Ida Rauh was a lawyer, suffragist, actress, sculptor, and poet who helped found the Provincetown Players in 1915.
Education
Rauh graduated from the New York University law school in 1902, "with little hope of practicing law, so closed was the profession to her sexual" She became involved with the Women"s Trade Union League, including efforts to assist in the shirtwaist-makers strike in New York in 1909.
Career
The players, including Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, Eugene O"Neill, and others, first performed in a structure owned by Mary Heaton Vorse in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Later, the group moved to a theater on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. In Provincetown, Rauh directed the first production of O"Neill"s one-act play "Where the Cross Is Made", and in the Village she became known for her intensely emotional acting.
Soon after, she traveled to England to join other militant women in the fight for women"s suffrage.
Returning to New York, she helped Mabel Dodge organize her Village salon and became active in the feminist group Heterodoxy, formed in 1912. In some places, such as Eastman"s home town of Elmira, this was considered scandalous, the "first step on a slippery slope that led to feckless wives of loose morals, easy divorce, and free love".
During her years in Greenwich Village, Rauh supported a variety of feminist causes, among them Margaret Sanger"s campaigns. Arrested in 1916 for distributing birth-control information, Rauh was charged with obscenity and given a suspended sentence.
Rauh left the theater in 1920 to pursue sculpture, painting, and other interests.
A book of her poems, And This Little Life, was published in Her collected papers, including poems, television scripts, stage plays, correspondence, and other materials are housed in the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Rauh was the daughter of Samuel and Rosa Rauh of New New York Her marriage to Eastman ended in divorce in 1922, long after the two had separated.
The couple had one child, Dan, with whom Eastman had no connection for 23 years after the separation.
Rauh, Dasburg, and the two boys lived together until 1927-1928 in New Mexico and in Woodstock, New New York Dan, who became a psychologist, died of a heart attack in 1969 while talking to his mother on the telephone.
Rauh died a few months later.
Politics
Eastman, who edited the left-wing journals The Masses and The Liberator with the help of his older sister Crystal in the second decade of the 20th century, credited Rauh with introducing him to socialism.