Mary Beard

1876-1958

Mary Ritter Beard joined the New York Women's Trade Union League in 1909 to organize a shirtwaistmaker's strike and two years later to protest the New York City Triangle Shirtwaist Company. By 1910 she was at the center of the Women Suffrage Party's activities, organizing, raising money, and developing propaganda. From 1910 -1911 she edited "The Woman Voter," the official newspaper of the Woman Suffrage League of New York. Due to her concern for working-class women, she discontinued the editorship in order to focus on the Wage Earners League, a working woman's affiliate of the state suffrage league.

When the Congressional Union, a militant suffragist group inspired by fiery Alice Paul, was founded, Mary Beard supported it. And when the union evolved into the National Woman's Party, she stayed on until suffrage was won. In the early 1920s when the Woman's Party turned its primary focus to organizing for the Equal Rights Amendment, Beard resigned because she felt absolute gender equality worked against recognizing the existence of a special female culture.

Her first two books, Woman's Work in Municipalities (1915) and A Short History of the American Labor Movement (1920) were written amidst her years as a political activist. Her work in social reform developed into a study of women's contribution to the development of civilization and challenged the widespread view that women were always subject to and victimized by men. She asserted that, though rarely recognized in history books, women were equal contributors to the building of civilization. In 1946 she published her best-known work, Women as a Force in History, in which articulated her own feminist ideas. Beard is recognized as a founder of the field of Women's History.

Source: Biography from World Authors 1900-1950 (1996)