Personal Life
Sedgwick lived his entire life in New England. He married Mary Katrine Rice of New Haven, CT on December 29, 1881. They had no children.
Sedgwick was a supporter of many causes that furthered the betterment of the public and he volunteered his time for numerous charitable institutions including his position of curator of the Lowell Institute beginning in 1897. However, he was opposed women’s suffrage and anything that smacked of equality of the sexes. In a long article in the New York Times, Sedgwick stated his views plainly. He believed that women’s suffrage and feminism “…would mean a degeneration and degradation of human fibre which would turn back the hands of time a thousand years.”
Read more about this topic: William Thompson Sedgwick
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“I was not at all apprehensive about ... disease ... [it] had no terrors for me. The thing I most feared in the world was hunger. That was something of which I had personal knowledge.”
—Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 4 (1919)
“To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)