Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer
Research Department

Hall County's Pioneering Women

Social Reform and Women's Sufferage

Hall County women brought refinement and civilization to the rugged prairie towns.  They were the heart and soul of the community.  Men may have controlled the political and economic forces in the town, but women controlled the home.  They were seen as responsible for the morality and spiritual well being of their families.  However, ensuring their family’s welfare sometimes meant extending their influences beyond the home and into the community.  To fight potentially corrupting influences, women founded clubs in the name of the abolition of slavery, temperance, suffrage, and poor relief.  Women looked for ways to make their prairie towns better than the overcrowded, polluted cities of the east.  They endlessly campaigned to create libraries, hospitals, and schools so their children would have every opportunity possible.

Elizabeth Griffin Abbott dedicated her life to improving her community and helping the less fortunate. [Photographs of Elizabeth are featured throughout this page.]  Her strong beliefs in equality and social reform inspired her community as well as her family.  Her daughters, Edith and Grace Abbott, drew from their mother’s influences in their careers as social reformers.   As adults, Edith and Grace would say that they were born believing in women’s rights and remembered their mother, Elizabeth, telling them, “I was always a suffragist, and even if you are little girls, you can be suffragists too because it is right and just” (Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice, p. 5-6).

Elizabeth was born on January 20, 1845 in a log house in Franklin Township in DeKalb County, Illinois.  In the late 1830s, James Griffin and Emeline Gardner Griffin had moved to Illinois with other members of their close Quaker families from Genesee Valley, New York.  Ardent abolitionists, the Gardner and Griffin families worked for the Underground Railroad in their part of Illinois.  In O. A. Abbott’s autobiography, Reflections of a Pioneer Lawyer, Elizabeth’s husband recounts how a young Elizabeth once stumbled upon two runaway slaves hidden by her family while retrieving a ball that had rolled under a unfamilar hay wagon.  On the day that the legendary abolitionist John Brown was hanged, Elizabeth wore black in mourning.

Women’s rights were also important to Elizabeth.  As a child, her uncle Allen Gardner once brought Elizabeth a copy of the speech made by Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the Seneca Falls Convention.  At eight years old, Elizabeth eagerly struggled to memorize Stanton’s famous speech, which she never forgot.  She shared her strong beliefs in women’s rights with her husband, Othman Ali Abbott.  During their courtship, they shared a copy of the book, Subjection of Women, by celebrated British political and social reformer John Stuart Mill, writing their personal notations in the book’s margins and mailing it back and forth.  In 1882, Susan B. Anthony traveled to Nebraska to speak at a large public meeting in Grand Island.  O. A. and Elizabeth had been campaigning hard together for a women’s suffrage amendment to the Nebraska state constitution.  The Abbotts were only too honored to have Anthony stay in their home.  Lacking a guest room, however, the famous women’s right advocate shared a bed with six-year-old Edith, who was quite proud to have “helped the cause.”

Though they were from the same county in Illinois and had attended the same high school, O. A. and Elizabeth did not marry until he was over thirty and she was twenty-eight.  O. A. Abbott served in the Civil War as a first lieutenant in the Ninth Illinois Calvary and was twice wounded.  Following his discharge, O. A. read law with an Illinois attorney for two years before being admitted to the Illinois bar.  In the spring of 1867, he and his brother Marcus decided to head west to California.  However, west of the new railroad town of Grand Island, the Abbott brothers discovered that the military had closed the road west due to Indian attacks.  O. A. backtracked to Grand Island where he became the town’s first practicing attorney.  Marcus went on to California, but eventually returned to Hall County where he successfully farmed south of Wood River. After graduating from the Rockford Female Seminary (later renamed Rockford College) in 1868, Elizabeth became a schoolteacher as she had always planned.  By the time of her marriage to O. A. in 1873, Elizabeth was a respected high school principal in West Liberty, Iowa.

  O. A. and Elizabeth had four children: Othman A., Jr. (September 14, 1874), Edith (September 26, 1876), Grace (November 17, 1878), and Arthur Griffin (March 10, 1880).  In 1890, with the help of Elizabeth’s mother, they also took in Othman’s deceased sister’s two children, a thirteen-year-old girl, Sabre, and six year old Thomas.  The Abbott children were encouraged to speak their minds. Education was stressed.  Elizabeth insisted all her children learn German and employed a private teacher to give them lessons.  Books and literature were important in the Abbott household.   Rather then traditional children’s books. Elizabeth read her children Aesop’s Fables, Arabian Nights, Andersen’s and Grimm’s fairy tales, Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver’s Travels.

Elizabeth worked tirelessly to create Grand Island’s public library.  After the failure of the 1882 vote for women’s suffrage amendment to the Nebraska state constitution, Elizabeth urged the Grand Island suffragettes to invest the left over funds from the local campaign into establishing a public library.  Grand Island’s first public library was simply a few bookcases in Henry Clifford’s law office.  In 1903, Elizabeth stood behind President Theodore Roosevelt as he broke ground for the new library building she helped secure a grant to build from the Carnegie Foundation.  She was a vital member of the library board 47 years and served as its president for 17 of those years.

In addition to suffrage and literacy, Elizabeth Abbott also championed other causes as well.  In 1886, Nebraska governor James W. Dawes appointed Elizabeth as a delegate to the Thirteenth National Conference of Charities and Corrections at St. Paul, Minnesota.  She was also selected for a three-year term to the Visiting and Examining Board of the Soldiers and Sailors’ Home by Nebraska governor Lorenzo Crounse in March 1893.  Elizabeth also campaigned for Grand Island’s first public park and was active in the Grand Island Women’s Club.  In 1936, at age 91, Elizabeth’s alma mater, Rockford College, presented her with an honorary master’s degree for her dedication to social reform in Nebraska.

Elizabeth Abbott dedicated her life to improving the lives of those around her.  She left a legacy of public service and community pride.  She taught her children to believe in their own ideas and respect those of others.  Even when the depression of the 1890s hit the Abbotts hard, Elizabeth continued with her civic interests and duties.  Her children would carry on her tradition of social reform.  Edith became the first women dean of a graduate school at an American university as the University of Chicago’s graduate school dean of social service administration.  The Grand Island Edith Abbott Memorial Library honors her name.  During 1917-1939, Grace Abbott was associated with the U.S. Children’s Bureau, Department of Labor, and became bureau chief in 1921.  She was also once considered a strong candidate for the office of Secretary of Labor.  Grace later joined her sister at the University of Chicago as professor of public welfare administration.  Grand Island’s Grace Abbott Park in named in her honor and she is also featured in Nebraska’s Hall of Fame.  Charlotte Abbott, Elizabeth's only grandchild (seen at the right as a young child with Elizabeth), devoted much of her career to social welfare related work in New York City carrying on her grandmother's traditions.

All work and no play makes Jane a very dull girl!

Learn more about Women's History

Hall County's Pioneering Women

Women in Business in Hall County

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Research Department webmaster: Karen Keehr