Charlotte Odlum Smith

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Charlotte Odlum Smith (née Odlum; 1840 – 1917) was an American reformer, regarded as the foremost authority on women's working conditions. She was a formidable lobbyist for disadvantaged women, and was partly responsible for the mandatory listing of ingredients on food labels. Smith was also a magazine editor, active in gaining recognition of women inventors.

Early life

Charlotte Smith was born Charlotte Odlum in or near the village of

1840 census. After a difficult childhood (three siblings dying as infants, father soon absent, mother supporting Charlotte and her three surviving brothers by keeping boarders, frequent moves interrupting her education), she became the head of the household after Richard's death in the mid-1850s. During this period the Odlums traveled to New Orleans, then to New York City, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, and Montreal, Quebec
, Canada. These journeys were made partly in search of medical care for Catherine Odlum, who was suffering from a diseased tooth.

Before she was twenty, Charlotte was running her own shop in

8th Missouri Volunteer Infantry, disappeared after the Battle of Shiloh; it was never known whether he had been killed, captured or had deserted. Charlotte, however, ran the Union blockade across the Ohio River, and evidently made thousands of dollars doing so. At the same time, she and her mother were providing milk, butter, and nursing services to Union
soldiers in Memphis. On April 4, 1864, the Odlums' house in Memphis was torn down by Union troops to clear an artillery firing path.

After the war, the family went to Mobile, Alabama, where Charlotte opened an enormously profitable dry goods store, and Catherine ran multiple boardinghouses. Here, Charlotte met and eventually married Edward Smith, an Irish-born merchant. The marriage failed, and almost immediately after the birth of her second son, Charlotte moved to Chicago. The bookstore she started there was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1871, and she fled with her children to St. Louis, where she published a book on the Fire, and was soon doing newspaper work.

Editor

By 1873, with another Catholic businesswoman, Mary Nolan, she started her first magazine, the Inland Monthly. This publication was noteworthy in several ways: edited by a woman, but not a women's magazine, containing unusual amounts of science but virtually nothing about suffrage, and aiming with fiction, poetry, and essays at educated readers in general. It ran until 1878, when Smith sold it for a large sum and headed for Washington, D.C.

Lobbyist for working women

While in St. Louis, Smith had been awakened to the woes of the poor, including underpaid workers. She also saw the economic disadvantages of women in particular, and began calling for

Knights of Labor
, and spoke at labor conventions, sometimes as the only female delegate. In 1886 she founded her second periodical, the Working Woman. This was far more radical, and less successful, than the Inland Monthly. Very few issues survive.

On May 19, 1885, Charlotte Smith's brother, Robert Emmet Odlum, a swimming instructor, decided to jump from the Brooklyn Bridge to prove that it was possible; he died in the attempt.[1] Charlotte visited New York on May 28 and spoke to Coroner William H. Kennedy, who denied responsibility for removing Odlum's heart and liver.[2][3]

In 1896 the Women's Rescue League, presided by Smith, passed a resolution denouncing "bicycle riding by young women because [it produces] immoral suggestions and imprudent associations both in language and dress which have a tendency to make women not only unwomanly, but immodest as well".

adulteration
of foods, cosmetics, and medicines. She was partly responsible for the listing of ingredients on product labels.

Female inventors

Smith also became involved in the fight to win more of a role for women in the great

United States Patent Office to issue a list of all female holders of U.S. patents to that date (1883).[6]

In addition to working through legislatures and organizations, Charlotte Smith also took direct action, personally helping many poor women and "underdogs," and providing housing for poor working girls with her own money. During these years (1880s - early 1890s), she was one of the best-known women in America, with hundreds of articles appearing about her in

Boston Globe, and smaller newspapers as far away as Montana and Hawaii
.

The last chapter of Smith's life took place in Boston,

pauper's grave
. Page 11 of the Tuesday, Dec. 4, 1917 edition of the Boston Herald carried an obituary for Charlotte Smith stating the “champion of the working girl and indefatigable crusader against vice and everything else she has found amiss in the world about her, died from pneumonia late last night at the City Hospital. She was 65 years old. She was taken to the hospital last Friday [Nov. 30, 1917] from her home, 36 Oak street, [in Boston’s] south end."

References

  1. ^ Catherine Odlum (1885). The Life and Adventures of Prof. Robert Emmet Odlum, Containing an Account of his Splendid Natatorium at the National Capital. Gray and Clarkson.
  2. ^ "Robert Odlum's Sister". The New York Times. May 29, 1885. Retrieved 2011-07-01.
  3. ^ "The Public "I": A VERY BAD IDEA" thepublici.blogspot.com (Retrieved on July 1, 2011)
  4. ^ "The Peterson Magazine 1896". 1896. Retrieved 4 February 2017.
  5. ^ The Women Inventor, https://archive.org/details/Womaninventor1Smit
  6. OCLC 6530276

Other sources
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