In the 1800s in the US, women were evidently getting fed up with well-off white men hogging all the power and authority and refusing to share their privileges, such as education and voting. But a group that doesn’t have any formal power often faces significant hurdles in trying to change the status quo. The women of the US developed a number of strategies, and one of them was the Womens’ Club movement. Across the US, women organized themselves into informal clubs where they would do things like discuss the art and culture they’d probably been isolated from, talk about women’s suffrage and what to do about it, and by getting to know one another, become allies.
One of the prime movers of the Women’s Club movement, particularly in the midwest and her own state of Kansas, was Mary Tenney Gray. She was born to the Tenney family on June 19, 1833, in a small Pennsylvania town. As the daughter of a church pastor (an educated man), she was able to educate herself from her father’s library. In her late teens she enrolled in a seminary and graduated when she was 20.
After graduation she got a teaching job in Binghamton, New York, and a few years later married Barsillai Gray, and moved to the Kansas Territory (it wasn’t a state yet) where Judge Gray founded the town of Wyandotte. Mary Gray was active in the things open to women at the time, including charities and country fairs. But her interests went beyond local charities and exhibits. In 1859, when the Kansas Territory was working toward becoming a US state, she attended the convention aimed at formulating the state constitution. She, along with some other female delegates, attempted to include voting for women in the constitution. Their efforts didn’t succeed at the time, but Gray’s reputation began to spread.
Kansas achieved statehood in 1861, and around that time the Grays moved to Kansas City, where Mary Gray lived for over 20 years. She was a prominent leader of Kansas’ contribution to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia that year. In 1881 she helped found the Social Science Club of Kansas and Western Missouri. It was the first association of womens’ clubs in the western US, and Gray was the first president. The organization grew quickly, until over 500 women in the two states participated. The preamble to its constitution was “The object of this society shall be to promote a better acquaintance among thoughtful women of this section who are most desirous and best able to raise the standard of women’s education and attainments, to enlarge their opportunities, and by frequent meeting bring the highest knowledge of each for the benefit of all.” After that, Gray became known as the “mother of the women’s culture club movement in Kansas.” Her efforts to promote education for women, bring art and culture to rural towns in the west, and to advocate for women’s suffrage all succeeded.
Gray was also a writer, and published articles in a number of publications. She also served as one of the editors of New York Teacher magazine, as well as the Kansas Farmer. At the time, some conventions and organizations held essay contests, and in 1901 Gray’s paper on Women and Kansas City’s Development won a prize. She lived to be 71, and if you visit Kansas City, Kansas (there’s a Kansas City, Missouri right across the river), you can see a monument to Gray overlooking a view of the Missouri valley, which Gray described as “the most beautiful and romantic view in America.”
