Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon | |
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| Born | 2 August 1890  |
| Died | 24 November 1979 (aged 89) |
| Occupation | Economist, pedagogue, political activist |
Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon (born Wadesville, Virginia, August 2, 1890; died Sandy Spring, Maryland, November 24, 1979) was an American woman suffrage activist and labor economist.
Pidgeon was the daughter of Lewis Pidgeon (1859-1951) and Susan Talbott Williams Pidgeon (1860-1943), members of a long-established Quaker community in rural Clarke County in northern Virginia. She graduated from the George School, a Pennsylvania Quaker high school, in 1909, and Swarthmore College in 1913, majoring in English. After college she spent 1914 to 1916 as a teacher at the Media Friends School in Media, Pennsylvania. [1]
In 1917 Pidgeon became an organizer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She worked first in Buffalo, New York and then in Auburn and in the Fifth Congressional District in Brooklyn, organizing events and speaking. After the successful vote for woman suffrage in New York in November 1917, she was sent to South Dakota where she organized, spoke, and worked for the South Dakota Universal Franchise League. Woman suffrage was enacted there in November 1918. Pidgeon was sent next to her native Virginia. She worked in various parts of the state until early 1920, when the Assembly rejected the Nineteenth Amendment. She contributed an article on the situation in Virginia to the February 1920 issue of The Woman Citizen, the national organ of NAWSA. In preparation for women voting for the first time in November 1920, the Equal Suffrage League and the University of Virginia Extension Bureau cooperated on citizenship classes, and Pidgeon became the state director. She continued to run the citizenship program and teach until 1926. [2]
Pidgeon was a member of the steering committee for the foundation of the Virginia League of Women Voters in 1920. She became involved in Virginia politics, supporting a constitutional amendment promoting roadbuilding and becoming a vice president of the Virginia Good Roads Association. In August 1921 she was elected to the central committee of the Virginia Democratic Party. She helped organize a state conference on efficiency in state government in November 1921, responding to a call by the National League of Women Voters, and for much of the 1920s she headed the League's efficient government department in Virginia. In 1924 she completed a master's degree in political science at the University of Virginia, and in 1926 entered a doctoral program in political science at the University of Chicago. In the summer of 1925 she attended a program in Geneva, Switzerland about the League of Nations.
In 1928 Pidgeon left her academic studies and went to work at the United States Women's Bureau, part of the United States Department of Labor. Initially an assistant editor, in 1930 she was made director of the Bureau's department of research, and in the 1940s she was chief of the Economic Studies Section. She was the sole or principal author on over 30 publications during her time at the Bureau. Pidgeon retired in 1956.
Pidgeon was one of the Women's Bureau members involved in the Women's Charter movement, a coalition of disparate groups including Communists and labor activists who opposed the proposed Equal Rights Amendment in favor of a broader document that would also preserve labor regulations aimed at providing special protections for women. The movement collapsed after 1938 with increasing opposition to Communist involvement. [3]
When Pidgeon moved to Washington, D.C., in 1930 she became a founding member of the Friends Meeting there. She served as Recording Clerk at the Monthly and Quarterly Meeting levels, and contributed occasionally to Quaker publications, such as a review of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and other feminist works that appeared in the January 1, 1971 Friends Journal. [4]
In 1967 Pidgeon moved to Friends House, a newly-founded Quaker retirement community in Sandy Spring, Maryland, where she died of a heart attack on November 24, 1979. She is buried in the cemetery of the Hopewell Friends Meeting House near her family's home.
Susan B. Anthony was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society.
The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the United States and its states from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex, in effect recognizing the right of women to a vote. The amendment was the culmination of a decades-long movement for women's suffrage in the United States, at both the state and national levels, and was part of the worldwide movement towards women's suffrage and part of the wider women's rights movement. The first women's suffrage amendment was introduced in Congress in 1878. However, a suffrage amendment did not pass the House of Representatives until May 21, 1919, which was quickly followed by the Senate, on June 4, 1919. It was then submitted to the states for ratification, achieving the requisite 36 ratifications to secure adoption, and thereby go into effect, on August 18, 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment's adoption was certified on August 26, 1920.
