Friday Feature–Reading the “mysterious” Anna Magee
Hugh Henry Breckenridge, Portrait of Miss Anna Magee, 1917, on permanent loan to the Moss Magee Rehabilitation Hospital Center City from Thomas Jefferson University. Photo: author
To honor the death on Dec. 12, 1923, of Anna Justina Magee, St. Stephen’s formidable philanthropist featured here regularly, I challenge her rumored reputation as a “mystery woman.”
That’s a provocative moniker even for “never explaining her actions,” as Thomas Ashcom Jr. and Edith W. Schmidt reported in their 1983 history of the Magee Rehabilitation Hospital.* We often read of Anna’s pursuit of privacy, but what made such “noses for news” twitch and judge her?
There are many published references to her activities during her lifetime, even one she published in a journal, as we’ll see. The press’s inclusion of the stated purpose of some of these makes me think hard about her reputation—and boundaries.
What activities require public explanation? What boundaries are acceptable, suspect or legitimately challenged?”
As we explore her known life today, we can assert her visibility and the purposes of some activities, stated or implicit. Others we simply acknowledge as part of her and appreciate for their cultural consequence.
The first observers to emphasize the breadth of Anna Magee’s engagement, and to stress its novelty for her time, were two male Thomas Jefferson University physicians who studied her within the last decade, the late Dr. John T. Ditunno, Jr. and Dr. Chris Formal. They sought the person beyond her best known act, a momentous bequest to Jefferson Medical College (now Sidney Kimmel Medical College) that led to what is now Jefferson Moss Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in Center City. The two doctors’ resulting papers on Anna Magee introduce many of the points I pursue here.**
We learn much by looking closely at the only depiction of her known so far, her portrait by PAFA professor Hugh Henry Breckenridge seen above. Though it’s easily dismissed as a conventional rendering for any interior, what we know about the project defines the image as presenting a social being in a public space, as we see her today, in the main lobby of “Magee.”
The Trustees of Jefferson Medical College commissioned the portrait to be hung in the College, honoring her gift that funded a named Professorship of Medicine there in 1916. Anna likely had a say in the setting, portrayal and attire since she agreed to sit for the portrait.
The life-size result focuses on the individual without a defined place. Anna fills a dark, ambiguous, possibly domestic interior with a hint of elegant period or historicizing gilt furniture at right. She is palpably present, washed with light that draws attention to the corsage at the waist of her black gown, the jewels on her relaxed joined hands and her skin, culminating in her commanding features. The 74-year-old Anna looks confident, vigorous and engaged. She addresses us with a probing frontal gaze, sharpened rather than dimmed by her pince-nez.
Her apparel draws us, conveying its own messages. This is not attire for a daytime committee meeting. Her skin-baring, fashionable evening gown with arresting, if minimal jewelry (no headgear or earrings) conveys her wealth, social status and contemporaneity even in wartime. The huge beribboned corsage at her waist instead hints at vanity or pleasure (possibly sacrificing comfort or mobility). This formidable donor, the portrait suggests, “steps out” in such contemporary attire.
We’re familiar with such approaches in portraits of society women of her time and class, but how to reconcile this rendering with the inherited description of the forceful “do-gooder,” a devout, private and old-fashioned woman?
The period press gives us a telling example. An article in The Evening Public Ledger (May 9, 1922) reports that she served on the entertainment committee for an event celebrating the arrival of early Swedes in Philadelphia cohosted by organizations that she was deeply involved with, the Genealogical Society and The Colonial Dames.*** The occasion and organizations explain her actions. No mystery. I hope she mingled, dressed as we see her here.
Anna Magee reported her private activities in her memoir of her family published in early 1919.**** There, she revealed she was a member of one of the earliest women’s social clubs in Philadelphia, the Acorn Club founded in 1889 as an innovative forum for women to engage with other women outside the home. Established as a “room of their own” after walks together, the Club enabled women to meet, read and discuss cultural topics at leisure over tea.
Today’s growing studies of such women’s clubs in the United States widen old debates about women’s spaces, long considered the home (either gilded cage or powerful domain), to highlight public ventures for women introduced in the late nineteenth century. Club members’ walks in these prestigious neighborhoods weaken an old stereotype of “decent” woman not permitted in public alone even in daylight, never mind on the streets.
Anna’s membership in the Acorn Club also tells us more about her. With her contribution to social welfare and reform in many areas, as her eulogies and will attest, inclusion in this Club reveals her interest late in life in socializing and having intellectual exchanges with women. What did she read? What did she discuss? How did those encounters shape her views or those of others? Answers may be beyond boundaries. Yet we respect her openness about her affiliation with the group.
Women walking near 1733 Walnut St, Phila. Photo: Phillyhistory.org, Melissa Romero
Even in her late years alone, did she walk to the Club when she lived at 1720 Walnut? The family moved there the year the Club was founded (1889) in a room on Pine Street. Their first clubhouse was two blocks away, at 1504 Walnut Street. We know her social peers strolled her street, alone or in groups. Did she, even in old age?
Miss Anna Magee, you’ve given us a lot to rethink about you and your world.
— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator
* In Julie Berkowitz/TJU Art Historian Collection at the Siegman Archives, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia. Much of what follows draws on this collection. My thanks to F. Michael Angelo, Thomas Jefferson University Archivist, for access to this material.
** The most detailed is John F. Ditunno Jr. and Chris S. Formal, ‘Anna Justina Magee: A Woman of Determination and Vision” (2021). Department of Rehabilitation Faculty Papers. Paper 46.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/rmfp/46
*** “Anna Justina Magee. . .,” GSP Newsletter [Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania Newsletter] (March 2018), 3.
**** Miss Anna J. Magee, “Memorials of the Kneass Family of Philadelphia,” Publications of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania 7, 2 (March 1919), 121.