Elizabeth Mansfield Irving

This is Elizabeth Mansfield Irving (top) and Kate Brownslee Sherwood (bottom). Elizabeth is my great grandmother; the book I am writing is about these two.

Elizabeth Mansfield Irving (III)

 

Progress report - I am really enjoying writing a biography of Elizabeth Mansfield irving, my great grandmother. I now am calling it One Woman's Voice: Biography of Elizabeth Mansfield Irving, Elocutionist & Women's Rights Pioneer and I expect to publish it possibly in February.

My search has been helped a lot by being able to get a whole lot more information. It seems that as these people move into the new century they appear in newspapers a lot more, and many of these have been recovered. There are other results of their making it up into the Roaring Twenties and beyond: they have cars; they discover California; they eventually even get telephones.

I don't mean to be facetious. It's fascinating to study an era when things changed so fast, like ours. They argue about how such changes will affect their social structure. The old newspapers are full of opinions on various subjects, as journalists all seemed to be pretty good writers, and there were lots of them around.

Elizabeth was a performer. Through various accounts I can see her in front of people, people who are sometimes yelling or screaming or demanding an encore. We see her crank out the good poems of the age and stir people up into patriotic feeling. It's really an amazing account.

Elizabeth Mansfield Irving (continued)

This post is to explain a little of my project. Elizabeth Mansfield Irving (1852-1939) is my great grandmother, and mother to my Grandma Margo, Margaret Irving Wallace. She had an interesting life which I will tell about shortly. In fact I am writing a book about her.

Originally I was going to focus on Grandma Margo, because I have an old scrapbook of hers that would fill up a book by itself. That book, I was thinking of calling The Elocutioner's Daughter, just because it rolled off the tongue; of course I know nothing about The Exocutioner's Daughter, or at least not enough to make fun of it, and in fact Elocutionist appears to be a more common term though both are acceptable.

But I found more about Elizabeth Mansfield Irving, in fact enough to easily fill a whole book by itself. It appears Grandma Margo won't even show up until it's over half done.

She happened to come of age at a time when elocution was just becoming big. In fact, for women who were trying to get men to vote for suffrage, they saw elocution as probably the best way to do it. Make very persuasive arguments. Learn how to control your voice. Use your voice effectively.

this was what Elizabeth was good at. And I'm writing a book about it.

To my cousins, Grandma Margo's grandchildren - I will dedicate the book to you. Why not? I've known you all my llfe.

Elizabeth Mansfield Irving

I've been doing a lot of research on Elizabeth Mansfield Irving, my great grandmother. She was born in 1852 and came of age in the Gilded Age - when she decided to be an elocutionist, and was. She was great.

The National Association of Elocutionists has her imprint all over them. Here are some Proceedings:]

National Association of Elocutionists. 1892. Proceedings of the First National Convention of Public Readers and Teachers of Elocution, Columbia College, New York June 27-July 2, 1892. Online: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Proceedings/JXecqYkzmHcC

National Association of Elocutionists. 1898. Proceedings of the National Association of Elocutionists, Tenth Annual Meeting (1897), New York. Online: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Proceedings_of_the_Annual_Meeting_of_the/564VAQAAMAAJ

National Association of Elocutionists. 1898.  Proceedings of the National Association of Elocutionists. 1898. Held at the Odeon in the College of Music, Cincinnati, Ohio, June 27, 28, 29. 30, and July 1. Douglas Brown, Cincinnati. Online: https://books.google.com/books?id=gLINAAAAIAAJ 

National Association of Elocutionists. Proceedings of the National Association of Elocutionists: Tenth Annual Meeting, Held at Buffalo, New York, June 24 to 28, 1901. Online: https://sites.google.com/a/hx.books-now.com/en266/9781331976622-45enhiGErescon74

National Association of Elocutionists. Proceedings of the National Association of Elocutionists: Thirteenth Annual Meeting, held at New York City, New York, June 1904. Online: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Proceedings_of_the_National_Association/XagVAQAAMAAJ

National Speech Arts Association. Proceedings of the National Speech Arts Association: Seventeenth Annual Meeting, Oak Park, Illinois, 1908. Online: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435054844287&view=1up&seq=1.

National Speech Arts Association. Proceedings of the National Speech Arts Association: Eighteenth Annual Meeting, Asbury Park, New Jersey, 1909. Online: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435054844527&view=1up&seq=5&skin=2021

James Wallace

Margret Wallace Leverett

her passport photo, ~1947