Lillian Bayard Taylor Kiliani (August 3, 1858 ā October 10, 1940), also seen as Lilian Bayard Taylor, was a German-American poet, translator, and anti-suffragist.
Killant wrote and translated poetry and other texts,[4] including a German translation of Hamlet for Edwin Booth in the 1880s.[5] She was active in several German women's organizations,[6] including a stint as president of the German Governesses' Home Association.[2] She was international secretary of the New York State Association Opposed to Woman's Suffrage,[7][8] and an honorary member of the organization's British equivalent.[2] She visited England in 1909, and reported back to American newspapers that there was "no hope in England for woman suffrage."[9]
Writing from Germany, March 14, 1915, she states:
The women are doing a noble, womanly work in a womanly way, and perhaps the war may serve to show many of them how much more important it is than to try to do the man's work. In times like this, the men on the battlefield and the women at home are proving best how each should do his and her appointed part of the world's work.[10]
Publications
On Two Continents: Memories of Half A Century (1905, with Marie Hansen Taylor)[11]
A Sheaf of Poems (1911, her father's translations of German poetry, interspersed with her own translations of the same poems)[12][13]
Killant married German surgeon and medical school professor Otto George Theobald Kiliani in 1887.[15] They had a son, Richard, born in 1888, and a daughter, Gladys, who died in childhood.[2] During World War I, her husband served as a surgeon in the German army's medical corps, and their son Richard served in an American regiment.[1] Her mother, who moved back to Germany in 1915[1][16] and lived with the Kilianis in Bavaria, died in 1925;[17] her husband died in 1928,[18] and her son died in 1934.[19] She died in 1940, at the age of 83, in Germany.[20] Some of her letters and journals are in the Marie Hansen Taylor papers at Stanford University.[21] In 1925, she donated some of her father's papers to Yale University.[17]