The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, March 25, 1906, Page 11

' THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALL. WHIT NEY % o natural, vigor- he res - sibilities of her activities of are not y are in Warwick who no ety. the a woman beset a life of friv- rwick is that ibbled- e Prince was one of the d, a leading spirit ts, imitated, af d about, ng that rarest of lib- e—the liberty of a smart d woman in London's I saw her in the at Ascot, favored by the Prince of Wales who is now a King discreet, surrounded and by well- z groomed British dandies, she was the most perfect type of high-bred, tri- umphant feminine bezuty I have ever T exquisitely gowned, golden-haired, blue eyed, with delicate features perfectly s 1l and slender as a lily stem, chiseled, radiantly young and proud and joyous, she was a picture of thor- oughbred loveliness. She was dancing, dining, opera-going, baccarat playing by night, coaching, riding, race-going by day, frivoling and flirting all the time, and yet, even then, finding the time to @o something eise besides shining in society, for she had slready set up the little shop in the West End for the marketing of peas- ant women's handiwork. She is still beautiful and beautifully gowned, still a figure in society—and a power. Yet since the day when she was the “Babbling Brooke” she has bad the time and energy to set up make studies with Altkin or en here, with St Gaudens in the , Rodin in Paris. She set up studio in the Bryant Park building York, and when she went into she shut the door on her millions, her 2l position, her gowns and her jew- 20 22 T Yo 0 > JIERMAN OLIRICHS three shops in London where the prod- ucts of women's work in England, Scotland and Ireland and Wales are sold for the benefit of the women workers. She has, apparently cssually, on her coaching, trips when she han- died the reins, formed guilds of these working women in villages and coun- trysides and had them trained and in- duced to work. She has founded a club in London. She has established a farm in Warwickshire. She has written as many articles on politics, economics, sociology and trifles like that as many another woman who has to make her dally bread and bonnets by working. And she has taken as active an inter- est in politics—along the Liberal and Socialistic lines—as an American Con- gressman mending his fences. During the last election she was reported and snapshotted as one of the sensations of the campaign when she went about speaking from the tails of carts to the workingmen and asking them to vote for John Burns. Yet in a pélitical way she has done no more than Lady Randolph Churchill, who is now Mrs. West, did for her hus- band. That she was the better poli- tecian of the two and that “Lord Randy” owed more to the tact of his handsome American wife than.to his own popularity is no secret. Lady Ran- dolph Churchill stepped out of the limi- ations of a purely socléty life for her son as well as her husband, and it was her campaigning, her speechmaking and buttonholing and soup and blanket and smile distributing that launched that young man upon his career. Lady Henry Somerset, like the Coun- tess of Warwick, is one of the for- tunately placed English women who cannot sit in idleness. No poor, lone widow with seven small children to support works longer hours or more arduously than does Lady Henry Som- erset for the cause of temperance. What with her public speaking, her . writing, her executive dutles, her trav- eling, her secretaries, her attention to the million details of a great organiza- tion she leads as busy and impersonal alife as did our own Susan B. Anthony. She has beautiful estates, a big income, a hereditary social position, all that fpolish girls dream of and ambitious girls marry for, and she puts all aside —exeept the income, which for the most part she gives away—and works like a non-union factory girl for the realization of an ideal. An English woman who i5 a worker of another sort is the Marchioness of Granby, who is an artist from her soul to her finger tips, who puts before the public only & very little of her work, and that little only now and then. But it is work so exquisite that she is not forgotten in the intervals of retire- ment. Her portrait of Paderewski alone is enough to rest a reputation on and remains without rival among the many that artists have been moved to make of him. But we don’t have to go away from home to find women who turn from so- clety to work for work’s sake. There is a white-haired, grim-visaged old woman in Wastington who makes a religion of it that she both practices and preaches. She is Mrs. John A. Lo- gan. Her long life has been one of activity. While General Logan ‘was alive she was unanimously voted the best politician in the Logan family and her tact and far-sightedness retrieved many a blunder that the soldier-hus- band’s brusqueness led him into. After a life of many gratifications and much sorrow she is still active, alert and sharing the interests of today. Indeed we do not need to go so far from home as Washington or New York to find