This week being the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment I thought it’s about time we talk about Rachel & Co.’s most ardent suffragette.
Marion Weston Cottle was the older sister of Will’s kinda-sorta girlfriend Jennie. Marion and Jennie met Will through their mutual family friends the Clarkes, most likely when they visited the Clarkes in Will’s hometown of Portville, NY in the summer of 1894.
Marion and Jennie returned to Portville the next summer (1895) as well, and appear to have stayed for several months. (I suspect this was at least partially to escape the public attention their family found itself receiving after the girls’ father, a prominent attorney, was kidnapped and held for ransom by a disgruntled former client.)
At the time the letters begin (fall 1895) both Marion and Jennie were studying music at Wellesley, where the two shared an apartment. I only have two letters directly from Marion, but she is mentioned over 100 times in letters from Jennie, Rachel and various family friends.
Jennie’s letters give the impression that Marion was the outgoing and adventurous sister, while Jennie was the reserved rule-follower. Marion’s large circle of friends are regular features of Jennie’s letters (though several of these friendships seem to have been rather volatile). The letters document the many, many concerts, lectures and plays Marion attended, as well as her efforts to secure a purebred Angora kitten and attempts to learn to ride a horse “in the new style viz.: man-fashion”.
After Jennie and Will stopped speaking to one another in late-1899, Marion appears to have gone to work as a clerk in her father’s law office in Buffalo. This may have been due to the fact that her brother Edmund, who had previously practiced law with their father, was appointed as Theodore Roosevelt’s aide-de-camp around the same time.
Marion soon returned to school to study law and graduated from NYU in June of 1904. Around this time she became involved in the College Equal Suffrage League.
Marion passed the bar in New York in 1905, in New Hampshire in 1906 (reportedly only the second woman to do so), in Massachusetts in 1908, in Maine in 1910 and qualified to argue before the United States Supreme Court in 1911. She had law offices in New York, Boston and North Conway, New Hampshire. Despite all her qualifications, she was refused admittance to the American Bar Association due to her sex.
In 1911 she became the President of the National Association of Women Lawyers and associate editor of The Women Lawyers’ Journal - which was headquartered in her office in New York City. The same year she was an official New York delegate to the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in Louisville.
Marion soon became a much sought-after lecturer on the topics of women’s suffrage and “the law of domestic relations” - specifically divorce and women’s legal and property rights.
Just before the US entered WWI Marion made news around the country by proposing the formation of a women’s cavalry unit.
In 1918 she became one of the first five women ever admitted to the American Bar Association.
Marion was a widely publicized and endorsed candidate for United States Assistant Attorney General in 1921, a position that ultimately went to Mabel Walker Willebrandt. She had hoped to use the position to help standardize divorce laws across the country.
For a time after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment Marion gave lectures educating newly enfranchised women voters on their legal rights and responsibilities.
While I’m hesitant to assign labels to people who can no longer speak for themselves, I also don’t want to fall into the stereotypical “just gals being pals” school of history - so I'm just going to state the facts...
Marion never married. She and her Wellesley classmate Cedelia Cox (who also never married) designed and built a summer home (“Sylva-of-the-Pines”) in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in 1903. While the two often worked in separate cities and sometimes lived separately (Cedelia was a music teacher in Boston and later New York, where she shared an apartment with her archaeologist/future spy niece Dorothy) they reportedly spent upwards of six months a year together in New Hampshire pursuing their shared passion for hiking and mountain climbing. According to the social columns of Buffalo newspapers Cedelia was a regular feature at Cottle family holidays, and both are rarely mentioned in the papers without the other.
After Cedelia’s death in 1922, Marion traveled to the West Coast and spent some time in California before returning to New York. She continued to practice law and lecture, and made several outspoken statements in the late 1920s criticizing corruption and the Sacco and Vanzetti verdict.
Marion died on January 28, 1930 and is buried with her parents and siblings in the family plot at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo.
