Susan Look Avery

Susan Look Avery (née Look; October 27, 1817 – February 1, 1915) was an American writer, suffragist, pacifist and supporter of temperance as well as a single tax. She hosted Lucy Stone and husband Henry Blackwell when they came to Louisville, Kentucky for the American Woman Suffrage Association meeting—the first suffrage convention in the South—in 1881. In 1890 she started the Woman's Club of Louisville, and in honor of her birthday, the suffrage club of Wyoming, New York, named itself after her.

Early life The eldest of six children of Samuel and Polly Lommis Look, Susan Howes Look was born on October 27, 1817, in Conway, Massachusetts. She moved with her family to western New York where she grew up in a rural setting and among the many who were impacted by the Second Great Awakening in the "Burned-Over District." She enrolled in the Utica Female Seminary at age seventeen and after graduation stayed to teach there. In 1843 she traveled to the village of Wyoming, New York with her sister Julia who had been hired to teach in Middlebury Academy there. On her way home, she visited friends in Aurora and there she met Benjamin F. Avery, an industrialist. During the Civil War, the Avery Plow manufacturing buildings were converted into a Union soldiers' hospital and Mrs. Avery would bring the dying into her own home for hospice care. They were outspoken Unionists and family lore is that they were the first in Louisville to fly the U.S. flag despite the threats from the Knights of the Golden Circle. For two years during the Civil War, she toured Europe. There, in 1885, Benjamin Avery died.

Political and reform activities Woman suffrage Susan Look Avery hosted Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell of the American Woman Suffrage Association when they were in Louisville for the national convention in 1881. When the Louisville Equal Rights Association started up in 1889, she was an important founding member. Avery also hosted many reformers at her summer residence, Hillside, once a spa in Wyoming, New York. According to her family, in her later years, she invited and hosted such notables as Susan B. Anthony, Reverend Anna Howard Shaw, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Booker T. Washington. She wrote:

Let us also thank God and take courage, that women, through whom sanitation must come... are thinking and speaking on the subject - the prevention of vice, crime and sorrow as never before; with an earnestness born of conviction of responsibility and the fervent desire to meet it.

Works Response to Florence Kelly, "Household Labor," Figaro (May 7, 1892). "Politics, A Moral Science" "Greedy England," Harper's Weekly (June 1897) Op ed, Wyoming Reporter (December 10, 1898)