By Bonnie Withers

To celebrate Poetry month, I hunted about for UU poets, not so much the well-known, like e.e. cummings, but some whose names are not so well celebrated. That brought me to the Cary sisters, Alice (1820) and Phoebe (1824), Universalists. The sisters were among nine children born to an Ohio farmer and his wife. Although they received little formal education, the parents created a household devoted to justice, equality, and a love of nature expressed through poetry and the Bible. The girls read any book they could find and spent many hours daily writing poems and short pieces about the world around them. While in their teens, their mother, Elizabeth died and life changed with the arrival of a harsh stepmother who disdained their literary efforts. The girls continued to write in secret and soon both had poems published in a local newspaper. 

Alice produced more work than Phoebe and kept offering her poems and essays for publication. After ten years, she finally got paid for one of her poems! Her work became widely read, with praise from the likes of established poets Edgar Allen Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier. Horace Greeley was a great admirer of both young women. 

Eventually, Alice and Phoebe moved to New York, where they managed to live on the income gained from their writing with Alice being the more prolific. Alice wrote long narrative poems, short stories and novels. In fact, there were complaints in some quarters that her pace of production was wearing on folks. Phoebe, meanwhile, wrote less and did more of the housekeeping. Only after her death was her work given more attention. What I appreciate about Phoebe is her ability in caricature which can be found in her long poem, “Was he hen-pecked?” where her strong belief in equality for women is delightfully expressed. 

Although there were hints at romance along the way, these moments didn’t last and the sisters remained seriously devoted to one another all their lives. 

It is hard to appreciate today how well-known the Cary sisters were. When Alice died in 1870, virtually every newspaper in the U.S. carried her obituary. Two of her pallbearers were P. T. Barnum and Horace Greeley. Phoebe, worn out by grief and by two years of caring for Alice, died just six months later.