Anne Lynch Botta

Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta
Painting of Anne C. Lynch Botta, c. 1847
Born	(1815-11-11)November 11, 1815 Bennington, Vermont, US
Died	March 23, 1891(1891-03-23) (aged 75) New York City, US
Occupation(s)	Writer, poet, socialite
Spouse	Vincenzo Botta
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Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta (November 11, 1815 – March 23, 1891) was an American poet, writer, teacher and socialite whose home was the central gathering place of the literary elite of her era.

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Hi everybody. I'm gonna tell you a success story, but first I need to put it in the context of long term disappointment. Every year, 1.8 million children die from diarrhea. That's one child dying every 15 seconds, and that's mostly due to the lack of decent toilets, clean water and hygiene. The thing is that we know that we can do something about this. Through wash services, water, sanitation, hygiene promotion, we know that we could reduce these deaths by 92%. Yes, 92%. That means we could virtually eliminate these things. We could virtually eliminate these deaths. So, what's the problem? Build a toilet, piping clean water, right? Well, it's not as easy as that. The millennium development goals were established because a few years back, 1990, we realized that nearly 50% of the world did not have access to a decent toilet. The goal was that by 2015 we would reduce that disparity in half. Well, we're not doing a very good job at that. At this point it looks like we're going to fall short by about a billion people. And so, again, what's the problem? It sounds like it's such a simple task to accomplish, but yet, it's been a miserable failure, a spectacular failure. Some estimates suggest that nearly 70% of these types of projects fail. And I want to say that it's not just a health issue that we're talking about. We're also talking about dignity, we're talking about privacy, and we're talking about security. Imagine, can you imagine not having a toilet? Can you imagine not having clean water? I mean, it's just something that we take for granted. In Kibera, in the slum where we're working very hard on this problem, water is 5 to 7 times more expensive than it is here in the US. In two flushes of our toilets, we use the amount of water that a person is lucky to have for all they day's needs. In Solongo, which is the particular village where this project that I'm talking about today is, which is a part of Kibera, 42% of the people do not have access to a functional pit latrine. Let alone an improved sanitation, an improved toilet, which is what the millennium development goals are calling for. And unfortunately, the death rate for the kids in the Kibera slum, it's twice that of the rural kids of Kenya, which is also not good. But I promised you a success story. We're working very hard on this issue. And we have realized that we're throwing a lot of money at building things and that's not really working. So now, we're focusing on the people. We're working hard to empower Kiberans to work within their community to become entrepreneurs, hygiene promoters, water advocates, and toilet facility managers. This is a project that we're very proud to say is a ground-up approach, it's a participatory approach and it's an approach that we believe is sustainable. So, let me just take you back and I'm going to tell you a little bit about one part of our program. I wish I had time to tell you about the whole thing but we don't today. So I'm just going to focus on one aspect of our hygiene program, and so I can give you an example of what I mean when I say "focus on the people." A couple of summers ago, I took a group of DU students, every summer I take a group of DU graduate students with me to Kibera to work on this issue. Couple of summers ago we went there to look at what was going on in terms of hygiene within the community. Our students from DU worked with students from the University of Nairobi, and they studied what it is that people thought about hygiene practices like washing your hands, like purifying your water, and they wanted to find out what are some of the reasons why, perhaps, or what are some barriers to people being able to do those things. And one of the things that they found was that cost was a big barrier, not a big surprise, right? The cost of bar soap, for example, is way too much, hence people weren't buying bar soap, and they weren't washing their hands, which means they weren't being able to prevent diarrhea. And so, well, we learned that there was a woman in another slum, across town, who was making her own homemade liquid soap. And so we thought, "Well, let's go check that out!" We went over there, and she showed us what she was doing, she gave us her recipe, brought us over to the place where she was buying the ingredients, and so we bought a batch of the ingredients ourselves, and brought it back to Kibera, to see what the folks there thought about this. I also talked to a kind of friend of mine who was a chemical engineer, who looked at the recipe and said, "Yeah, you know this is a pretty common liquid soap recipe, and yes, this will work just as good as bar soap for hygiene." So great, right? And the best part, of course, was that the ingredients were very very inexpensive. So we thought, "Okay, great", I mean if people will like this soap, then this might actually be our way to reduce that barrier in terms of cost, it costs a lot less than bar soap and maybe this is the way to help people to be able to practice hygiene. And so, we devised a plan. I want to introduce you to Helen, as a part of telling my story. Helen is a pretty typical woman in Kibera, she is a single mom, she has two girls, and she makes money by doing women's hair, but it's not enough to pay her bills. She has an abusive boyfriend who pays her rent, and he doesn't live with her, but she would really like to be able to afford her own rent so that she can get out from that situation. And like most women in Kibera, she really wants to be able to do more for her children. So, Helen came to our soap demonstration. We brought a bunch of women in and we said, "Let's try this, let's make this soap." We did the demonstration, and everybody seemed to like the soap, they thought it was really great like how foamy it was, they liked the fact that you could do different colours, and so it seemed to be that people were willing to at least give it a try. We sent everybody home with a full baggy of soap, to try it home and see what they thought about it. Well, Helen came up to us afterwards and said to me, "I would like to make a batch and sell this." I said, "Sell it? What do you mean, sell it? You think people would buy it?" and I'm thinking in my head, "Okay, we have to add a profit onto this cost, right? Do you think people are actually gonna do that?" And Helen says, "Oh yeah, I think people will pay twice what this cost." So I'm thinking, "Okay, Helen, you are brilliant, right? If this works, this is going to be fabulous! We can have women selling soap, and at the same time they're encouraging people to use soap, right? The more people that use soap, the more people have the opportunity to go to work because they are not sick, because they're not getting diarrhea, the more kids can go to school, more kids can make it to their 5th birthday." So, this is fantastic, right? So we say, "Okay, sure, we'll buy you a batch and let's see how this goes." So we gave Helen a batch, and she made it, and she went out and sold it all right away. Of course, Helen was right. So, we devised a plan. We worked with the women in the community to come up with a plan of how we could do this more broadly. We, as a part of our program there, we have a participatory hygiene education program, in which we are working with the community health workers -- there are one hundred community workers in this community -- and they each are assigned to 20 households and they work with the Ministry of Health on a variety of kinds of health things. And so we are already working with them to train them to be trainers. So it's the "Train the trainer" program. The idea is that we want to train them to be the hygiene educators in the community, so that we can leave and go on to another community. So we thought, well, what if not only were they promoting hygiene, if through those trainings, well what if they were also promoting hygiene by selling hygiene products? And so, we devised a plan to have the community health workers sell the soap, to make them sell the soap. They've been doing this since July, and they've been able to make at least 50% profit on every batch, and that 50% profit on one batch of soap is the equivalent of a half-a-month's rent, in Kibera. So, it's going pretty well, and they're pretty happy about it, and so are we, I have to say. And here's an example of a man, using one of our hygiene -- This is a hand washing station and it's outside of one of our toilet facilities, and that's one of our bottles of liquid soap. So another thing about this was that they also figured out that they could put the soap, hold the soap in discarded water bottles, which we all know is a huge problem all over the globe, in Kenya too. And so it's nice it terms of, It helps with the discarded water bottles, but it also allows them to have different sizes, so they can sell soap in different sizes, different quantities, which has also worked out really well. You know, we can reduce these deaths by 92%, if we have water, sanitation and hygiene services; we know that. The problem that we have had is that we haven't been able to make these programs sustainable. And so, that's why we believe now that we need to not just focus on programs. We need to invest in people. People like Helen. We can save 1.4 million children's lives every year if we can do this right, and that's what we're trying to do. So here's Helen again. We just talked to Helen this weekend, and she's still selling soap, she has a lot more competition now with soap sales, because we have all these community health workers also selling, so she's actually moved over to the next village, and she's selling soap there, and she has a regular set of customers. She's using the money to pay for expenses for her girls to go to school, and she's also using it for food. And she really hopes that eventually she can move into her own place. She's working toward that goal. Helen is really happy about the changes that she's seeing in her community -- Oh, one thing I didn't mention is that we have found through our research that hand washing is up, and diarrhea is down, which is fabulous. And Helen is really happy about the changes that she's seeing in her community, and these are changes that she helped bring about, I have to say. And so, I just want to end by saying that we need to invest in a lot more Helen’s, so that we can have more sustainable programs, that are really going to make a difference. Thank you. (Applause)

