Josepha Newcomb Whitney


Josepha Newcomb Whitney was an American clubwoman, pacifist, suffragist, and politician.

Early life

Anna Josepha Newcomb was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Nova Scotia-born astronomer Simon Newcomb and Mary Caroline Hassler Newcomb. Physician Anita Newcomb McGee was her older sister. Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler, first head of the United States Coast Survey, was their Swiss-born great-grandfather. The Newcomb daughters were mainly educated at home by their father. Josepha Newcomb later joined classes with the Art Students League of New York.

Activism

Whitney was a prominent suffragist in Connecticut and New York. In 1912, Whitney planned the first suffrage meeting in Cornwall, Connecticut. She was president of the local Equal Suffrage League and the Housewives' League. "Where dirt is," she said of corruption in politics, "it is the custom of woman to get her broom and clean it up." During World War I, she worked on the assembly line at a munitions plant in Winchester, Connecticut to study the working conditions of women in the war effort. She also conducted a food price survey.
Whitney supported young opera singer Olympia Macri through and after her 1925 murder trial, and protested to end all-male juries in Connecticut. "Women demand a little less gush for the sacredness of motherhood and a great deal more actual consideration," she explained. In 1928 she led a group of active New Haven women in leaving the Daughters of the American Revolution over a blacklist of speakers.
Whitney was chair of the Connecticut Women's Peace Party before and after the war, and president of the New Haven, Connecticut chapter of the League of Women Voters. She was founder of the Connecticut League of Nations Association in 1924, and attended the League of Nations Conference in Geneva in 1927.

Politics

Whitney ran for the Connecticut state senate in 1922; she lost that race, but she became the first woman on the New Haven board of aldermen in 1927, and won a seat in the Connecticut General Assembly in 1932.

Personal life

Josepha Newcomb married twice. Her first husband was lawyer and judge Edward Baldwin Whitney. They married in 1896 and had seven children together; one, Sylvia, died in infancy. Judge Whitney died suddenly in January 1911, leaving Josepha Whitney a pregnant widow, age 29, with five children under age 12. She married again in 1952, to Harry LaTourette Cavenaugh, a retired army colonel; she was widowed again in 1954, when Cavenaugh died.
Her daughter Caroline was an economist and expert on the dairy industry. Her son Hassler Whitney was a noted mathematician. Another son, William Dwight Whitney, was an international anti-trust lawyer.