Background

Doris was born on October 26, 1892 in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, the daughter of Henry Hendebourck Stevens and Caroline Koopman. Her father was a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church for forty years and her mother was a first generation immigrant from Holland.

Education

A deeply religious upbringing pointed her toward a career of public service, and upon graduation from Oberlin College in 1911 she began settlement work in Cleveland.

Career

She became vice-principal of the Oberlin High School. Inspired by the British suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, who spoke in her sociology class, Stevens joined the suffrage crusade. She labored in three unsuccessful state campaigns in Ohio, Michigan, and Montana (1911 - 1913) and then concluded that only a federal amendment would succeed. She joined Alice Paul and Lucy Burns in Washington, as a member of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.

In 1914 this group withdrew from the National American Woman Suffrage Association in a dispute over money, tactics, and temperament. It became the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1916 and was responsible for the most dramatic events in the final years of the suffrage campaign. The NWP sought to embarrass President Woodrow Wilson into endorsing the suffrage amendment. Stevens helped to organize the delegations that harried Wilson. One of the first women arrested for picketing the White House in 1917, she was sentenced to sixty days in the Occoquan Workhouse, but was pardoned after three days.

During October and November 1917, while Paul and Burns were imprisoned, Stevens commanded the NWP headquarters and directed the picketing. During a 1919 demonstration in New York City against Wilson, a man wrenched away a banner and knocked her down with a banner pole. After the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment, she wrote Jailed for Freedom (1920) about the militant suffrage effort.

A personal friend of Wilson, Malone had been appointed collector of the Port of New York in 1913. In 1917 Malone became the lawyer for the NWP pickets and in September of that year resigned as collector to protest Wilson's failure to endorse the amendment. In early 1921 the NWP decided to press for an equal rights amendment. At this time Stevens was in Europe as the companion of the powerful and wealthy backer of the NWP, Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont. From the time they first met in 1914 until Belmont's death in 1932, Stevens sometimes functioned virtually as her personal servant; she made several trips to Europe upon Belmont's summons, wrote most of her speeches and articles in the 1920's, and found her marriage strained by her demands.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was introduced in Congress in 1923. Over the next three years the NWP had to battle nearly every other feminist and women's organization, for these groups feared the impact of ERA on legislation designed to protect women. Defeated in the U. S. Congress, the NWP turned to international treaty to press for equal rights. Stevens was on the NWP Executive Committee and chaired its International Relations Committee during 1923-1929.

Belmont, who had herself appointed president of the NWP in 1921 (although she resided in France), expected to play a major role in the international effort; but she was too old to do so. Stevens served as her surrogate and deputy so capably, energetically, and brilliantly that she incurred the jealousy of Paul, who was the vice-president from 1921 to 1928.

Stevens led an NWP delegation to Havana, Cuba, in 1928 to lobby for equal rights before the Sixth Pan-American Conference. Her address there was the first made by a woman before any international body to plead for treaty action on women's rights.

As a result, the conference created the Inter-American Commission of Women. Stevens was chairman of the commission from 1928 to 1939.

The commission investigated the legal status of women in the American republics and presented treaty recommendations to the Pan-American Conferences of 1933 and 1938. Stevens attempted to present a draft of an equal rights treaty to the signers of the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact in Paris in 1928, but was arrested for disrupting the conference.

She spoke on behalf of a treaty for independent nationality for women before the First World Conference for Codification of International Law at The Hague in 1930. She was the first woman to address the Institut de Droit International (1929) and the first woman elected to the American Institute of International Law (replacing Elihu Root) in 1931.

In addition, she was a member of the Women's Consultative Committee on Nationality for the League of Nations from 1931 to 1936. By contributing to the impression that Stevens was not following Belmont's orders, in 1931 Paul undermined Stevens with Belmont, who then unexpectedly dropped Stevens from her will. Eventually there was a power struggle in the NWP, and in 1933 Stevens became a leader of an opposition faction. This faction, which in 1945 objected to the selection of Anita Pollitzer as national chairman, forcefully attempted to seize the NWP headquarters in Washington in 1947.

Lawsuits to determine legal control of the NWP followed; Stevens lost her suit in 1947 and resigned from the NWP the following year. Another blow had come in 1939 when the Roosevelt administration replaced Stevens with Mary Winslow on the Inter-American Commission of Women. Stevens blamed Eleanor Roosevelt for the removal. The action accelerated Stevens' drift toward right-wing politics. She explained that Eleanor Roosevelt had purged her from the commission "for being ungettable for the Commies. "

She called Winslow a Communist and fed information about Eleanor Roosevelt and Winslow to the vitriolic columnist Westbrook Pegler. She became an ardent champion of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and his anti-Communist crusade.

She died in New York City.

Achievements

• Doris Stevens was a paid regional organizer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association's Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CUWS), she became the national strategist. She was in charge of coordinating the women's congress, held at the Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915. Between 1917 and 1919, Stevens was a prominent participant in the Silent Sentinels vigil at Woodrow Wilson's White House to urge the passage of a constitutional amendment for women's voting rights and was arrested several times for her involvement. She supported passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and worked with Alice Paul from 1927–1933 on a volume of work comparing varying impact on law for women and men. In 1933, her work resulted in the first treaty to secure international rights for women. The Convention on the Nationality of Women established that women retained their citizenship after marriage and Convention on Nationality provided that neither marriage nor divorce could affect the nationality of the members of a family, extending citizenship protection to children.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Jailed for Freedom

    (This collection of literature attempts to compile many of...)

  • Jailed for Freedom: American Women Win the Vote

    ( A firsthand account of the National Woman’s Party, whic...)

  • Jailed for Freedom

    (The Lakeside Press edition of Jailed for Freedom by Stevens.)

  • JAILED FOR FREEDOM The Story of the Militant American Suffragist Movement

    (Factory Shrinkwrapped)

  • book

  • Jailed for Freedom

Views

She fought the roll-back of policies removing the gains women had made to enter the work force during World War II and worked to establish feminism as an academic field of study. She continued fighting for feminist causes until her death in 1963.

Membership

She was a member of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage.

Interests

• In her last years Stevens turned to music. She wrote a number of songs, mostly about growing up on the Plains, and had the pleasure of seeing them performed, recorded, and broadcast on radio in the mid-1950's.

Connections

On December 10, 1921, Stevens married Dudley Field Malone, a noted lawyer, whom she had met in 1916. Despite his early passion for Stevens (Malone had divorced his first wife to marry her), from the start it was a desperately unhappy marriage. He drank excessively, caroused with other women, and even physically abused Stevens. They were divorced in 1929.

On August 31, 1935, she married Jonathan E. Mitchell, a journalist with the New York World, whom she had met in 1923. This marriage was a lasting success.

Father:

Henry Hendebourck Stevens

Mother:

Caroline Koopman

Spouse:

Jonathan E. Mitchell

Spouse:

Dudley Field Malone

collaborator:

Alice Paul

Friend:

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Friend:

Crystal Eastman

Friend:

Max Eastman

Friend:

Louise Bryant