Letitia Stevenson

Letitia Green Stevenson (January 8, 1843 – December 25, 1913) was the wife of Vice President Adlai E. Stevenson I, and thus second lady of the United States from 1893 to 1897. Biography Early life Letitia Green was born on January 8, 1843. She was the daughter of Presbyterian Reverend Lewis W. Green (1806–1863), who was the head of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and Mary Peachy Fry, a descendant of surveyor and adventurer Joshua Fry. She was educated at the Walnut Hill Female Institute in Lexington, Kentucky, and a school near Gramercy Park in New York City. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, she returned to Lexington. After her father died the next year, Green moved with her mother north to Chenoa, Illinois, where her sister, Julia Green Scott, lived. There, she met and courted Adlai Ewing Stevenson, a graduate of Centre College. The pair wed at Julia's house on December 22, 1866. The Stevensons moved into a house in nearby Bloomington in 1869, shortly after the birth of their first child, Lewis, so named for her father. They carefully planned their family in an era before this was common or publicly accepted. Letitia maintained the household in the frequent absence of her husband. Daughter Mary, nicknamed "Bessie", was sickly as a child and eventually succumbed to tuberculosis in 1895. Lewis was also frequently hospitalized due to complications from an injury sustained while hunting. Stevenson traveled with her son to sanitariums across the region. Eventually, Stevenson's responsibilities waned as Lewis married and daughters Julia and Letitia left for boarding school. After a political appointment in 1884 led to a move to Washington, D.C., Stevenson became engrossed in the emerging women's rights movement.