An excerpt from a book I’m writing about early Unitarian congregations in Palo Alto, Calif., 1895-1934. It’s also part of my series of posts on obscure Unitarians. The first biography is of Sylvie Thygeson, an early birth control activist. Birth control activists in the early twentieth century deserve greater attention, and hopefully her biography helps expand the amount of information in this area. Sylvie’s daughter Ruth was also a birth control activist, but since her life was short and outside the scope of my main research, I only have a brief biography of her.
N.B.: This supersedes an earlier post on Thygeson, and includes substantial additional research.
Sylvie Thygeson and her daughter Ruth
Sylvie Grace Thompson Thygeson
An advocate for woman suffrage, and an early birth control activist, she was born June 27, 1868, in the small town Forreston, in north central Illinois. Progressive activism had a long history in her family. Even her name “Sylvie,” a French name, came from the family’s activism. Her paternal grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, and her grandmother were abolitionists and conductors on the Underground Railroad. When Sylvie’s father was a boy, he met an African American girl named Sylvie who was part of a family of fugitive African Americans escaping from slavery in Louisiana. When his own daughter was born, he named her after that African American girl.
Late in her life, Sylvie told the story that even though her paternal grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister, in the town she grew up in “we were the only family that were atheists.” Although their precise beliefs about the non-existence of God are unclear, they apparently had no formal religious affiliation.
She entered high school at age twelve and graduated at sixteen, after which she taught in a country school. But her teaching career only lasted for a month, until her father died. After his death, she was sent to live with an uncle in St. Louis, Mo. Her uncle, an appellate judge, gave her a job as a stenographer. She later recalled her time in St. Louis as a broadening experience, one that made up in part for her family’s inability to send her to college. As it happened, her uncle also gave her the beginnings of a solid legal education, and she learned enough about law in her two years in St. Louis to later gain her admission to law school as a second-year student.
After two years, she left St. Louis to rejoin her mother and younger siblings, who by then were living in St. Paul, Minn. There she met Nels Marcus Thygeson, a lawyer, and they married on July 17, 1891. Despite her assertion late in life that she had never had any religion, Sylvie and Nels were married by a Congregational minister, not a justice of the peace.
Not long after her marriage, in the 1892-1893 academic year, Sylvie enrolled as a junior in the law school of the University of Minnesota. Her time with her uncle prepared her so well that the entrance examination placed her in the second year class. However, she did not return to the university the following academic year. She and Nels began to have children in 1895, including: Ruth Adelaide (b. April 9, 1895, Minn.); Elling Henry McKee (b. Feb. 26, 1898, Minn.); Phillips Baker (b. March 28, 1903, Minn.); and Mary Ellen Baker (b. May 26, 1906, Minn.).
While living in St. Paul, Sylvie became active both in the suffrage and birth control movements. Her suffrage work in St. Paul was centered in the Women’s Welfare League, of which she was the First Vice President. The Women’s Welfare League also provided financial support for birth control efforts. Around 1915, working with two other women, Sylvie started a birth control clinic in St. Paul. Margaret Sanger came to speak to them, and they found two (male) physicians to work with them, to actually provide the “birth control instruments.” Birth control was illegal. Publicly, they arranged lectures on the topic. Actually providing birth control was done in secret, relying on word-of-mouth referrals.
Her son Phillips recalled that she also was active in other community groups. She was president of the Women’s Club in St. Paul. He also recalled that “she was into all the church activities [at] the Unitarian church.”
At home, Sylvie was the disciplinarian, not Nels. Phillips later remembered, “She was very supportive of us as far as education was concerned, but she was difficult to get along with. She was rough on the kids, in contrast to my father who was tenderhearted with children.” Sylvie had a violent temper and could be cruel and vicious; for example, she repeatedly told her daughter Mary that she was ugly. Once, when her children were grown, during a violent argument she threw a can of tomato soup at Elling. Phillips hated her, probably from adolescence on; yet in her own way Sylvie cared deeply for Phillips, providing essential financial support to him for years, even after he had married and begun working as a doctor.
Sylvie and Nels purchased a summer house at a farm on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. The family stayed there during the summer, and the children loved boating in the lake, and harvesting the many different kinds of fruit they grew on the farm. Theirs was an affluent household with two servants. But in 1913, Sylvie sold the summer house because she wanted to invest the money. Then the investment went bad and she lost everything. Her children resented the fact that she sold the summer house, and then invested badly.
Around 1916, Nels developed cancer of the pancreas. He had an operation at the Mayo Clinic, and the family went to California so he could recuperate. But the cancer recurred, and by early 1917 Nels knew he was dying. The family spent some time at the summer resort in Old Orchard, Maine, then went to Palo Alto. Nels knew David Starr Jordan, and he wanted to give his children an opportunity to attend Stanford University. That first summer, they lived next door to Herbert Hoover’s family, though Herbert himself was overseas with the Belgian Relief Commission.
Nels died in Palo Alto at the end of the summer, on August 23, 1918. Nels’s death led to a significant change in the family’s economic status. Sylvie’s son Phillips later recalled, “everybody had to get out and work. Previously the children in the family didn’t work. We all worked weekends and after school, so it was a complete change.” Sylvie went back to St. Paul and sold the family home and all its contents, then returned to Palo Alto and purchased a house there. However, although the children worked, they didn’t have to help support their mother financially, and she did not have to find a job; they were no longer affluent, but they were still quite comfortable.
Elling, who had spent a year at the University of Minnesota, transferred to Stanford that fall as an undergraduate. Ruth had already received her A.B. from the University of Minnesota, and she entered Stanford’s medical school. Both Mary and Phillips went to Palo Alto High School, and both later went to Stanford. Stanford’s tuition then was just $40 per quarter (about $525 in 2020 dollars), and there was never any question that the children would go there, rather than some other school. As Phillips later recalled, “financial reasons prevented us from going to any expensive [college].”.
