Georgiana Bruce Kirby

Georgiana Bruce Kirby (née Georgiana Bruce; 7 December 1818 – 27 January 1887) was an English-born American teacher and writer noted for her work in women's suffrage in the late 19th century. She founded the Santa Cruz Society of Suffragists in 1869.

Early life

Georgiana Bruce was born on December 7, 1818, in Bristol, England. Lack of financial resources meant that she only had two years of formal schooling before taking positions with other families.

At fourteen, she became a governess to an English family, taking her to Paris and then Melbourne, Canada, where she became a school teacher and taught farming fundamentals. She returned to London in 1837 and within a year was working for the American Unitarian minister Ezra Stiles Gannett, who brought her to Boston at the age of twenty.

Life in the United States

Georgiana joined the Transcendentalist community of Brook Farm at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, with her brother where they lived cooperatively. She studied at the school, ran the nursery, and participated in academic discussions with various Brook Farm literary members and visitors, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and Margaret Fuller. These authors and the spirit of transcendentalism had a major influence on her and she began writing during this period.

By February 1844, Kirby had supported Brook Farm’s conversion to the French utopian social doctrines of Charles Fourier. She, however, thought the community had lost its spontaneity and she left to live in New York City. There, she networked with her friend Margaret Fuller, landing a job as assistant to Eliza Farnham, newly appointed matron of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. She worked at Sing Sing for a year, then left New York to teach at schools in Illinois and Missouri, before returning east to serve as a public school teacher and governess in Pennsylvania and New York.