Biographical Database of NAWSA Suffragists, 1890-1920

Biography of Margaret M. Fette, 1840-1920

By Sarah Kinane, undergraduate student, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California

Treasurer, South Pacific Conference, Los Angeles, California

Margaret M. Fette was born around 1840 to Henry and Margaret Fette near Boston, Massachusetts. Margaret Fette received an elaborate education as a young woman, and she became a teacher. She used her home as a space to promote education for young children. After teaching for a decade, she retired and moved to Europe, where she became enamored and intrigued by French culture. Her aunt and fellow suffragist, Elizabeth G. Foorde, spent two years travelling with Fette.

In 1885 after five years in Europe, Margaret Fette moved back to the United States, and she began her campaign for woman's suffrage. Fette found her home in Los Angeles, California, where she became close with other reform-minded women and began creating relationships with these clubwomen. The "Mother of Clubs," Caroline Seymour Severance, described Fette as "an admirable organizer, capable and thorough in her own special duty and generous in taking up the neglected work of others." Fette was an early supporter of women's suffrage and worked with Severance and other suffragists during the California and federal campaigns. Newspaper accounts show her support for woman suffrage in 1895 and her membership on the Executive Committee of the Women's Suffrage League in 1902. In 1906, Fette spoke at a memorial for Susan B. Anthony. In 1911, at a meeting of the Woman's Parliament of Southern California that supported woman suffrage by a 4:1 margin, Fette was re-elected as auditor. Fette must have enjoyed the outcome of the suffrage referendum campaign that summer and early fall, as male voters approved the measure in the October vote, making California the sixth state to grant women full suffrage.

Besides suffrage, Margaret Fette engaged in philanthropic and other reform endeavors. In 1895 she with Severance and other reformers on a fundraiser for free kindergartens. She was an avid writer and contributor to the Western Monthly, a periodical that tracked Western expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also served as president of the Southern California Woman's Press Club. Fette was also involved with the Unitarian Church, serving as the South Pacific Conference treasurer in 1906.

Margaret M. Fette was never married and died on September 24, 1920. She was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles.

 

Margaret M. Fette, ca. 1896.
CREDIT: Clara Spalding Brown, "Some Los Angeles Writers," The Editor 4, no. 6 (December 1896): 229.

SOURCES:

Brown, Clara Spalding. "Some Los Angeles Writers." The Editor 4, no. 6 (December 1896): 224-30. HathiTrust.

Caroline Maria Seymour Severance Papers, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

"The Club Woman's Hoe." Los Angeles Herald. October 11, 1899, p.5. California Digital Newspaper Collection, Center for Biographical Studies and Research, University of California, Riverside (https://cdnc.ucr.edu).

Fette, Margaret M. "Clubs and their Uses." Los Angeles Herald. November 28, 1895, p.18. California Digital Newspaper Collection, Center for Biographical Studies and Research, University of California, Riverside (https://cdnc.ucr.edu).

Find a Grave. Margaret M. Fette. Accessed May 8, 2019. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/41263818/margaret-m_-fette.

Harper, Ida Husted, ed. "California." Chapter IV in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 6: 1900-1920. New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922, 35-66. [LINK]

Lawrence, Florence Bosard. "Plans Party for 100th Birthday." Los Angeles Herald. August 7, 1910, Part III, p.9.

Severance, Caroline Marie Seymour. The Mother of Clubs: Caroline M Seymour Severance. Los Angeles: Baumgardt Publishing Co., 1906, p.140. InternetArchive.

Pacific Unitarian 14, no. 7-10 (May-August 1906): Inside back cover. HathiTrust.

United States Census, 1850, 1860, s.v. "Margaret M. Fette, Cambridge, MA." HeritageQuest.

United States Census, 1870, s.v. "Margaret M. Fette, Boston, MA." HeritageQuest.

United States Census, 1900, 1910, 1920, s.v. "Margaret M. Fette, Los Angeles, CA." HeritageQuest.

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