Anne Weston Whitney (1849-1909)
A self-trained anthropologist and lover of folklore and what we might call the paranormal, Anne “Annie” Weston Whitney was always eager to participate in Club activities. Between 1892 and 1908, she held office as a Vice President, Corresponding Secretary, and served as chair of many committees including the Committees on Fiction, the Study of the English language, Ethnology, and Anthropology. Whitney was also the secretary of the American Folk-Lore Society, and she published articles describing Maryland folk beliefs and superstitions. A volume of her writings, compiled with fellow member Caroline Canfield Bullock, was published posthumously in 1925, under the title Folk-Lore in Maryland. While Whitney’s work displays her passion for her subject, she was not especially impartial when observing other cultures. Her essays on “Negro American Dialects,” which can be located among the works we include in our archive, portray Black dialects as degraded versions of “educated” white speech, indicating Whitney’s attitude of superiority toward the cultures she spent so much time studying. Whitney remained a prominent Club member even after she moved to New York in 1908, until her death the following year.
Sources
Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore. Board of Managers Minutes, November 4th, 1909. Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore Papers, MS 988 Box 4 Book 7, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, MD.
Ward, Robert L. “[Family: Whitney, Milton (1823-1875)](http://wiki.whitneygen.org/wrg/index.php/Family:Whitney,Milton(1823-1875)” last modified 19 May 2015.
The American Folklore Society. “Officers of the American Folklore Society.” Journal of American Folklore 9 (1898): 320.
Contributors
Clara Love; Natalie Muñoz