Maud Wood Park

Maud Wood Park, 1915

Maud Wood Park (born January 25, 1871 as Maud Wood in Boston , † May 8, 1955 in Reading , Massachusetts ) was an American activist for women's rights . She belonged to the American suffragette movement and was the first president of the League of Women Voters . Their commitment was instrumental in introducing the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution , which forbids excluding a person from voting on the basis of gender.

Life and commitment

Maud Wood attended St. Agnes School in Albany . After graduating in 1887, she worked as a teacher for eight years. She then attended Radcliffe College , where she graduated in 1898. During this time she began to campaign for women's suffrage . She was one of the few students who advocated women's suffrage. She was also one of the few young participants in the 1900 National American Woman Suffrage Association meeting . So she founded the student association College Equal Suffrage League and a year later the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government , of which she remained chairman for 12 years. She attended colleges across the United States and was able to form departments of the College Equal Suffrage League in 30 states . In 1908 they merged to form the National College Equal Suffrage Association .

In 1920, the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed, banning gender discrimination in the franchise, giving at least white women the right to vote in the United States. In the same year activists founded the League of Women Voters to represent the interests of women in politics. Park became the first chairman. In 1924 she resigned for health reasons, but remained politically active. In the following years she worked with the Women's Joint Congressional Committee on social and health policy issues. The successes of this lobby group were the Sheppard-Towner Act , passed in 1921 , which guaranteed state funding for mothers, and the Cable Act , passed in 1922 , which made the nationality of married women independent of that of their husbands.

In the late 1920s, Maud Wood Park's health continued to deteriorate. She retired from politics and lived in Cape Elizabeth . There she wrote, among other things, the play Lucy Stone , which premiered in 1939.

Her collection of documents on the women's rights movement, which she donated to Radcliffe College in 1943, became the basic holdings of the Schlesinger Library .

literature

• Suzanne O'Dea Schenken: From Suffrage to the Senate. An Encyclopedia of American Women in Politics. Volume 1, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara 2002, ISBN 978-0-8247-7198-0 , pp. 521-522.

Web links

Commons : Maud Wood Park  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Maud Wood Park in the Encyclopædia Britannica (English)
• Maud Wood Parks Woman's Rights Collection in the Schlesinger Library (English)