Martin, Prestonia Mann

MARTIN, PRESTONIA MANN (1861-1945). Fabian socialist and life-long acolyte of Edward Bellamy, Prestonia Mann came to social reform through her acquaintance with philosophy and particularly transcendentalism. The daughter of a wealthy physician and a cousin of the educator Horace Mann, she attended popular liberal lyceums, including Bronson Alcott’s Concord Summer School of Philosophy and the Scottish-born philosopher Thomas Davidson’s Glenmore School for the Cultural Sciences in the Adirondacks. In 1895, Mann purchased land near Glenmore and created her own summer colony, which she named Summer Brook Farm after the utopian colony founded in the 1840s by George and Sophia. Renamed Summerbrook, Mann’s colony leaned less toward intellectual pursuits than collective living, including the sharing of household chores, and discussions about activist reform. Its seasonal visitors included such reform luminaries as Upton Sinclair, W.D.P. Bliss, Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, H.G. Wells, and Maxim Gorky, the Russian revolutionary. A writer in the International Socialist Review described Summerbrook in 1900 as “a chalet built of picturesque spruce logs” where “sisters” and “brothers,” having finished with their daily tasks, spent evenings together reading poetry, putting on dramatic and musical performances, and debating the issues of the day. It was here, in the Keene Valley of New York, that Prestonia Mann met Dr. John Martin, the British Fabian whom she married in 1900.

In 1910, Prestonia Mann Martin published a tract inspired by Bellamy and by her experiences as editor of the American Fabian. Is Mankind Advancing? examines the concept of progress as applied to social rather than material evolution to conclude that few substantive gains had been made since the downfall of Greek civilization. Martin outlined a plan of state socialism that includes the redistribution of wealth and simultaneously calls for the restoration of women to their role as “priestesses of the private, inner life,” that is, the family.

Soon to follow was Feminism, Its Fallacies and Follies, co-authored with John Martin and published in 2016. Even more strident in its condemnation of extra-filial roles for women, including voting and wage-earning, the book claims authority, mistakenly, from the Swedish writer Ellen Key. Popular throughout Europe and the United States, Key had argued for the sanctity of maternity but only through a system of state sponsorship that guaranteed their absolute autonomy from men. In addition to celebrating women’s dependence on men, the authors, like many of their British Fabian contemporaries, endorsed a blatantly racist argument for eugenics, which Prestonia Mann Martin defined as a science of “being well born.” Before 1920, she played a prominent role in anti-suffrage circles.

In 1929, John and Prestonia Mann Martin moved to Winter Park, Florida, where they spent the remainder of their lives. In 1932, after the Great Depression began, Prestonia published Prohibiting Poverty, a short book outlining a “National Livelihood Plan” that depended on eight years of public service, similar to the work-army earlier proposed by Edward Bellamy. Eleanor Roosevelt referred favorably to this plan in one of her addresses.

Martin, John, and Prestonia Mann Martin. Feminism, Its Fallacies and Follies. New York: Dodd and Mead, 1919. Hathi Trust Digital. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015008022173&view=1up&seq=9

Martin, Prestonia Mann. Prohibiting Poverty: Suggestions for a Method of Obtaining Economic Security. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019969883&view=1up&seq=11

Randy Noles. “The Pundit’s Peril.” Winter Park Magazine. (Spring, 2020)