Draft:Grace Hodges Bagley

Grace Hodges Bagley
Portrait of Grace Hodges Bagley, ca. 1919
Born	Grace Hodges (1860-07-30)July 30, 1860 Champaign, Illinois, U.S.
Died	August 22, 1944(1944-08-22) (aged 84) Kennebunkport, Maine, U.S.
Spouse	Frederick Phillips Bagley
Children	Frederick Bagley, Almeda Bagley Myers, Elizabeth Bagley Reed

Grace Hodges Bagley (July 30, 1860 – August 22, 1944) was an American social reformer and civic leader from Chicago devoted to improving the lives of women, children, and immigrants. She and her husband, Frederick P. Bagley, hired architect Frank Lloyd Wright to design a home for their family in Hinsdale, Illinois in 1893, soon after Wright opened an independent practice. While living in Illinois, Grace Bagley worked closely with leading social reformers of the time including Jane Addams and other influential members of the Chicago Woman’s Club. Later moving to Massachusetts, she remained active in women’s suffrage, immigrants’ rights, and child welfare issues.

Background

Born on July 30, 1860 in Champaign, Illinois, Grace Hodges was the daughter of Leonard Hodges (1817-1889) and Carrie Almeda Murphy Hodges (1833-1921). Her father was a successful attorney and real estate investor. Her mother was raised in Hancock County, Ohio, part of a family that is believed to have been involved in the Underground Railroad.

The Hodges family moved to Chicago during Grace’s early childhood. In 1885, Grace Hodges married Frederick Phillips Bagley (1860-1933) at her parents' summer home in Waukegan, Illinois.

Born and raised in Detroit, Frederick Phillips Bagley was the son of prominent businessman George Frederick Bagley and a nephew of John Judson Bagley, who had served as the governor of Michigan in the 1870s. John J. Bagley and his wife Frances E. Newberry Bagley were active members of the First Unitarian Church in Detroit. Frances Bagley served as vice-chairman of the Board of Lady Managers for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

Grace and Frederick Bagley “settled on Chicago’s fashionable Near South Side,” and he soon became a dealer in architectural marble, first with partner Charles E. Nason, and then on his own as Frederick P. Bagley & Co. In addition to his marble business, Frederick Bagley invested in real estate. He purchased property on Polk and Pacific streets in Chicago’s Levee District in 1889 and built a four-story tenement building that would come to play an important role in Grace Bagley’s story.

Early Clients of Frank Lloyd Wright

By the early 1890s, Grace and Frederick Bagley had three young children, and the family was living in a comfortable house on S. Indiana Avenue. They were active members of All Souls Church, a Chicago Unitarian congregation founded and ministered to by Frank Lloyd Wright’s uncle, Jenkin Lloyd Jones. The Bagleys “wanted an escape for the summer months” from the heat and grime of Chicago, so they decided to build a country house “20 miles west of the city in Hinsdale, Illinois.” Hinsdale’s active Unitarian church and its convenient commuter train to Chicago prompted the Bagleys to purchase a lot two blocks south of Highlands Station.

Famed American Prairie style architect Frank Lloyd Wright had recently established an independent architectural practice and, as a fellow member of All Souls Church, was known to the Bagleys. They quickly employed him to design their new suburban home. This was quite early in the development of Wright’s style and he produced a gambrel-roofed Dutch Colonial house for the Bagleys. Despite the traditional appearance of the exterior, it had “a plan somewhat similar to several other Wright designs of the 1890s, including his own” Oak Park Home & Studio. A generous foyer opened into a large living room and dining room. “The deep front and rear porches, with access into the main living areas through French doors, gave the family of five ready access to their wooded lot.” An octagonal library, foreshadowing the library that Wright would soon add to his Oak Park house, opens off the stair landing in the front hall. “Marble Ionic porch columns and marble facing on the foundation and chimney were provided by Bagley’s business.”

During the family’s time in Hinsdale from 1894-1898, Grace Bagley became Secretary of the Fresh Air Association, a charitable organization founded by the local Unitarian church. In cooperation with several other west suburban Unitarian congregations, women and children from the settlement houses of Chicago’s tenement neighborhoods were brought to Hinsdale during the city’s hot and fetid summer months.

Several years later, Frank Lloyd Wright designed a summer residence for Grace Bagley’s sister, Almeda Bagley Foster, and her husband Stephen A. Foster, at the outskirts of Chicago in the West Pullman neighborhood.

Social Reform Efforts in Chicago

Grace Bagley first became involved in Chicago’s social reform efforts in the early 1890s, after she visited Hull House, America’s first settlement house, on Chicago’s Near West Side. Founded in 1889 by pioneering progressive reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, Hull House offered housing and a broad array of social services to the surrounding densely populated immigrant community.

Reflecting back on this period about two decades later, Bagley wrote:

“I drifted into Hull House, as do most Chicago women when they want to begin to help other people, and got quite interested in the work there among the foreign population. One day it dawned on me that I had a foreign population of my own, right under my own nose in my own tenement and the place for me was among my own immigrant tenants.”

