North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times

Sarah Cowan “Daisy” Denson: The Lost Matriarch of State Public Welfare Reform

263 Sarah Cowan “Daisy” Denson The Lost Matriarch of State Public Welfare Reform Sarah Wilkerson-Freeman    On a freezing morning in January 1903, the state legislature debated a juvenile reform school bill while only blocks away Claude Baker Denson, executive secretary of the North Carolina Board of Public Charities, lay critically ill in his Raleigh home. During his thirteen years in government office, Denson had discovered child offenders as young as seven years old incarcerated alongside adult criminals in jails, prisons, and county road camps. He had spearheaded efforts to create humane alternatives for child criminals and, as he lay near death, read that “the joint committee of the House and Senate reported [the bill] favorably.” With victory seeming close, Claude Denson made an unusual deathbed request—that his daughter, Daisy, succeed him in government office. From that day to 1963, when Ellen Black Winston, North Carolina’s commissioner of public welfare, was appointed U.S. commissioner of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the executive position of the state’s charity and public welfare board would be held almost exclusively by women. Daisy Denson’s 1903 appointment was an unexpected event that became the starting point for the systematic inclusion of women in North Carolina’s state government—a first step in the incremental process of “feminizing” statesponsored public service. The story of how Daisy Denson overcame barriers to wield power in government office also reveals how voteless white women used precarious toeholds in government to advance their collective influence on public policy. Denson’s career as a reform activist bureaucrat further illustrates how the gender of a state official could play a critical role in redefining public social services and expanding government responsibility and regulatory authority. But for Daisy Denson, in that moment and time, her interest was not Sarah Cowan “Daisy” Denson Courtesy of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh, N.C. Sarah Cowan “Daisy” Denson 265 in magnifying women’s political power per se, but in protecting white and black children from the abuses of southern state police power and its pathological manifestations. Sarah Cowan “Daisy” Denson was born in 1863 in Pittsboro, North Carolina . She later recalled that “my baby eyes opened upon the brave stoicism of that generation immediately after the war and later in life I understood it.” Her mother, Margaret Matilda Cowan, came from a family of prosperous rice planters and slaveholders from the Cape Fear region who took refuge in Pittsboro during the Civil War. Their extensive fortune in slaves and real estate was lost with the defeat of the Confederacy. Claude Denson, a Virginia native, graduated from the University of North Carolina before the war with special interests in horticulture and education. After service as a Confederate officer, he operated a botanical nursery and boys’ school in Pittsboro to support his seven children (four boys and three girls, with Daisy being the eldest) by 1880. The Densons belonged to the Episcopal Church, and Daisy was a lifelong Episcopalian. Daisy recalled that although her family did not have much money, her girlhood “was filled with books and music, art and flowers, religious faith.” In the late 1870s, she attended Norfolk, Virginia’s Leache-Wood School for Young Ladies , a nondenominational seminary run by two extraordinary women, Irene Kirke Leache and Anna Cogswell Wood. Leache-Wood differed from the usual girls’ finishing school in atmosphere and curriculum as it offered both classical courses (Latin, history, composition, and the arts) and nontraditional ones (calculus, chemistry, scientific and architectural design, accounting, and office management). One Norfolk man observed that Leache-Wood students acquired “something indescribable, but different from other women.” Daisy Denson emerged from Leache-Wood, and her formative exposure to the interesting and fearlessly independent couple, with a strong appreciation of women’s potential, especially her own. She returned to Pittsboro to teach in her father’s private school but found it limiting. As she later recalled, “Teaching was about the only so-called ‘respectable ’ opening at that time for those girls who had been bred and nurtured as I had been.” In 1883, at age twenty, Daisy joined her father in establishing the North Carolina Teachers’ Assembly (ncta), an organization of female teachers and leading male educators. The ncta successfully used this dual-gendered partnership to pressure the legislature into establishing a state college for white women in 1891. Denson was working with the men and...