Biography

Early life

She was born Anne Charlotte Lynch in Bennington, Vermont. Her father was Patrick Lynch (died 1819), of Dublin, Ireland, who took part in the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798.^[1] For this, he was imprisoned and then banished from Ireland. He came to the United States at the age of 18, eventually making his way to Bennington where he set up a dry-goods business, and where he met his future wife, Charlotte Gray (1789-1873), daughter of Revolutionary War veteran Lt. Col. Ebenezer Gray (1743-1795). Patrick Lynch and Charlotte Gray married in 1812. Along with their daughter Anne, they had a son, Thomas Rawson Lynch (1813-1845).^[2]

Lynch's father died in 1819, shipwrecked off the coast of Puerto Principe, in the West Indies.^[3] After the death of her father, the family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where Anne and her brother were sent to the best schools. When she was sixteen she was sent to the Albany Female Academy, where she graduated with high honors in 1834 and stayed there as a teacher for a few years.^[3]

Literary society

She moved to Providence, Rhode Island with her mother in 1838, where she continued to teach. In 1841, she compiled and edited "The Rhode Island Book",^[1] a collection of poems and verse from the best regional writers of the time, including two poems of her own. She also began to invite these writers to her home for her evening receptions. It was said in 1843, that "the very best literary society of Providence could be found in the parlor of Miss Lynch".^[3]

