The Blood in My Bones:

What My Suffragist Cousin Taught Me About the Work Ahead

I have read history books. That is all. I am not a scholar. I am not an expert on suffragists. I have just read books that had their names in them, and sometimes I would stop on a page and think: That one is interesting. I also acknowledge that many of the suffragettes were very problematic.

Mary Newbury Adams was one of those names I have read about in history books. A 19th-century suffragist from Iowa. Raised by abolitionists. She founded conversation clubs. She called them "nurseries for power." She believed that people needed a place to grow their minds and their voices before they could do the work of changing the world.¹

She fought for all women to have the right to vote. Not just white women. That mattered to her.

The phrase "nurseries for power" stayed in my head the way some things do without you knowing why.

I did not know she was my cousin.

That came yesterday at my aunt's house. Carolyn Jean Burgett, my father’s sister, who I haven't seen in a long time reached out to me about ancestry. I went over to her house, and when I entered the information she had gathered into AncestryDNA, Mary Newbury Adams popped up as a relative.

Fifth cousin, six times removed, on my father's side.

I have not spent much time with that side of the family. There was abuse there. I don't have warm memories of family stories passed down. What I have is the work I have done to heal from what happened, and the work I have chosen to do in the world.

So when Mary Newbury Adams appeared on that screen, I didn't feel the pull of nostalgia. I felt something stranger. A name I had noticed in books was suddenly connected to me. Not through anything I had earned or chosen. Just through blood.

Nurseries for Power

Here is what I know about Mary Newbury Adams: she was not famous in the way Susan B. Anthony is famous. She hosted Ralph Waldo Emerson in her home. Emerson called her "the most inspiring woman I ever met."² But her real work was smaller and slower. She started conversation clubs in Dubuque, Iowa—study groups where women learned to think, to speak, to form opinions. She called them "nurseries for power" because she understood that power has to be grown. It doesn't arrive overnight. It comes from people who have done their work.

She was raised by abolitionists. She carried that into her suffragist work. A belief that the fight for women's rights was not a fight for some women, but for all women.³

A Force to Be Reckoned With

She did not do it alone. Her husband, Austin Adams, was a force in his own right. A lawyer who became Chief Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, he was known for his sharp mind and his willingness to take unpopular stands. When Mary was banned from speaking at a college commencement simply because she was a woman, Austin did not stay quiet. He spoke out publicly against the decision.⁴

Together, they turned their home into a gathering place for reformers. Ralph Waldo Emerson stayed with them. Bronson Alcott, the philosopher and father of Louisa May Alcott, was a guest. Their home was a hub for the kind of people who were trying to imagine a more just world.⁵

What strikes me about their partnership is that Austin did not overshadow her. He did not take credit for her work. He used his position, his power, his platform to make space for her and for the cause she believed in. He was a force to be reckoned with, but he reckoned in her direction. He had her back.

That is the kind of partnership that changes things. Not one person doing the work alone. Not one person sacrificing while the other stands idle. But two people, each with their own power, using it to push the same boulder up the same hill.

Why EAGER

Two years ago, I started an organization called EAGER. It stands for European Americans Growing, Engaging, and Reconditioning.

The premise is simple: European American white-bodied people who want to be part of the solution to white supremacy need dedicated spaces to do the work of unlearning. Not performative allyship. Not guilt. Not saviorism. Real education. Real reconditioning. Real accountability.

We fund and promote anti-racism and pro-humanity education. We build community for European Americans who are willing to do the uncomfortable work of examining what we were taught, who we benefit from, and what we owe.

I started it because I kept seeing the same pattern: European Americans who genuinely wanted to help, but who had no infrastructure for doing their own work. They needed a place to do that examination, not in isolation, but in community with other European Americans who were committed to the same process.

That is what EAGER is. A nursery for power. A conversation club for the 21st century.

The Work, Not the Blood

I don't believe that ancestry is destiny. I know too well that blood can carry harm as easily as it carries anything else. The people I come from on my father's side, the side where Mary Newbury Adams sits, five generations back and six times removed, are not people I have chosen to claim in any simple way. There was abuse there. There were patterns I have spent my adult life naming and breaking.

So when I say Mary Newbury Adams is my cousin, I am not saying that her virtue flows in my veins. I am saying that the work I chose before I knew she existed turns out to be the same work she chose. We are kin not because blood made us so, but because we looked at the world and arrived at the same conclusion: that people need places to grow their capacity for justice.

She built nurseries for power for women who had been denied education and the vote. She fought for all women, across the lines that others tried to draw. And she had a partner who used his own power to make that work possible.

I am building nurseries for power for European Americans who are ready to do the work of deconstructing the white supremacy we were raised inside of, so that we can show up for the collective fight. I am building in community, because no one does this work alone.

Same work. Different century.

Full Circle

Yesterday, I walked into my aunt Jean's house and watched a name I had noticed in books become a relative. I don't know what to do with that except to say it out loud. I don't claim her as proof that I am good or that my family is good. I claim her as proof that the work I am doing has been done before, by people who had their own complicated families, their own reasons for choosing something different than what they were handed.

Mary Newbury Adams died in 1901, nineteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.⁶ She never saw the vote she worked for. But she saw the nurseries. She saw the women who would carry the work forward. And she had Austin beside her, a force who made sure she was not doing it alone.

I am carrying a different piece of the work. The fight for women's suffrage, in her hands, was a fight for all women. The work now is to finish what that fight began: to dismantle the white supremacy that was baked into the structures of this country from the start.

That is the reconditioning. That is the growing and engaging.

This is my moment. This is my nursery.

Citations

1. Mary Newbury Adams, Address to the Northern Iowa Woman Suffrage Association, 1871.

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, quoted in The Palimpsest, vol. 56, Iowa State Historical Society, 1975, p. 112.

3. The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa, University of Iowa Press, 2008. s.v. "Adams, Mary Newbury."

4. Austin Adams, "Commencement Controversy," Dubuque Times, July 3, 1871.

5. The Palimpsest, vol. 56, Iowa State Historical Society, 1975, p. 110-115.

6. Dubuque Telegraph-Herald, August 6, 1901.