Elizabeth Hall Ball 1842-1920
In the press, Elizabeth Hall Ball was referred to as Mrs. F.Q. Ball — her husband was Chief Justice of the Cook County Superior Court. Since her first name didn’t typically make it into print during her lifetime, this article will exclusively use her first name.
The site FindaGrave.com has two short sentences describing Elizabeth Hall Ball: “Suffragette” and “Daughter of Thomas W. Hall and Catherine Moore,” but a little digging in old newspaper articles reveals that she was much, much more.
Elizabeth was born in Ohio in 1842, she graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1860, and eight years later, married Civil War veteran Farlin Quigley Ball. The couple had three children, one of whom died in infancy. They resided in Chicago, Cicero, and eventually settled in Oak Park with their two boys.
Elizabeth was intensely active in her community, particularly with the Chicago Woman’s Club where she served a term as president. Women’s clubs were powerful civic and political forces that impacted policy and laws. The clubs also provided educational opportunities for women.
For 37 years, Elizabeth was the director of the Chicago Home for Girls (formerly the Erring Woman’s Refuge) where she worked on a yearly literary calendar called the Refuge Kalendar which was sold nationally. She was a charter member of the Nineteenth Century Club in Oak Park. She participated in a dizzying number of other organizations including: Rockford’s Federation of Women’s Clubs, League of Religious Fellowship (an outgrowth of the Parliament of Religions at the World’s Fair promoting closer religious union), Women’s Western Golf Association, Suburban Civics and Equal Suffrage Club of Oak Park, the Flower Mission (bringing items to children in need), and fundraiser for Hephzibah Children’s Hospital.
In 1872, as a member of the Humane Society, she helped bring an action against the Omnibus Line on 12th and Clark in Chicago for abusing horses.
Elizabeth was on the Membership Committee of the Chicago Woman’s Club during the year-long struggle over admitting a woman of color, Fannie Williams, to the club. Ms. Williams was admitted in 1896 and served for 30 years.
Interested in environmental concerns, Elizabeth wasn’t shy about voicing her opinion bucking a popular trend of the time, stating, “I am opposed to the feminine fashion of using birds for hat decoration. It is a shame to thus destroy their life…I deplore their wholesale slaughter for fashionable purposes.” In 1897, she stood next to Jane Addams of Hull House at an event with the Council of Jewish Women supporting the passage of a child labor bill. In 1899, Elizabeth was a delegate to the annual convention of Illinois Equal Suffrage Association where an “energetic campaign” was promised. She was also a founder of The Chicago Political Equality league, who once denounced a proposal by the Chicago Board of Education to exclude married women from teaching positions at public schools and increase the number of male teachers in schools at a salary higher than that for women.
She proposed a resolution protesting city council plans to legalize vice and medical inspections in Chicago in 1904. (Medical inspections were quick, mandatory health screenings for immigrants, prisoners, or school children for disease surveillance. These inspections were used to keep schools open and to allow work to continue even if workers were afflicted by disease.)
In 1905, club members spiritedly pushed back against claims made in the book “Turn on the Light” that women who belonged to clubs were committing “race suicide” by having fewer babies. Members pointed out that women in clubs had an average of 3.3 children and that educated women made better mothers. (This did not put the matter to an end — in 1910, Henry Neil, secretary of the Fine Arts society of Oak Park offered a box of cigars to the father of the “next child born in Oak Park.”)
Elizabeth was also found in the society pages. In 1906 she attended Oak Park’s annual open air horse show at Westward Ho Golf grounds on Oak Park Avenue (now the site of the shuttered Mars candy factory). Her travels to visit siblings in Montana and her appearances at luncheons and weddings were also covered.
In 1914, Elizabeth participated in “indignation meetings” held because club members were concerned about the return of actor Charles Dingle to Oak Park. During Dingle’s previous visit he had “a considerable acquaintance among the women and girls of the village.” Ironically, the attention brought more people to the theater. (Dingle went on to act in movies, most notably Little Foxes opposite Bette Davis.) That same year, Elizabeth was a member of the Alice E. Bates Circle which became the Welfare League – women working for “the reclamation of wayward girls, of young boys about to go astray, and of the little children the city streets are sending down the road.”
Elizabeth was known for her ability to bridge the gap between what it meant to be a “modern woman” and an “old time lady.” She died in her home in Oak Park on June 13, 1920. The 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote was ratified by Congress on August 18, 1920.
References: The Inter Ocean, The Chicago Tribune, Rockford Daily Republic, The Telegraph, Travealanche, Oak Leaves, The Sunday Chronicle, Ephemeraobscura.com, The Social Evil in Chicago – The Vice Commission of Chicago, Monroe County Appeal, Great Falls Leader, The Buffalo News, Alumni Directory of the Ohio Wesleyan University: 1846-1901.
Thank you to the Oak Park Historical Society for their help.