The death of Jane Cunningham Croly, noticed in Tuesday's _Eagle_,
involves the loss of a woman of leadership who put a good deal of help
into others' lives. Born in 1829, she began at seventeen to write for
newspapers. Her topics were, for a wonder, practical, the young too
generally beginning with abstract, academical or recondite subjects.
Hers were "fashions" in dress, fads in food, fancies and foibles in
decoration etc. From them she advanced to more philosophical or
general fields, but on all she wrote was the stamp of applicability to
contemporaneous life.
In the middle, later, and more genial period of her life she did more
talking than writing. And her talking was always earnest, direct,
sincere, with a gleam of hope and a note of wisdom in it--the union of
experience and reflection. Had it been reported it would have made for
her a literary name: but she was content, or constrained, to limit her
work to the platform, or to the circle of existence affected by it.
As a clubwoman Mrs. Croly achieved the eminence almost of a pioneer.
It can be shown that a club or two of women had a titular beginning
before "Sorosis," but that was the original society started by her on
the theory that there were opportunities and conditions in club life,
on an educational or literary basis, of which women could well avail
themselves. Mrs. Croly sympathized with the more earnest purposes
entering into her idea, and was in little related to any sensational,
spectacular, or faddish features that may here or there become
attached to it. She was a believer in seriousness, an exemplar of
industry, a devotee to system, and a very remarkably punctual,
effective and straightforward writer. Her flight was never very high,
but it was always progressive, and her regulation of her pen by the
precise rules that govern presswork was entitled to distinct praise.
She could always be trusted to keep within her topic and herself
behind it, and she understood the art of putting things to her public
in a way to discover to them their own thoughts as well as to denote
her own.
To David G. Croly, her husband, long a newspaper man of admitted power
and executive force, Mrs. Croly was a constant help, as he too was to
her. From him she learned not a little of her topical discernment and
technical knack. He was never afraid of ability in whomever found, and
he rejoiced that the sex of his wife, and the novel fact that she was
the first woman in America to write daily for publication, gave to her
and her subjects a vogue he and his could not command in a world of
more and mainly personal work. She survived him twelve years. Their
union was not made any less congenial by marked dissimilarity of
convictions on cardinal subjects.
Mrs. Croly was the recipient of many evidences of the honor and
affection in which her own sex held her, and beyond doubt the
organizations of which she was the inspiring force will pay to her
memory the tributes her disinterestedness and abilities deserved,
exercised as she always was for so long with projects nearly related
to the better equipment of effective womanhood for the conditions and
conduct of life. Her death at seventy-two, after not a little
suffering and not a few sorrows, was not unexpected, though it will be
sincerely and widely regretted. In her last years she was happily made
aware of the love and tenderness towards her which she had richly
earned by service, counsel, and example to the lives of others.