A bold feminist, suffragette, and writer, Alice Moore Hubbard (1861 – 1915) considered herself one of the “New Women” at the turn of the century.
Early Life
Born on a small farm in Wales, New York, Alice Hubbard desperately wanted to be a teacher. Through effort and economizing, she attended the State Normal School in Buffalo, New York, followed by the New Thought Emerson College of Oratory in Boston. Following her graduation she taught at East Aurora College in New York.
In 1885, Elbert Hubbard founded the William-Morris-inspired Roycraft, an Arts and Crafts community and publishing company, in East Aurora, where Alice met him. The community became the center for a group of free thinkers, reformers, artisans, and suffragettes.
Elbert Hubbard was a successful soap salesman, artist, publisher and philosopher. He is still well-known for his clever maxims. Falling in love, Alice Hubbard had an affair and illegitimate daughter with Hubbard, who after a scandalous divorce, married her in 1904.
An ardent proponent of marriage equality and women’s right to vote, Hubbard participated in the first suffragist parade in Washington DC.
Accomplishments
After marriage, she became involved in her husband’s life-work. She served as principal at the Roycroft School for Boys, managed the Roycroft Shop and the Roycroft Inn. She also pursued a writing career, publishing several books.
The first, Women’s Work is an analysis of the secondary role of women in society and a call for women to liberate themselves through education, and wage-earning. Life Lessons contains thoughts on and biographies of Susan B. Anthony, David Swing, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frederick Froebel, Henry D. Thoreau, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. An American Bible focuses on the “Prophets” Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and her husband.
The Myth of Marriage addresses the business and inequality between marriage partners versus real romance. The following excerpt is from this work.
Alice Hubbard’s life was cut short, when she and her husband, according to witnesses, holding hands, choose to go down with the ship, the Lusitania torpedoed in 1915 during the First World War.
Her Words
Her Writings
Justinian and Theodora: A Drama Being a Chapter of History with her husband (1906)
Woman’s Work: Being an Inquiry and an Assumption (1908)
Life Lessons: Truths Concerning People Who Have Lived (1909)
An American Bible, editor (1912).
The Myth in Marriage (1912)
A Little Journey to Yellowstone with her husband (1915)
Learn More About Alice Hubbard
“Alice Moore Hubbard: A Tribute” by Mary Ellen Kramer in the National Magazine vo. 42 1915
Roycraft still exists as a working artisan center See: Roycraft Campus
“Alice Hubbard” Freedom of Religion Foundation
Teaching is successful only as it causes people to think for themselves. What the teacher thinks matters little; what he makes the child think matters much.
Alice Moore Hubbard