In Palo Alto, Sylvie was active with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, as were Annie Tait and Marion Alderton, both of whom were members of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto. Sylvie, too, joined the church, and was listed in the 1919 parish directory. Yet although she appeared on the 1920 membership list, her name was crossed out in the 1921 revision. We can only wonder why she left the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, especially since she had been so active in the St. Paul Unitarian church. But that was a difficult time for the Palo Alto church, when a number of lay leaders grew so discouraged they advocated closing the church. 1920 was also the year Marion Alderton resigned her church membership to protest the pro-war attitude taken during the First World War by the minister and some lay leaders. Marion’s resignation may have affected Sylvie’s decision to end her own affiliation with the church.
In 1925, Sylvie was still living in Palo Alto with Elling, Mary, and Phillips; Ruth had married in 1918, and had moved to San Francisco with her husband. Phillips married in 1925, and the ceremony was performed at All Saints, an Episcopalian church in Palo Alto. Mary was the last to finish her studies at Stanford, receiving her degree in 1928, and she and Sylvie were still living together in Palo Alto in that year. After Mary left home, Sylvie moved to Los Angeles. By 1930, she was living there with her mother, her son Elling, a brother and other relatives. In 1940, she was still in Los Angeles, now living with her mother and two brothers. While in Los Angeles, she continued her social activism, and was a member of the Anti-Nazi League. I was unable to find out if Sylvie joined the Los Angeles Unitarian church, a church whose views tended to coincide with her own, during her years in Los Angeles. Sylvie’s mother died in May, 1946, and Sylvie herself returned to Palo Alto in 1955.
Over the years, Sylvie belonged to a number of progressive organizations, including the Women’s Welfare League while in Minnesota; the American Civil Liberties Union throughout her life. While living in California, she belonged to Planned Parenthood and the San Jose Birth Control League. Sylvie was an early member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She traveled to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1929, and was impressed by the rights women had in that country at that time.
When she was interviewed at 104, she expressed her worldview as being based on the theory of evolution. She also said:
“So I never had any religion [as a child] and I had less after I knew that story — that [when] my grandfather [died, he] had been on this mission of giving spiritual help. He was a minister. He was a Presbyterian minister. He was giving spiritual help to this woman who was dying, and he’d gone across on this prairie and coming back he and his little boy he had taken with him were caught in the prairie fire and burned to death. So I never in the world could have had any religion after that, hearing that story.”
More precisely, she meant she couldn’t believe in the contradictions of a loving Christian God that would allow her grandfather to die while living out his Christian religion. But she had in fact belonged to the St. Paul Unitarian church for many years, a church which did not require her to believe in such a contradictory deity. She was probably a religious naturalist, someone who doesn’t see the need for supernatural deities.
When she turned 100, her children purchased a house for her in Palo Alto, and hired a caregiver to take care of her. Her mind remained sharp but she was quite deaf and had inoperable cataracts, leaving her nearly blind. When she was 105, she had to move in to a convalescent hospital in Menlo Park. As she approached her 107th birthday, she decided she had had enough, and told her family she was going to stop eating. She died in 1975, a little over a month before her 107th birthday. At her request, there was no funeral service.
Notes: 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940 U.S. Census; 1895, 1905 Minnesota State Census; Feminist History Research Project, “Sylvie Grace Thompson Thygeson: In the Parlor,” The Suffragists: From Tea Parties to Prison, interviews conducted by Ralda Sullivan, and Sherna Gluck and Mary Shepardson, Berkeley: University of California, 1975; Beret E. Strong, Seeking the Light: The Live of Phillips and Ruth Lee Thygeson…, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008; Catalogue for the Year 1891-1892 and Announcement for the Year 1892-1893, University of Minnesota; Ramsey County marriage licenses, July 17, 1891; article on Phillips Thygeson, The Proctor Bulletin, University of San Francisco, January, 1983, pp. 1-2; Ophthalmology Oral History Series: Phillips Thygeson, San Francisco: Foundation of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, Regional Oral History Office, Univ. of Calif. at Berkeley, 1987; Alumni Directory, Stanford University, 1921, 1932; Directory of Palo Alto, Mayfield, Stanford University, Ravenswood, and East Palo Alto, Palo Alto: Willis Hall, 1925; New York, New York Passenger and Crew Lists, 1909, 1925-1957, S. S. Majestic sailing from Cherbourg, May 2, 1928; Obituary of Mary Ellen Thompson, Los Angeles Times, May 13, 1946, p. 8; California Death Index.
Ruth Adelaide Thygeson
She was born April 9, 1895, in Minn., daughter of Nels and Sylvia Thygeson. She received her A.B. from the University of Minnesota in 1916, and began graduate study at Stanford University in 1917. She married Dwight Shepardson on August 30, 1918; they had one child, Barbara Anita (b. 1925). Ruth was listed in the 1919 parish directory of the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto; perhaps she was part of the church’s college group. She received her M.D. from Stanford in 1922, and began working as assistant physician for women at the University of California infirmary. According to her mother, Sylvie, she provided birth control information to women there. Ruth lived in San Francisco with her husband and daughter, and died in 1940.
Notes: 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940 U.S. Census; 1895, 1905 Minnesota State Census; Alumni Directory, Stanford University, 1921; Feminist History Research Project, “Sylvie Grace Thompson Thygeson: In the Parlor,” The Suffragists: From Tea Parties to Prison, interviews conducted by Ralda Sullivan, and Sherna Gluck and Mary Shepardson, Berkeley: Uniersity. of Califfornia, 1975; Stanford Illustrated Review, Nov., 1922, p. 112.