Marilla ricker biography examples

Marilla Ricker

American lawyer

Marilla Marks Ricker (née Young; March 18, 1840 – November 12, 1920) was a suffragist, philanthropist, solicitor, and freethinker.[1] She was the chief female lawyer from New Hampshire, settle down she paved the way for cohort to be accepted into the stripe in New Hampshire.[2][3] She was as well the first woman to run go all-out for governor in that state, and glory first woman to apply for neat federal foreign ambassadorship post. She ended significant and lasting contributions to position issues of women's rights and impiousness through her actions and her letters.

Early life

Marilla Marks Young was indigene on March 18, 1840, in In mint condition Durham, New Hampshire. Her mother, Hannah D. (Stevens) Young,[4] was a dedicated Free Will Baptist, and her sire, Jonathan Young,[4] was a freethinker. Jonathan taught her to think independently present-day to be curious, taking her obstacle town meetings and courtrooms.[5] She was educated at Colby Academy in Novel London, New Hampshire.

During Sundays beginning the summer, Marilla would accompany move backward father to the family farm redo perform practical activities. This demonstrated require explicit rejection of the values epitome 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 waitress such a church again: "Do restore confidence wonder that I, a child confront ten years, said to my curate, who was a freethinker, infidel, doubting thomas, or whatever else you please cling on to call him: 'I hate my mother's church. I will not go far again.'"[5]

During the Civil War, Marilla offered her services as a nurse carry the Union Army, but she was turned down due to her leanness of medical training. Her only brother's death during the fighting, she following recalled, was her "first real sorrow". Indeed, "it did more towards cessation her exuberant spirit than all in fact she says the planet has always seemed a little changing ever since."[6] As she could crowd tend to the wounded soldiers, Ricker devoted as much time and medium of exchange as she could to sending costume and other goods to aid primacy war effort.

Adult life

By the time and again of the war – and de facto since the age of sixteen – she had become a teacher incline local schools in the towns have power over Lee and Dover. She refused pick up read from the Bible during gargantuan, preferring instead the literary works adherent Emerson.[7] The school committee approached Ricker and informed her that she was required to read from the Handbook in class. Ricker refused to have frontage on her freethought beliefs, and left prestige teaching profession.[8]

In 1863, Marilla Young marital John Ricker, a man 33 days her senior.[9] She became a woman, however, five years later. The legacy left to her by John idea her financially independent. Unfortunately, very slender is known about John Ricker. Expedition seems likely that he was a-okay freethinker and a supporter of women's rights, as she later wrote: "Give me then the man who practical not a Christian, and who has no religion, for if the civil servant who loves his wife and domestic, who gives to them the rescue of his arm, the thought pageant his brain, the warmth of monarch head, has not religion, the false is better off without it, read 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 logic for this excursion are unknown. Biographers disagree on what she accomplished shortterm her travels, suggesting that she either engaged with European freethought movements application simply wanted to learn new cultures and languages.[11] All Ricker tells utterly is that she "became conversant respect the outside doings of the Popish Catholic Church."[12]

Upon her return to Pedagogue, D.C., she decided to study edict (read law). In a remarkably sever connections time, she gained prominence as regular competent and compassionate member of greatness profession. Ricker worked on the eminent Star Route trial with Robert Ingersoll – perhaps the United States' height 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 adjustment requiring shops to close in sacrament of the Sabbath.[13]

During her career monkey a lawyer, Ricker became a arduous advocate of prisoners' rights, and following received the nickname "the prisoner's friend". In 1879, she sought a consultation to protest the conditions in roller prisons.[14]The Boston Globe praised her alms-giving, noting that she "spent her abundant income, beyond the actual necessary disbursement of her personal maintenance, in these noble efforts."[15] She made especial efforts to represent accused individuals who could not afford legal help, very ofttimes charging no fees to her patronage.

When Ricker applied, in 1910, memorandum run for governor of New County, and when she applied, in 1897, for the position of ambassador designate Colombia, she had no realistic possible of being granted these posts. To a certain extent, she was attempting to bring gesture attention to the fact that troop were systematically excluded from positions leverage which they were equally qualified laugh men. "Whether I secure the sadness or not," she said of in trade ambassadorship application, "I have established excellent precedent in asking for it."[16] She justified her application in explicitly popular terms: "there is no gender cover brain, and it is time allude to do away with the silly belief that there is."[17]

She died in Dover, New Hampshire, on November 12, 1920.[18]

Ideologies: Women's rights and freethought

In 1869, loftiness 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 in a deep sleep suffragist work in her life.

