Flavia Camp Canfield


Flavia Camp Canfield

Early life

Flavia Camp was raised in Black Earth, Wisconsin by her mother and step-father the Rev. Asa A. Allen, a Congregational pastor, with a combined total of fifteen siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings. She taught in a local school in her late teens, and went to the University of Wisconsin in 1863, the first year it admitted women.
On June 24, 1873 she married James Hulme Canfield with whom she had a son and in 1879 a daughter Dorothy. Although she didn't speak any foreign languages, she made many trips to Europe with her daughter, for example studying art for a year in Paris.

Organisational work

Canfield became interested in the nascent Women's Club Movement, and accordingly while her husband was president of Ohio State University she began a campaign not only to organise clubs in the Columbus region but to federate them. In all she founded 26 such clubs and the Columbus Federation of Women's Clubs. She was the first president of the Ohio State University Women's Club, and was president of the Ohio Federation of Women's Clubs from 1898–1900.
Canfield continued her interest in the arts as president of The Columbus Art Association, in which role she "broadened the policy of the association and enlarged the membership".

Literary legacy

Her published novels include The Kidnapped Campers: A Story of Out-of-Doors, The Refugee Family: A Story for Girls, The Big Tent, and Around the World at Eighty.
Being made the subject of satire in "Flavia and Her Artists", a short story by her daughter Dorothy's friend Willa Cather, was probably the cause for the ten-year rift between Dorothy and Cather.