Georgiana Bruce Kirby

Georgiana Bruce Kirby(December 7, 1818 - January 27, 1887) was an American public school teacher and governess.

Life and career

Kirby was born on December 7, 1818, in Bristol, England. Her father died three months before her birth while working as a merchant seaman out at sea. Her mother remarried to a man who expended all of the family's savings. Therefore, Bruce only spent two years in formal schooling before leaving her small town to hold various positions in other family's homes. She became a governess at the age of fourteen to an English family who took her to Paris and then Melbourne, Quebec, where she is known for being a school teacher. She taught her students farming fundamentals, but after a few years, she returned to London in 1837. She got a job working for the American Unitarian minister Ezra Stiles Gannett, who eventually brought her to Boston at the age of twenty.

After a few years of living in Boston, Bruce joined the Transcendentalist community of Brook Farm at West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Bruce’s brother followed her footsteps and also joined the association in June 1841. The community’s liberal religious beliefs forced all members to live in community, cooperative living. Bruce studied at the school, ran the nursery, and participated in academic discussions about various Brook Farm’s literary members or visitors including Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and Margaret Fuller. These authors and the spirit of transcendentalism had a major influence on Bruce’s writing she produced while at Brook Farm. At Brook Farm, she joined the “Fancy Group,” which allowed women to use domestic skills to paint lampshades and screens which were sold to raise money to help fund Brook Farm.

By February 1844, Bruce had supported Brook Farm’s conversion to the French utopian social doctrines of Charles Fourier; although she began to feel that the community had lost its spontaneity; therefore, she moved to New York City. While in New York City, Bruce networked with her friend Margaret Fuller, and landed a job as an assistant to Eliza Farnham, newly-appointed matron of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. After working at Sing Sing for a year, Bruce left New York to teach at schools in Illinois and Missouri, but soon returned east to serve as a public school teacher and governess in Pennsylvania and New York.

With funds borrowed from Horace Greeley, Bruce traveled west in 1850 to join Farnham in Santa Cruz, California in 1850 where Farnham's late husband Thomas J. Farnham had been given a piece of land by Isaac Graham, in gratitude for Farnham's legal help in 1840. Eliza Farnham had been ridiculed in Boston for her plan to bring a large group of single women to California, and eventually decided to travel alone to the West. Georgiana helped Eliza work the farm for two years, producing poultry, potatoes, and fruit. While in California, Bruce continued her involvement in the women’s rights movement, the Temperance movement, and the anti-slavery crusade.

In 1852, Bruce married Richard Kirby, a local tanner, and had five children. She raised her five children and also continued to write fiction and short stories. She stayed in touch with friends and activists from Brook Farms, and she stayed up to date on women’s rights movements through reform papers such as Greeley’s New York Tribune and National Anti-Slavery Standard. She kept a journal from 1852 to 1860.[1] The abolitionist movement and the Civil War fueled Bruce’s belief that women were enslaved, and after the Civil War, she joined the women’s rights movement to secure women’s rights in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. By 1869, she raised enough money to fund California’s first local woman suffrage society. In 1870, she served as vice-president of the San Francisco Women’s Rights Convention. Bruce reported on local lectures by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Bruce also criticized California’s judge decision that prevented women from voting and debated woman suffrage critics. In 1874, at the age of 56, she organized the Santa Cruz Temperance Union, which became affiliated with the WCTU, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, that successfully encouraged the prohibition movement later in the 1920s.

Death

Georgiana Bruce Kirby died at the age of 68 on January 27, 1887. In 1887, her memoir was published, Years of Experience: An Autobiographical Narrative,[2] in addition to her diary; however, the memoir ends in 1850 when Bruce left New York for California. Georgiana Bruce Kirby Preparatory School, in Santa Cruz, California, was named after her, and supports her ideals.

Notes

1. Kirby 1987, p.59-108
2. Available online through Hathitrust

References

1. Guarneri, Carl. "Biographical Sketch of Georgiana Bruce Kirby". Alexander Street. Retrieved 4 March 2020.
2. "Georgiana Bruce Kirby". New Brook Farm. Retrieved 4 March 2020.
3. Kirby, Georgiana Bruce (1987). Steen, Judith B.; Swift, Carolyn (eds.). Georgiana Bruce Kirby: Feminist Reformer of the West. Santa Cruz County Historical Trust. ISBN 0-940283-02-6.