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The Club is pleased to share the following letter from Anna’s grandson, Professor P. E. Bennett (University of Michigan) on August 5, 2007*. Paul was searching the Internet and found a match to his grandmother’s name here at our website. We asked him if he would like to share a remembrance of his grandmother and he was kind enough to email the following history along with family photos of Anna. The photos are from the Bennett family collection* including one of his grandmother at a Votes for Women rally (date and location is unknown).
Anna was an early member of the Club and one of Illinois most outstanding workers for suffrage, public health and community life.1 Dr. Blount, Phoebe Butler, Elizabeth Ball, and Emily Conant co-founded the Suburban Civics and Equal Suffrage Association.2 To learn more about Dr. Anna Blount and her contributions, read The Gentle Force: A History of The Nineteenth Century Woman’s Club of Oak Park by Carolyn O. Poplett, edited by Maryann Porucznik.
Both my grandmother, Anna Ellsworth Blount, and grandfather, Ralph Earl Blount, were devoted to trying to make the world a better place. Ralph Blount (1865-1963) was a minister, teacher, and conservationist.
My grandmother (1872-1953) was a doctor, specializing in ob/gyn, and in her activities outside her practice and her family she spent years working for women’s suffrage. I’m not familiar with her specific activities at The Nineteenth Century Club, but you must have records, such as that reference I saw in the biography of President Amelia A. Macnish on the Club website (President’s page) listing at least four members on the State Suffrage Commission: Grace Wilbur Trout, Dr. Anna Blount, Grace Hall Hemingway, and Anna Lloyd Wright.
For most of their married life my grandparents lived what appeared a fairly conventional life in Oak Park. However, they got involved in some activities beyond the norm. For example, you may remember how scandalous Frank Lloyd Wright’s life was, particularly after he left his first wife and their kids and went to Europe with Mamah Cheney. In the 20's, while he was still married to his second wife, he got involved with Olgivanna and soon she had their daughter, Iovanna. The newspapers chased Wright and Olgivanna all over and the episode was major news. Olgivanna became his third wife and promoted Wright’s fame for the rest of her life.
In a book published last year, “The Fellowship/The Untold Story Of Frank Lloyd Wright & The Taliesin Fellowship,” at page 112 there’s a paragraph referring to my grandmother, Wright, Olgivanna, and Iovanna:
“On December 2, 1925, at about six o’clock in the evening, Wright received the anxiously awaited call from Dr. Anna Blount, the obstetrician. Wright evaded the photographers by entering the hospital through the rear. Dr Anna Blount herself let me in, Wright recalled, and proudly led me to the room where a little white bundle lay. A delicate pink face showing in the hollow of her mother’s arm. Holding his newborn daughter to the light, he declared, ‘You’re as big as a minute.’”
My mother, Dr. Ruth Blount Bennett, who died 12 years ago, used to tell a story mocking herself for how she’d been a typically egocentric teenager. She had returned to Oak Park from college to spend a weekend at home and was about to walk upstairs to her room when her mother, Anna Blount, told her that she couldn’t have her room because she had put a patient in there. As a normal teenager, my mother was annoyed at her mother’s presumption, even after she explained what was going on–hiding the very pregnant Olgivanna from the newspapers, she had put Olgivanna, to whom my mother referred as “Wright’s mistress” and “the Russian ballet dancer,” in the bedroom. My mother soon got over her displeasure and could laugh about her immaturity.
My grandparents met in the 1880's when Ralph Blount was the principal of Anna Blount’s school in Oregon, Wisconsin. Those were the days when a young person who had just finished undergraduate school himself, could immediately become the principal of a small country school. Anna went on to college at the University of Wisconsin and Ralph went to Harvard Divinity School, but they kept in contact. After being a minister in Colorado, Ralph came back to Illinois and he and Anna were married in 1893.
He encouraged her ambition to be a doctor and supported her as she went to medical school, graduating in 1897 from what was then called “The Womans [sic] Medical School of the Northwestern University.”
My grandparents lived and worked at Hull House and were friends with Jane Addams. In his research in the library collections on Hull House, one of my cousins found such references as in 1897 when Anna was an intern at Cook County Hospital and frequently did lectures at Hull House on “social hygiene and other medical subjects.” My grandfather was listed as a resident of Hull House for most of 1898, and then soon after that my grandparents moved to Oak Park, where they spent most of the rest of their lives together and my grandmother set up her medical practice.
They had three children: Walter (1900), who became an orthopedic surgeon; Earl (1905), who became an aeronautical engineer and architect; and Ruth (1908), my mother, who became a pediatrician. She met my father when they were in the same class in medical school at Northwestern in the late 20's. Anna and Ralph’s descendants are all over the USA and have been in many fields, and consistent with Anna’s and Ralph’s social involvement, many became doctors, lawyers, and teachers.
Because medical specialties and certification programs were not as strong in the USA then as in Europe, Anna went abroad to study ob/gyn in about 1903-1904–my mother thought it was mostly in Munich and Vienna. Ralph took care of Walter, their only child at that point, back in Oak Park until the local school year was over and then joined Anna in Europe.
When my grandmother set up her practice, she and my grandfather moved to 124 South Oak Park Avenue (later renumbered to 146), a house that was torn down years ago. My grandfather built an addition to the house for his wife’s medical practice. Doctors having their practices in medical studios attached to their houses, with separate entrances, was much more common then–I believe Dr. Hemingway’s house on Kenilworth Avenue has a similar studio and separate entrance at the back and side.
My grandmother had a forceful personality and pursued what she thought right, including her many years in the suffrage movement and treating people who might not otherwise have had good medical care, whether it was immigrants who couldn’t speak English or a mistress of Frank Lloyd Wright. She lectured widely on medical topics and on suffrage. She was well-regarded as a doctor and leader, including being elected president of the local medical society.
My mother remembered that as a little girl she watched society meetings, with the house crammed full of male doctors, but the meetings being conducted by her mother. My mother used to laugh about the meeting when everyone else had already arrived and the meeting had started when Dr. Hemingway, Ernest's father, arrived late. Dr. Hemingway was extremely heavy. There were no chairs left, so he grabbed the telephone chair, one of those very spindly things that were commonly put under the old-style wall phones. He pulled the chair into the living room, sat on it, collapsed it, and was embarrassed and sitting on the floor.
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