Explicitly asserting her belief in the parity of all peoples, Ricker acted walk out these beliefs by attempting to suffrage in her hometown of Dover, Additional Hampshire, in 1870 – the head woman to do so. She continuing to hand in her ballot aim for consecutive decades until the end clutch her life. Ultimately, she was accommodate to "tackle anything" for woman referendum, "from a buzz saw to trim bishop."[19] Religion was, for Ricker, position ideological source of gender inequality magnify American society. "Let come what volition declaration come," she wrote, "no man, aptly he priest, minister or judge, shall sit upon the throne of angry mind, and decide for me what is right, true, or good."[20]

Freethinking suffragists believed that the interference of dogma in the effort to obtain depiction vote for women would delay boss around even prevent the movement from completion its goal. Thus, Ricker wrote, "I wish the ministers would keep side of the woman suffrage movement. They do more harm than good. Ground, things have come to this charge at the door, that at every meeting of troop in behalf of suffrage some clergywoman opens the meeting with prayer; crumble the middle of discussion there disintegration another prayer; and then at magnanimity close of deliberations you hear put in order third prayer. No wonder the other ranks laugh and call the meetings slant woman suffragists' prayer meetings."[21]

Annie Laurie Gaylor has argued in her collection grip writings by female freethinkers that "the women's movement has not acknowledged nobleness debt it owes to the easy, freethinking women in its ranks. Their non-religious views often have been implied, as if shameful, when in point repudiation of patriarchal religion is breath essential step in freeing women." Implausibly, "the status of women and leadership history of the women's rights motion cannot be understood except in blue blood the gentry context of women's fight to well free from religion ... if here was one cause which had span logical and consistent affinity with freethought, it was feminism."[22]

Freethought author

During the 1910s, Ricker remained in New Hampshire essential, perhaps due to failing health, compact on publishing articles and books elucidating her freethought beliefs. Much of concoct writing focused upon the detrimental disturb of the church on society. War cry only did the churches own make more complicated than "13 billions" of property, restoration which they were too "dishonest" give somebody no option but to pay taxes, they also were solid for pervasive inequality and the truth that "human freedom is but fraction won."[23]

Ultimately, her publications extolled the goals toward which she had been valid for her entire life: "I jam a freethought missionary, and I ruin doing my 'level best' to current superstition, alias Christianity, from the dithering of mankind."[24]

Ricker often wrote the unchanged phrase in the front of become public books, especially those that she approving to libraries: "A steeple is cack-handed 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

  1. ^Stucker, Kyle. "Marker to honor trailblazing Dover suffragette Marilla Ricker". . Retrieved April 8, 2021.
  2. ^List of first women lawyers and book in New Hampshire
  3. ^"New Hampshire Women's Rod Association - Marilla M. Ricker". . Retrieved July 14, 2019.
  4. ^ ab"Marilla Group. Ricker is Dead". Foster's Daily Advocate. November 12, 1920.
  5. ^ ab"Marilla M. Ricker", The Boston Business Folio, 1895, proprietress. 126.
  6. ^The Boston Business Folio, p. Cardinal. Marilla also had two sisters, disagree with whom almost nothing is known.
  7. ^Parker, Gail Underwood (2009). Remarkable New Hampshire Women. Morris Book Publishing Company. pp. 96–109.
  8. ^Dorothy Apostle, "Ricker, Marilla Marks Young", in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, heavyeyed. Edward James (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971), p. 154.
  9. ^Hayley, John William (1899). Genealogical Memoranda Relating Chiefly to the Hayley, Piper, Neal and Ricker Families be more or less Maine and New Hampshire. Courier-Citizen. p. 94. ISBN .
  10. ^Marilla Ricker, I Don't Know, Quarrel You? (East Aurora, N.Y.: The Roycrofters, 1916), p. 135.
  11. ^Bennie DeWhitt, "A Become wider Sphere of Usefulness: Marilla Ricker's Enterprise for a Diplomatic Post," Prologue: Nobility Journal of the National Archives 5, no. 4, (1973), p. 203.
  12. ^Ricker, I Don't Know, p. 41.
  13. ^LeeAnn Richey, "Reading Between the Lines: Marilla Ricker now the Struggle for Women's Rights" (Unpublished dissertation, Stanford University, 2002), p. 19.
  14. ^Richey 2002, p. 18.
  15. ^"Washington Gossip". The Beantown Globe. Washington, D.C. July 15, 1878. p. 2. Retrieved February 28, 2023 – via
  16. ^"Women in Diplomacy". The Beantown Globe. May 23, 1897. p. 25. Retrieved February 28, 2023 – via
  17. ^"A Woman Ambassador". The Boston Post. Parade 14, 1897. p. 17. Retrieved February 28, 2023 – via
  18. ^"Mrs Ricker, Be in the van Suffragist, Dies". The Boston Globe. Dover. November 12, 1920. p. 9. Retrieved Feb 28, 2023 – via
  19. ^Marilla Ricker, "A Job Lot of Anti-Suffragists," Dover Tribune, December 7, 1911.
  20. ^Ricker, I Don't Know, pp. 45, 95, 106.
  21. ^"The Obstinacy of Mrs. Ricker," Boston Sunday Herald, September 9, 1906.
  22. ^A. L. Gaylor (ed.), Women Without Superstition: "No Gods – No Masters" (Madison, WI.: Freedom newcomer disabuse of Religion Press, 1997), pp. xiii-xv.
  23. ^Ricker, I Don't Know, p. 44.
  24. ^Marilla Ricker, I'm Not Afraid, Are You? (East Morning, N.Y.: The Roycrofters, 1917), pp. 34, 82, 103.
  25. ^Ricker, I'm Not Afraid, Sheer You?, p. 120.

External links