By Judy Carmack Bross
“Seeing how they moved the needle, how they found a wrong and fixed it, and what they were passionate about, fascinated me. The Suffragists were out there calling for change, but sometimes the quieter, gentler voices can be effective, too,” Andrea Friederici Ross, author of Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McCormick, on her new book Sisters of Influence: A Biography of Zina, Amy and Rose Fay.
Rose Fay Thomas with her dog Dickie. Photo by George Glessner, courtesy of Glessner House
Rose Fay Thomas founded the Anti-Cruelty Society in Chicago in 1899 to combat the abuse of workhorses. Her sisters Zina and Amy were equally adamant in their beliefs that women could defy Victorian-era expectations to effect societal change and all three began national cooperative organizations. Andrea Friederici Ross’s captivating family biography Sisters of Influence, to be released October 14, is today’s Little Women, partially set in Chicago.
Amy Fay
The fascinating family saga relates as well the beginnings of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra started by Rose Fay’s husband (the musical legend Theodore Thomas), the construction of Orchestra Hall, the Cooperative Housekeeping Movement started by Zina Fay–a woman’s rights reformer–and the creation of the National Federation of Music Clubs. Sister Amy was an acclaimed pianist who studied in Germany and became a friend of composer Franz Liszt.
Zina Fay
All three sisters were authors, publishing books and writing magazine articles. In 1869, Zina called for a House of Ladies to run parallel to the two men’s Houses of Congress. She also took on the issue of higher education for women. Their circle of friends included great minds of the day including Longfellow, Emerson, Agassiz, and Chicago’s leading families, particularly Rose’s close friend Frances Glessner.
From their home on Bellevue Place near the Fortnightly Club on the blossoming Gold Coast created by Potter Palmer, Rose and Theodore Thomas held powerful influence not only in Chicago but in the national classical music scene.
Anti-Cruelty continues to honor its founder for her three-part mission to suppress cruelty to animals, educate the public on humane treatment of animals, and provide a refuge for strays. Founded in 1899 at the home of Genevieve Baldwin Winterbotham, the organization’s mailing address was Rose’s Bellevue home in its first years. She, and other volunteers, stood on busy street corners to reprimand carriage drivers who beat their animals, recommending compassionate ways to treat the horses. One of their first efforts was to build water troughs for horses across the city. The first animal shelter opened in 1904 on Clark Street with another center opening at its current location on LaSalle Street a few years later.
Author Andrea Friederici Ross
We asked Ross how she best described Rose Fay Thomas?
“Compassionate, gracious—those are the words that come immediately to mind,” she said. “Her book about gardening at her summer home, Felsengarten in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, near the Glessner’s estate, elucidates her beliefs. She wrote about the importance of trial and error and the power of compassion in causing things to flourish. She was talking about flowers and people.”
She planted seedlings from Longfellow’s garden and willows begun by Frederick Law Olmsted. As a little girl, Rose attended a school in Longfellow’s home and her bright charm inspired a Longfellow poem.
In 1890, at age 37, Rose married Theodore Thomas at the Church of the Ascension on LaSalle Street, following the death of his first wife. Rose helped raise his youngest daughter and the couple enjoyed a very happy marriage. Thomas recounted a story in which he, sitting aboard a train at a station, saw a man beating a horse. Thomas rolled down the window as the train was departing and said, “If my wife was here, you’d stop that pretty quick!” In other letters he wonders fondly if he will come home to find she’d taken in more animals to nurse.
Like her sisters, Rose had a lifelong love of music. Her volunteer work with the local Amateur Musical Club led to the founding of the National Federation of Music Clubs.
Rose Fay Thomas
“I started to write about Rose first. I’ve done some work in animal rescue and I admired her accomplishments. As I read more in the family correspondence kept at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, I saw that as one of the youngest children of seven, she was greatly shaped by her older sisters. Rose was four when her mother died and you see not only the sisters’ closeness but also how they influenced her beliefs. Three of the six sisters chose more traditional paths of motherhood, but Rose, Amy, and Zina bridged the restrictive norms of the Victorian era and the activism of the Progressive era with their own powerful initiatives.”
Ross explained, “They navigated tumultuous times and difficult issues: slavery, suffrage, temperance, and education for women. Throughout their lives they made valuable contributions to society. Every effort was integral to the overall expansion of their spheres and helped move women and society forward.”
Children of an Episcopal minister who relocated frequently, from churches in Vermont to Georgia and Louisiana, members of the family often lived together due to financial instability in Cambridge, New York, and Chicago. Relatively poor despite being of old New England stock—an ancestor was Paul Revere’s neighbor—they “had a bracing diet of religion, hard work and music in their childhood” the author writes.
“They learned to be influences on their own without depending on husbands, being their own champions,” Ross added.
