the chief obstacle to a woman's success

Violet Oakley, The Red Rose Girls and more

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The Red Rose girls share a toast (image via Wikimedia Commons)

More than anything, Violet Oakley wanted to live as an artist.

So when Violet met three like-minded women in 1897, she pitched them on a plan: why not share an art studio, work on their craft, skip dating and and instead live together? The women — Elizabeth Shippen Green, Jessie Wilcox Smith and Henrietta Cozens — enthusiastically signed on. They found rooms in downtown Philadelphia, in a house, appropriately enough, named “The Love Building.” 

But the quartet remembered a warning from fellow artist Anna Lee Merritt: “The chief obstacle to a woman's success is that she can never have a wife.”