Melusina Fay Peirce

Melusina Fay "Zina" Peirce (; February 24, 1836 – April 28, 1923), born Harriet Melusina Fay, was an American feminist, author, teacher, music critic, organizer and activist best known for spearheading the 19th-century "cooperative housekeeping" movement. and the Cambridge Woman's Union In 1898–1899, she organized the Women's Philharmonic Society of New York.

As a nativist, Peirce was a vocal opponent of increased immigration to the United States and expressed animosity against Irish-Americans.

Her writings appear in the Atlantic Monthly, the Boston Post, and the Chicago Evening Journal. She wrote Cooperative Housekeeping: How not to do it, and How to do it: A Study in Sociology (1884), Cooperative Housekeeping (1889),

Peirce began learning to sew at age four, but openly expressed her distaste for it. However, Peirce was an obedient, "dutiful and conscientious," Christian child by age eight.

On Carelessness "Carelessness means that sometimes when people are employed in any way, they do not care how they do their work or take pains with what they are about. When people are careless, their trunks will be in confusion, and they will leave their clothes, and their shoes, and their soiled linen, about their bedrooms; and if they sleep with any companions who are careless too, then their rooms would be in disorder, and their soiled clothes will get mingled up together, and thus great disorder will be produced. Sometimes, when one of them looks over her clothes, she will find some collars or aprons missing. She will ask the other one to look into her trunk or bureau and see if any of her lost clothes are in her trunk, and perhaps the other one will say, Oh! I am doing something else now, and I will do it some other time, "and perhaps she will forget it, [and] thus the lost things never be found and this is the consequence of carelessness." — H. M. Fay; October 28, 1844 His parents were Judge Samuel Phillips Prescott and Harriet (Howard) Fay. and was an exemplary student. Peirce graduated in the summer of 1861, when she gave the graduation speech.

Peirce would go on to consider herself a sociologist.

Later years Melusina Fay married Charles Sanders Peirce in the early 1860s, but separated from him in 1876 and divorced him in the early 1880s.

Following the failure of her cooperative housing experiment, Peirce continued to advocate the "cooperative housekeeping" cause, traveling to London and Berlin to meet with European champions of cooperation. Peirce was also involved in several talks, in which she spoke about new insights gathered during her trip abroad and views on "womanhood" suffrage.

On October 4, 1876, Peirce spoke at the Fourth Woman's Congress in Philadelphia about what she had learned about cooperation in Europe. In 1880, Peirce spoke at the Illinois Social Science Association, where she advocated the creation of a "Woman's House" as an alternative to the United States Senate.

Death On April 28, 1923, Peirce died of chronic arthritis and valvular heart disease in her home in Watertown, Massachusetts. She was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Watertown two days later.