Connections

Recently while walking to a Persian restaurant after a morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Linda & friends from Oklahoma, I serendipitously spotted this women’s history landmark: a New York City public school the “Lillie Devereaux Blake School.” A close friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Blake challenged the status quo as an author and organizer. Famed for her eloquent & fearless oratory, she once countered a minister’s claim that Eve was inferior to Adam because God created Adam first.  The minister’s logic, Blake retorted, meant that Adam was inferior to fish since God created animals before he created Adam. Blake’s daughter Katherine and ECS’s daughter Harriot were close friends. The principle of the school her mother founded, Katherine was a charter member of the organization Harriot founded in 1907–the Equality League for Self-Supporting Women.