In 1845, Lynch met the famed actress Fanny Kemble, who became very attached to her and introduced her to a wider circle of literary friends".^[3] In the same year she moved to Manhattan with her mother. She began teaching English composition at the Brooklyn Academy for Young Ladies;^[4] she continued her writing and was published in periodicals such as the New-York Mirror, The Gift, the Diadem, Home Journal, and the Democratic Review. In New York, she also continued her literary receptions which she held every Saturday evening.^[3] It was at one of these receptions that she introduced the unknown Edgar Allan Poe to the literary society of New York. In 1848, her book "Poems" by Anne C. Lynch, was published by George P. Putnam. Edgar Allan Poe said of her: "She is chivalric, self-sacrificing, equal to any fate, capable even of martyrdom, in whatever should seem to her a holy cause. She has a hobby, and this is, the idea of duty."^[3]

Anne Lynch lived in Washington DC from 1850 to 1853, while serving as the personal secretary to Senator Henry Clay.^[5]

Marriage

Lynch traveled to Europe in 1853, where she met Vincenzo Botta,^[6] an Italian professor of philosophy in Turin.^[3] They married in 1855. Mrs. Botta told an intimate friend of her marriage, "it satisfied her judgement, pleased her fancy, and, above all, filled her heart".^[3]

Evening receptions

For many years she was a well-known and popular leader in society. She hosted intellectual gatherings at her home on West 37th Street.^[1] Unlike other salons, which had more to do with seeing and being seen by the high society of New York, her receptions provided a creative space in which artists could meet and collaborate.^[7] It was said of her salons that no one was either neglected or treated like a celebrity, and every one went away feeling stimulated, refreshed, and happy.^[1] At Mrs. Botta's receptions every Saturday night, attendees would find the most well-known writers, actors and artists, such as Poe, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott,^[8] Horace Greeley, Richard Henry Stoddard, Andrew Carnegie, Mary Mapes Dodge, Julia Ward Howe, Charles Butler, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Delia Bacon, Grace Greenwood, Bayard Taylor, William Cullen Bryant, Helen Hunt Jackson, actress Fanny Kemble, Daniel Webster, and many more.^[1] Her friend Kate Sanborn started her literary lecturing career at these receptions. Said a Boston writer: "It was not so much what Mrs. Botta did for literature with her own pen, as what she helped others to do, that will make her name a part of the literary history of the country."^[3]

Later life

In 1860, Mrs. Botta published the Handbook of Universal Literature, which contained concise accounts of authors and their work. She wrote: "This work was begun many years ago, as a literary exercise, to meet the personal requirements of the writer."^[9] This book was used as a text book in many educational institutions.^[10]

She was also a sculptor of portrait busts. Her sculpture of Charles Butler, done in marble, was donated to New York University.^[3] She said: "Beauty in art, in my opinion, does not consist in simply copying nature, but in retaining the true features of the subject, and breathing on them a breath of spiritual life, which should bring them up to their ideal form."^[3]

An example of her poetry which showed her interest in literature:

IN THE LIBRARY

Speak low, tread softly through these halls;

Here genius lives enshrined,

Here reign, in silent majesty,

The monarchs of the mind.

A mighty spirit-host they come

From every age and clime;

Above the buried wrecks of years

They breast the tide of Time.

And In their presence-chamber here

They hold their regal state,

And round them throng a noble train,

The gifted and the great.

Anne Charlotte Botta died of pneumonia at age 75. She is buried at the Woodlawn Cemetery in New York.^[3]

Mrs. Botta refused to write an autobiography, so after her death, her husband collected correspondence, poems, and biographical information and had a book published, in 1893, called the Memoirs of Anne C. L. Botta: Written by Her Friends.^[1] A quote by her friend, Mrs. L Runkle: "Life was the material with which she wrought." One of her noteworthy legacies is a quinquennial prize of $1,000 she founded at the Académie Française for the best essay on "The Condition of Woman."^[11] She also promoted the establishment of Barnard College.^[12]

References

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f "Memoirs of Anne Lynch Botta". New york University Archives. Retrieved January 29, 2007.
^ "Anne Lynch Botta". WomensHistoryBlog.com. January 14, 2014. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ ^j ^k ^l "Memoirs of Anne C. Botta". Making of America Books. Retrieved January 29, 2007.
^ "Anne Botta". Library company. Archived from the original on 9 February 2007. Retrieved January 28, 2007.
^ See Kim Roberts, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston, University of Virginia Press, 2018, p. 23.
^ "Vincenzo Botta". Picture History. Archived from the original on January 4, 2013. Retrieved February 1, 2007.
^ James, Edward T.; James, Janet Wilson; Boyer, Paul S., eds. (1971). Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, Volume 2. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 213. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
^ Harriet Reisen, Louisa May Alcott: The woman behind 'Little Women', New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2009, p. 253, reports Bronson Alcott frequented their salon in 1856, Louisa Alcott frequented it during her stay in New York the winter of 1875/76, and describes the topics as "politics and literature in three or four languages."
^ Anne C. Botta Biography. BookRags. Retrieved January 28, 2007.
^ "Anne C. Lynch". biography. Archived from the original on 9 January 2007. Retrieved January 27, 2007.
^ Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). "Botta, Vincenzo" . Encyclopedia Americana.
^ Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Botta, Anne Charlotte Lynch" . New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.