women who need more serious, satisfying work than soclety offers. In Chicago a few weeks ago, & young ‘woman by the name of Edna Dickerson came Into an inheritance of $1,000,000 from an uncle’s estate in Minneapolis. She bad been supporting herself by stenography and typewriting and in the process she had learned something of the value of work. Did she hall the inheritance as an escape from drudgery or a key to par- adise? Not a bit of it. ‘She sald she éidn’t want to share the drudgery of pink teas and other social functions. She didn’t want to be a slave to a retinue of servants or be chained down by town and country houses. She wanted an interest in life and so she incorporated a company for court re- porting, and has become the employer of other girl stenographers and type- writers and is playing the business game with the same szest that other women are playing the soclety game. ‘We need not have stopped over even at Chicago for examples. San Fran- cisco has her own. She has among the distinguished women artists of America her own Native Daughter, Miss Evelyn McCor- mick, whose paintings of the adobes and the drives and the waters of Mon- terey are making both herself and old Monterey famous. Miss Evelyn McCormick is the daughter of William McCormick, a re- tired capitalist, the sister of three pretty women well known in local so- clety; but a great many people know the name of Evelyn McCormick in the corner of a canvas who do not know that, Miss McCormick cared nothing about the soclety life her sisters find pleas- ant, but she cared a great deal about painting pictures; so she studied at Hopkins while they learned new co- tillon figures; she went to Paris and painted in Benjamin Comstant’s atelier and had the honor of exhibiting in the Salon while they very fittingly and naturally gave their attention to the Paristan variations in frocks. And now she has a studio at old Monterey and she spends the best part of her time trying to catch upon canvas the dreamy, evanescent charm of thal lovely spot. She has succeeded wom- derfully well, and her pictures are being bought and carried away by ap- preciative Eastern visitors almost be- fore Californians get a fair chance to look at them. Miss Betty Ashe, in spite of the pres- tige of belonging to the Southern set, thought it not nearly so well worth while to live a soclety life as to do something toward softening the con- ditions of life and healing the {lls of the very poor. To thoroughly equip herself and bring not only sympathy but efficiency to her work, she went East and took the course in nursing at Bellevue—the severest, perhaps, In this country. Then she came back to work among the people she thought needed her most—the poor on Telegraph Hill, and formed for their benefit the Tele- graph Hill Neighborhood < Association, setting up a dis] and a model cottage and clubs for boys and girls— and setting soclety to work for them. The most successful, and I believe the largest, violet grower in this State, fa- mous for its violets, is a soclety woman —Mrs. Timothy Hopkins of Menlo. One of the sights of the State that no tour- ist, whether of the private car or per- sonally conducted variety, feels he can afford to miss is the acres and acres of violetg that Mrs. Timothy Hopkins grows for the market. That soclety is mot altogether satis- fying even when its highest possibili- ties have been realized, Mrs. Hermans Oelrichs has been making evident of late. Mrs. Oelrichs has nothing left to con~ qQuer in New York's smart set. Evea at Newport she has a voice In saying who's who, and yet she seems worried, and is seeking for larger Interests. Neither art nor philanthropy appeal to her very strongly, but the fleld of finance has its fascination for her ap- parently. More and more in the her large fortune involves, and to have a personal voice of more than assent in them. She is not satisfled with signing ber name to papers in the places the lawyers and business agents point out and politely fill the pen for. finds it vastly more interesting to looks into the values and possibilities of in- vestment and speculation herself, and get some of the thrills of the game that her meney entitles her to. During her recent visit here she was much more interested in and gave much more attention te the dusiness ma that brought her here than to the functions arranged in her honor. not unlikely, when she agitated society by dining with her gloves that she was so sbsorbed in l.fi out how she could make Rer son enough to hold his own with the rich boys In New York that she forgot to take them off, and was engaged In setting a new fashion. However that may be, M»s. has found after giving it a fair trial, that she, too, along with many other women, needs an interest in life mere satisfying than seclety can give. Just what it is that has brought about this change, whether it is due to some Pk ik ¥ subtle difference in woman or to the altered conditions of our life that have taken her old duties aad occupations from her and given hef mo new and well-defined omes Iin thelr stead, is for some philesophie mind to