters shone a spotlight on Magistrate John O. Mott between December 1895 and January 1897, they discovered at least three women with plausible reasons for being on the street who were not only detained but also sentenced to the workhouse by Mott. In each case, higher courts overturned the sentence, but the practice of police on the beat remained untouched. “The theory that a woman who is found in a public thoroughfare at night,” the New York Tribune, 10 December 1895, editorialized, “is presumably there for an improper purpose is a theory on which no policeman or Magistrate has the slightest warrant for acting.” For a review of Mott’s most egregious decisions, see New York Tribune, 10 January 1897. For a discussion of “contested terrain” in London, see Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992), 41–80. 3. These resolutions were unanimously adopted at the meeting. (Woman’s Tribune, 9 October 1897, Film, 37:242–44.) ••••••••• 68 • Isabel Howland1 to SBA Sherwood, [N.Y.] Sep. 28, 1897. Dear Aunt Susan: Would it be possible for a colored woman to be given a regular place upon the National program? The wife of the manager of the Tuskegee Institute is a most enthusiastic suffragist and a very bright and capable woman. She wrote to you once, Adella H. Logan. 2 She is the daughter of a Confederate officer and her father 3 used to talk politics to her when she was a little girl. As a result she is unusually up on all public questions. Of course she must call herself colored but she is perfectly white with straight hair. It is her extraordinary interest in woman suffrage that has made me interested in her and I wish she might be at Washington. I asked her if she would ndop it in the possibility of her being illegible invited to do so and she said she would be “only too happy.” I wont bother you with her letter. I suppose we should have to collect her expenses somehow. Money is not made at Tuskegee. 21 september 1897 ^ 169 Hattie 4 will be with you in a few days and will tell you our plans for Geneva. I hope you and Mrs. Harper will both agree to them. We want to have a fine convention. Love to Aunt Mary and yourself, always, U Isabel Howland. Mrs. Logan is a much more able woman than Mrs. Booker Washington, 5 though less widely known, naturally. Y ALS, on New York State Woman Suffrage Association letterhead, AnthonyAvery Papers, NRU. 1. Isabel Howland (1859–1942), a niece of Emily Howland and 1881 graduate of Cornell University, lived in the hamlet of Sherwood in Cayuga County, New York. She came to prominence among suffragists during New York’s amendment campaign of 1894 and served as corresponding secretary of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association. (New York Times, 6 December 1942. See also Papers 5.) 2. Adella Hunt Logan (1863–1915), born in Georgia, the daughter of a white planter, trained as a teacher and joined the faculty at Tuskegee Institute in 1883. There she met Warren Logan (1859–1942) who went to work at Tuskegee in 1882 and soon became its treasurer. The two were married in 1888. Although Adella Logan stopped teaching after her marriage, she was a founder and leader of the Tuskegee Woman’s Club in 1895 and a person recognized as a thinker and speaker about African-American life. Her earlier letter to SBA, mentioned here, is not found. (Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in America, 2d ed. [New York, 2005]; Booker T. Washington, Papers, 2:47n; Adele Logan Alexander, Ambiguous Lives: Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789–1879 [Fayetteville, Ark., 1991], 3–13.) 3. Henry Alexander Hunt (1826–1889), a slaveholder in Hancock County, Georgia, and Adella Logan’s father, joined the Confederate army as a noncommissioned officer in 1863. (Alexander, Ambiguous Lives, 103, 106, 130–31.) 4. That is, Harriet Mills. 5. Margaret James Murray Washington (c. 1865–1925) was...

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