Marion Estelle Freeney Eley (13 September 1875–4 April 1954), president of the Virginia Federation of Women's Clubs and of the International Order of the King's Daughters and Sons, Incorporated, was born in Wicomico County, Maryland, and was the daughter of James Cannon Freeney, a carriage manufacturer, and Clara Ellen Covington Freeney. When she was young the family moved to Virginia. Freeney grew up in Suffolk and attended Suffolk Female Institute (later Suffolk College), where she studied history, Latin, voice, and mathematics, for which she earned a certificate of distinction. After teaching for about three years, she married Henry Seth Eley, a Suffolk pharmacist, on 14 November 1899. He served as treasurer of the city of Suffolk from 1919 to 1933. They had one son.
Religion played an important role in Eley family life. She and her husband were members of the Main Street Methodist Church and later of the Oxford Methodist Church, where she sang in the choir and taught Sunday school. For more than forty years Eley (known familiarly as Estelle or Stell and formally as Mrs. Henry S. Eley) was active in the International Order of the King's Daughters and Sons, an interdenominational organization of women and men dedicated to Christian service. She served as president of its Virginia chapter for more than twenty years, beginning in 1919, and as president of the international order, headquartered in New York, from 1936 until 1944. During that time she was one of the editors of its official publication, The Silver Cross. She also wrote articles on Bible studies and religious subjects for other publications.
As president of the Woman's Club of Suffolk from 1924 to 1933, Eley oversaw the purchase and remodeling of a new clubhouse. The club created the city's first lending library, which the Woman's Club maintained in its clubhouse until 1957. Eley served as recording secretary of the Virginia Federation of Women's Clubs before winning election as president for a one-year term in 1925. She served a second term from 1928 until 1930. While president Eley traveled frequently to address women's clubs and conferences in the state and to attend national conventions. During her terms the federation made important changes to its administrative and organizational structure, improved communication between division chairs and local clubs, and continued its policy of encouraging the formation and operation of community libraries. The federation also created a committee on the law and in 1928 began publishing a magazine, Virginia Club Woman, which Eley edited from its founding until 1932. Addressing the annual meeting in 1930 when she retired from the presidency, Eley outlined the federation's objectives with a question: "Has it ever occurred to you that without the UNITED voice of club women, demanding social justice, we would have known little or certainly less, of detention homes, juvenile courts, mother's pensions, scholarship loan funds, county libraries, to say nothing of highway beautification, etc." After her second term ended, Eley became a member of the director's council of the General Federation of Women's Clubs and in 1930 was elected the council's president.
In November 1931 Eley received an invitation from Jessie Daniel Ames, of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, to attend the first annual meeting of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Two days before the conference in Atlanta, Ames telegraphed Eley: "WE WANT VIRGINIA REPRESENTATIVE PREFERABLY YOU PLEASE WIRE WHETHER COMING." Eley replied the next day that she would take the overnight train. The association branded the common justification for lynching, the protection of white women from rape, as false. Just 30 percent of lynchings during the previous decade had been for rape or attempted rape. Eley joined the other members of the association's central council in issuing a public statement that "lynching is not a defense of womanhood, but rather a menace to private and public safety" that "tends inevitably to destroy all respect for law and order." The association enlisted help from local organizations and sheriffs to prevent lynching, which may have contributed to a sharp decline in lynchings by 1938. The association failed to persuade Congress to pass a national anti-lynching law, and it failed in some states, too. The General Assembly of Virginia had enacted an anti-lynching law in 1928.
Eley served on the local committee on charities and corrections in Suffolk and in the Co-operative Education Association of Virginia, the Virginia Tuberculosis Association, and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. She was also a vice president of the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs. On several occasions Eley stated that she had declined solicitations that she run for the House of Representatives on the Prohibitionist platform. After a series of operations for a brain tumor in 1938, she became partially paralyzed and was confined for much of the remainder of her life to a wheelchair, but insofar as possible she continued to be active in most of the civic and charitable organizations she served. Her husband died on 9 March 1952. Marion Estelle Freeney Eley died of cancer in a Suffolk hospital on 4 April 1954 and was buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery, in Suffolk.
Sources Consulted:
Birth date and first name as "Marion" in Death Certificate, Suffolk, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); autobiographical and biographical material supplied to Sue Ruffin Tyler for "The Women of Virginia" project, Tyler Family Papers Group D, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg (including form for the Southern Historical Publishing Associates, 25 Nov. 1941, with first name spelled "Marian," "a native of Virginia" and self-reported variant birthplace of "Eastern Shore of Virginia," and erroneous marriage year of 1901); biographies in Durward Howes, Mary L. Braun, and Rose Garvey, eds., American Women (1939), 263–264 (first name spelled "Marian" and variant birth date of 13 Sept. 1880), and Etta Belle Walker Northington, A History of the Virginia Federation of Women's Clubs, 1907–1957 (1958), 61–64 (variant death date of 5 Apr. 1954); United States Census Schedules, Nansemond Co., 1900 (variant birth date of Sept. 1876) Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; BVS Marriage Register, Nansemond Co. (age twenty-four on 14 Nov. 1899); presidential addresses in Yearbook of the Virginia Federation of Women's Clubs (1929–1930), 22–28 (first quotation on 24), 97–103; Jessie Daniel Ames to Mrs. Henry S. Eley, 18 Nov. 1931 (second quotation), and Eley to Ames, 19 Nov. 1931, Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching Papers (1930–1942), Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, Ga.; Atlanta Constitution, 22 Nov. 1931 (third quotation); Suffolk News-Herald, 23 May 1936; Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 21 Sept. 1941; Virginia Club Woman 5 (Sept.–Oct. 1932): 2 (portrait); ibid., 12 (Apr. 1940): 29; Commonwealth 2 (Nov. 1935): 17; Sara F. Gugle, History of the International Order of The King's Daughters and Sons, Year 1886 to 1930 (1931), esp. 384–385, 391–392; obituary and account of funeral in Suffolk News-Herald, 5, 6 Apr. 1954; obituaries in Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch and Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, both 5 Apr. 1954; variant spelling of Marian and birth date of 13 Sept. 1876 on gravestone.
Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Kelley M. Ewing.
How to cite this page:
Kelley M. Ewing,"Marion Estelle Freeney Eley (1875–1954)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2019 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Eley_Estelle, accessed [today's date]).
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