Severance, Juliet H. 1833 - 1919 | Wisconsin Historical Society

Historical Essay

Severance, Juliet H. 1833 - 1919

Severance, Juliet H. 1833 - 1919 | Wisconsin Historical Society
Dictionary of Wisconsin History.


physician and reformer; b. July 1833 as Juliet Hall Worth (DeRuyter, New York). She married John Dwight Stillman and in the mid-1850s they joined a migration of Seventh Day Baptists to DeWitt, Clinton County, Iowa. She was active in the anti-slavery, water-cure, dress reform, and dietary reform movements, and earned an M.D. degree in the spring of 1858 from Russell Trall's Hygeio-Therapeutic College in New York City. Late in 1862 she deserted by her husband during their move to Whitewater, Wis. She established her medical practice in Whitewater, embraced the local Spiritualist community (she had become a believer during the late 1850s while in New York City), divorced Stillman, and married Anson B. Severance.

Anson and Juliet moved to Milwaukee where he conducted a dancing school and she operated her medical practice. She was also a leader in the local Liberal Club, and through her close friendship with Robert Schilling became active in the Knights of Labor and Union Labor Party. After those parties declined, she left Anson and moved to Chicago to live among anarchists, freethinkers, and sex radicals. In 1908 she moved back to New York City to be with her daughter Lillian and son Fred. Severance kept up her reform activities literally until her death in 1919. A few days before she died she was volunteering at the Red Cross and writing an article for a radical magazine called The Truth Seeker.

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[Source: Correspondence with Dr. Joanne Passet, Indiana Univ. East (Jan. 30, 2012)]