Emily Howland was a philanthropist and educator. Especially known for her activities and interest in the education of African-Americans, she was also a strong supporter of women's rights and the temperance movement. Howland personally financed the education of many black students and contributed to institutions such as the Tuskegee Institute.
The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was an organization formed on February 18, 1890, to advocate in favor of women's suffrage in the United States. It was created by the merger of two existing organizations, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). Its membership, which was about seven thousand at the time it was formed, eventually increased to two million, making it the largest voluntary organization in the nation. It played a pivotal role in the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which in 1920 guaranteed women's right to vote.
Alice Stokes Paul was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the main leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage in August of 1920.
Carrie Chapman Catt was an American women's suffrage leader who campaigned for the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave U.S. women the right to vote in 1920. Catt served as president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1900 to 1904 and 1915 to 1920. She founded the League of Women Voters in 1920 and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904, which was later named International Alliance of Women. She "led an army of voteless women in 1919 to pressure Congress to pass the constitutional amendment giving them the right to vote and convinced state legislatures to ratify it in 1920" and "was one of the best-known women in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century and was on all lists of famous American women."
Women's legal right to vote was established in the United States over the course of more than half a century, first in various states and localities, sometimes on a limited basis, and then nationally in 1920 with the passing of the 19th Amendment.
Lucretia Mott was an American Quaker, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. In 1848, she was invited by Jane Hunt to a meeting that led to the first public gathering about women's rights, the Seneca Falls Convention, during which Mott co-wrote the Declaration of Sentiments.
Mabel Vernon was an American suffragist, pacifist, and a national leader in the United States suffrage movement. She was a Quaker and a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Vernon was inspired by the methods used by the Women's Social and Political Union in Britain. Vernon was one of the principal members of the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage (CUWS) alongside Olympia Brown, Inez Milholland, Crystal Eastman, Lucy Burns, and Alice Paul, and helped to organize the Silent Sentinels protests that involved daily picketing of Woodrow Wilson's White House.
Edna Buckman Kearns was a suffrage activist who worked on the 1915 and 1917 New York campaigns for votes for women, as well as the National Woman's Party campaign for the passage and ratification of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution.
This timeline highlights milestones in women's suffrage in the United States, particularly the right of women to vote in elections at federal and state levels.
Women's suffrage was established in the United States on a full or partial basis by various towns, counties, states and territories during the latter decades of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century. As women received the right to vote in some places, they began running for public office and gaining positions as school board members, county clerks, state legislators, judges, and, in the case of Jeannette Rankin, as a member of Congress.
Jane Clothier Hunt or Jane Clothier Master was an American Quaker who hosted the Seneca Falls meeting of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Mary "Mamie" Shields Pyle was a women's suffrage leader in the U.S. state of South Dakota. She was instrumental in the state's enactment of women's suffrage in 1918.
Women's suffrage in Virginia was granted in 1920, with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. The General Assembly, Virginia's governing legislative body, did not ratify the Nineteenth Amendment until 1952. The argument for women's suffrage in Virginia began in 1870, but it did not gain traction until 1909 with the founding of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. Between 1912 and 1916, Virginia's suffragists would bring the issue of women's voting rights to the floor of the General Assembly three times, petitioning for an amendment to the state constitution giving women the right to vote; they were defeated each time. During this period, the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia and its fellow Virginia suffragists fought against a strong anti-suffragist movement that tapped into conservative, post-Civil War values on the role of women, as well as racial fears. After achieving suffrage in August 1920, over 13,000 women registered within one month to vote for the first time in the 1920 United States presidential election.
Women's suffrage in California refers to the political struggle for voting rights for women in the state of California. The movement began in the 19th century and was successful with the passage of Proposition 4 on October 10, 1911. Many of the women and men involved in this movement remained politically active in the national suffrage movement with organizations such as the National American Women's Suffrage Association and the National Woman's Party.
Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis was the founder of the Lynchburg Equal Suffrage League and vice-president of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. She was also one of the founders of the Virginia League of Women Voters.
Sophie Gooding Rose Meredith was an American suffragist.
Lillie Mary Clinedinst was an American suffragist and labor activist.
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