Adah Gay Fuller

Social Justice Warrior, Singer… Photographer? I always love when I find out something new – and always wish I could find out more. This is certainly not the most important part of Adah Gay Fuller’s legacy – but it’s still fun to know.

Where do you get the ideas for  your stories?  Sometimes it’s nothing more than an idle conversation.

Over lunch this week, Polly Attridge (our Archivist) and Susan Jarvis (Collections Manager) were talking about a fairly delightful scrapbook filled with late 19th-century ephemera – advertising cards, valentines, etc.  They were searching for an identifying name and came up with “Ada.” “Well,” Polly said, “the only Ada I know is Adah Gay Fuller, and she spelled it with an H. But she might have kept a scrapbook, because she was a photographer…”

What?  I have done some research on Needham photographers, but this was the first I’d heard of it. I did know Adah Gay Fuller as a stalwart warrior for women’s suffrage, but not that she was also a photographer.  It turns out that we have at least 8 photos of hers in our collections.

It should come as no surprise that the documented history of photography, both amateur and professional, is dominated by men. In the earliest days, it was often an itinerant trade, as photographers carried their heavy and unwieldy equipment from town to town in search of clients willing to try out (and pay for) this new-fangled technology. But there were women experimenting in the field from the very start. The earliest recorded photograph by a female photographer is an image known as “The Quillan Leaf,” taken by Sarah Anne Bright (1793–1866) in England, in 1839. Constance Fox Talbot (1811–1880), the wife of photographic pioneer Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) was also making images by the late 1830s. 

By the later 19th century, camera equipment had become less expensive and easier to handle, opening up the practice to many more people. Kodak, especially, took advantage of this new opportunity by marketing their cameras specifically to women. In 1888, they introduced the Kodak No. 1 (“You press the button, we do the rest”), which was lightweight and had a 100-exposure roll of film inside (you  sent in the whole camera for processing).  Their ads featured women with camera in hand, and “Who’s That Kodak Girl?” became a long-standing commercial tagline.

For most women, photography was a leisure activity, allowing them to document their families, homes, and travels. It was a hobby for the financially comfortable. I have written previously about another female Needham photographer – Elizabeth Ladd. There were, of course, also women who made their living behind the camera, most often as working partners in their husband’s studio, or as widows taking over the family business. There was also a growing number of female professionals – photo journalists and artists, who used photography for artistic expression, or to document social action – but that is a long story for another day.

Adah Gay Fuller (1880-1970) was born in Needham and lived here for her entire life.  She had deep roots here. She was the descendant of two families who had lived in Needham since before its founding. On her father’s side, Fullers had held land here since at least 1702, and Thomas Fuller and Robert Fuller signed the petition that separated Needham from Dedham in 1711. On her mother’s side, the Gay family had lived here since the 1650s. 

Adah Fuller never married, and she directed formidable energies into social activism. Although there is a lot less information about her than I would like, the scant sources give an impression of a woman known for her direct and forceful energy. She was a dedicated life-long member of the First Parish. She sang in the parish choir with an operatic contralto that was so powerful that it drowned out the other singers. She also sang in local musical productions and operettas. When she died, at the age of 89, she was the First Parish’s oldest living member.

Adah supported herself as a private secretary, but her main work was social activism and public health.  She was a member of the Glover Hospital Association and of the Needham chapter of the Red Cross. She was an Incorporator of the Needham Historical Society in 1915 (yay!). She was a long-time member of the Florence Crittenden League, a mission organization founded in New York in 1883. The MA branch, in Lowell, provided residential care, skills training, and adoption services for unwed mothers from 1895-2003. But the work for which she is best-known in Needham is her tireless efforts for women’s suffrage. She was a stalwart of the Needham Women Suffrage League, and an organizer of the local campaign to pass the (failed) MA Suffrage referendum in 1915. She organized demonstrations in Boston and attended national suffrage conventions. When the 19th Amendment finally passed in 1920, she and Theresa Dubois (another ardent Needham suffrage organizer and First Parish member) led a victory parade down Beacon Street in Boston.

Adah’s venture into photography seems to be short lived and very specific. .In our collections, there are eight photos for which she is identified as the photographer. All of them date to 1905 or 1906, and all of them are of bridges. These came to us with labels, but there is no way to know if these were all, or what other photos (if any at all) we may have that are not identified as hers. One notable feature of the bridge photos is that they are all taken from the middle of the river, and nearly all contain canoes – suggesting that a canoe party was the impetus for her photos.

I always love when I find out something new – and always wish I could find out more. This isn’t a big thing, and certainly not the most important part of Adah Gay Fuller’s legacy – but it’s still fun to know, and a new (and maybe quieter) aspect of her character to add to the image of the warrior.