Background
Annie Nowlin Savery was born on April 14, 1831, in London, United Kingdom.
Annie Nowlin Savery was born on April 14, 1831, in London, United Kingdom.
Annie Savery came to the United States as a young girl. In 1875 she and another woman became the first two women graduates of the University of Iowa College of Law, where she studied the rights of married women. Largely self-educated, Annie read avidly and widely, taught herself to read and speak French, and was a lifelong student of religious thought.
Savery Nowlin is best known as a feminist pioneer and for her early participation in the woman suffrage movement in Iowa, beginning in the 1860s. She made her first speech about woman suffrage in January 1868 in Des Moines. In 1870, she later helped start the first woman suffrage society in Polk County, Iowa.
During the 1870s, Savery Nowlin was on the executive committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association. An Iowa woman suffrage bill was passed in committee in 1870 to amend the state constitution. If it was passed a second time in a succeeding session, the bill for a state constitutional amendment would be released to be voted on by the public. The bill did not pass a second time. Afterward, many activists in the state retreated and the movement was dominated by conservatives. They withdrew support from Savery Nowlin as their spokeswoman. No woman suffrage bill was proposed in Iowa again until 1916, a few years before the national constitutional amendment was passed in 1919, giving women the vote.
Savery Nowlin turned to other fields, acting as a financial partner in establishing a beekeeping operation in 1871 with Ellen Smith Tupper. The bees were kept on the Savery property on Grand. She also donated to the Des Moines Public Library and started a scholarship program for women at Iowa College, now called Grinnell College. She helped reform conditions at the county jail.
In 1876, Savery Nowlin helped raise funds to establish the first public hospital in Des Moines. She was among the many women in the 19th century who were integral to establishing and supporting libraries and hospitals for their communities.
After losing their house to fire and struggling financially during the depression of the 1870s, the Saverys moved to Montana in 1878, where her husband recovered his fortune in mining and other investments. They established residence in New York in 1883, where Savery was treated for chronic heart disease. They also kept ties to Des Moines.
Savery Nowlin traveled extensively in Europe in her later years, as a way of continuing her studies. Facing declining health, in the 1880s she became deeply involved in Theosophy, a kind of pantheism.
Savery Nowlin died on April 14, 1891, in New York City. Her body was returned to Des Moines for the funeral.
Savery Nowlin is known as a pioneer feminist and activist for woman suffrage. She began taking part in the woman suffrage movement in the 1860s, and became a leader in the county and state, speaking widely and helping establish organizations to support it.
After a bill to amend the state constitution for woman suffrage was defeated in 1872, Savery Nowlin worked on other civic interests. She donated to the city public library and helped found the first public hospital in the city.
In 1875 Savery Nowlin and another woman became the first two women graduates of the University of Iowa College of Law, where she studied the rights of married women. She passed the bar and was licensed to appear before Supreme Courts.
Savery Nowlin was posthumously inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame in 1997.
Savery Nowlin was often described by friends and in the press as a person of sharp wit and brilliant conversational abilities, and of a kind and generous character.
As a young woman, Savery Nowlin married James C. Savery, a young businessman and real estate speculator born November 30, 1824, in Massachusetts. They married in Saratoga, New York on January 20, 1852.
They moved to Des Moines, Iowa in April of 1864, then a town of 1500. They bought the log Marvin House for $3,000 and adapted it as a hotel, which she ran for a period. They had a house built on Grand Avenue, where they later did much entertaining.
James C. Savery built a modern hotel with partners, which opened in 1862 as the Savery Hotel. He reinvested revenue from the hotel and by 1870, the value of their real estate had increased from $10,000 to $250,000 (more than $3.5 million in today's dollars) as the city developed and settlement increased. For decades, Des Moines also was important as a city on the migrant trail of pioneers to the West and flourished with trade. The couple sold the Savery Hotel in 1878, and the new owners renamed it "The Kirkwood".
James C. Savery was one of the founders of the American Emigration Company, which recruited and helped settle nearly one hundred thousand immigrants from Scandinavia in Iowa and nearby states. Later he invested in banking and western lands, and in mining in Montana.