She then took charge of the tenement building that she and her husband owned at 186-188 Pacific Avenue in Chicago (no longer extant). She “became committed to improving the living conditions” for her tenants as well as the “living conditions in the surrounding neighborhood and in tenement districts throughout the city. She soon began writing and lecturing on tenement conditions. One of her first published articles “The Black Hole of Chicago,” was published in Figaro Magazine in 1892.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Grace Bagley was an active member of the Chicago Woman's Club (CWC), an organization that worked on reform issues. In 1894, Bagley, Celia Parker Woolley and three other CWC members proposed Fannie Barrier Williams as the first black member of the Chicago Woman's Club, and at the same time proposed a resolution that membership of the club should be based "on character and intelligence, without restriction of race or color." Neither proposal was immediately successful, and it was three months before the membership criteria were changed, and fourteen months before Williams was admitted as a member. Grace Bagley was a member of the CWC committee which successfully lobbied the Chicago City Council to build separate accommodation for children in the jail, in 1896. She and Julia Lathrop also lobbied the Illinois General Assembly in support of the state Juvenile Court Bill, which became law in 1899. Grace Bagley also helped “to organize ... the first day nursery for children of working mothers and widowed fathers” at Hull House, and she “took an active role in educating immigrants for citizenship. She also made important contributions to the Kindergarten and Playground Movements, and spoke at the first national convention of mothers in 1894, saying that children needed to have sand, plastic clay and similar substances to enable the "young brain to express itself."

Move to Massachusetts and Suffrage Work

At the turn of the 20th century, Frederick Bagley’s business was struggling, and his firm went into receivership in 1904. He accepted a position in the marble industry in Pennsylvania, and the Bagley family relocated to Pittsburgh. They only remained for a few years. In 1909, Frederick Bagley began working for Morrill Company, a manufacturer of printer’s ink in Boston, and the family moved to Norwood, Massachusetts.

Following her family’s relocation, Grace Bagley “became increasingly involved in women’s suffrage.” In 1913, Illinois Governor Edward F. Dunne approved a suffrage bill that gave women in her former state the right to vote for President and in local elections. At the same time, a strong Anti-Suffrage Movement had taken hold in Massachusetts. Grace and her daughter Elizabeth began collaborating with Emily Curtis Fisher, a Norwood high school teacher who was deeply involved in suffrage. The three hosted an event in the Bagley home in 1913 in which 51 women from the community heard important speakers including Maud Wood Park of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association. Following this event, Grace, Elizabeth and Emily went on an automobile tour to obtain signatures from legislators to support women’s voting rights.

Grace Bagley soon became a leader in several suffrage organizations, including the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association and Massachusetts Political Equality Union. Her most prominent role was Chairman of the Americanization Committee for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). This role was considered especially important during World War I when educating immigrants and helping them obtain citizenship was considered imperative to America’s war effort. The NAWSA, played a significant role in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave women throughout the nation the right to vote. Bagley also joined the successor to NAWSA, the League of Women Voters, and became first vice-president of the State league. In 1921 wrote a play for the LWV called How Maggie MacTaggart Gained Her Citizenship, as a way of conveying information that would not be boring.

Later Years

The political activism that Grace Bagley learned during her early years in the Chicago Woman’s Club served her well throughout her life. (See also [1] for chairman of a committee of women's national organizations to lobby for this:) In 1924 she testified before the House of Representatives, urging Congress and the President to create a cabinet-level Department of Education. As the authorized speaker for the National Education Association at the 1928 Republican National Convention, she unsuccessfully urged the resolutions committee to support the establishment of a Federal Department of Education. As a long-time leader of the Women’s Republican Club in Boston she served as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1928 and chaired Herbert Hoover’s Massachusetts campaign.

Also a member of the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform - see this [2] for what she said in a committee meeting.

Grace Bagley rose up through the ranks to Chair the Children’s Welfare Committee of the Massachusetts Civic League. Plans developed by the committee “were adopted as the corner stone” of Governor Frank G. Allen’s “Public Welfare Program.” The work of Grace Bagley’s committee also “led to the formation of the Children’s Commission and laid the groundwork for the Children’s Code in the Federal Department of Labor, sometimes referred to as the ‘Children’s Bill of Rights’.”

Threat to the Bagley House

Preservationists were alarmed when the Bagley House was put on the private market in 2021, which in Chicago’s Western Suburbs, generally signals that a property is available as a tear-down and replacement project. Members of the Hinsdale Historic Preservation Commission alerted the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy of the threat and the organization began publicizing availability of the property across the country. “Fortunately, Safina Uberoi, an award-winning documentary filmmaker and member of the Conservancy’s board (now president of the board), and her husband, Lukas Ruecker, came to the rescue.” The couple purchased the house, with the sole intent of preserving it for the future.

Uberoi and Ruecker sponsored the house’s nomination as a Hinsdale Landmark. They are currently working with preservation architects to carefully restore the house while adding modern conveniences that will help attract new owners who will purchase and live in the Bagley House in the future.

When Safina Uberoi learned from her consulting architectural historians Jean Follett and Julia Bachrach that Grace Hodges Bagley was a largely forgotten progressive reformer and cohort of Jane Addams, she organized an exhibition in the house entitled Finding Grace: Rediscovering the Life and Contributions of Social Reformer Grace Bagley. Since the exhibition closed in December of 2023, it has been made available as a traveling exhibition.