106 Central St, Wellesley, MA 02481, United States
In 1912, Douglas graduated from Wellesley College with a bachelor's degree in English. During her college days, she became active in the women's suffrage movement.
106 Central St, Wellesley, MA 02481, United States
In 1912, Douglas graduated from Wellesley College with a bachelor's degree in English. During her college days, she became active in the women's suffrage movement.
(The book portrays, in layperson's terms, the ecology of t...)
The book portrays, in layperson's terms, the ecology of the Everglades, its important plant and animal life, its long Native American history, the coming of the Spanish, its early settlements, and the modern attempts of drainage and development, typically with disastrous results.
(Marjory Stoneman Douglas begins this story of her life by...)
Marjory Stoneman Douglas begins this story of her life by admitting that "the hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself" and ends it stating her belief that "life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or a longer life, are not necessary."
Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an American author and environmentalist. She helped dispel the centuries-long revulsion that many had for the Everglades wilderness in southern Florida through her writings and environmental activism.
Background
Marjory Douglas was born on April 7, 1890 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, into the family of Frank B. and Lillian (Trefethen) Stoneman. After her parents' divorce (when she was 6), she moved to her mother's home in Taunton, Massachusetts.
Her mother, whom Marjory characterized as "high-strung", was committed to a mental sanitarium in Providence several times. Her parents' separation and the contentiousness of her mother's family caused her to suffer from night terrors. She credited her tenuous upbringing with making her "a skeptic and a dissenter" for the rest of her life.
Education
As a youth, Douglas became a voracious reader and began to write. At 17, she was awarded a prize for a story published by the Boston Herald. In 1912, Douglas graduated from Wellesley College with a bachelor's degree in English. During her college days, she became active in the women's suffrage movement.
Douglas accepted her father's invitation to come to Miami and join the editorial staff of a newspaper he published (that eventually became The Miami Herald). She began in 1915 as a society columnist, work she found largely uninteresting. She soon jumped at an opportunity to escape to another life.
She first joined the U.S. Naval Reserve, but soon found that she was ill-suited for the military life. Granted a discharge, she signed up for the American Red Cross and was in Paris when the armistice ending World War I was signed. She soon returned to Miami and her father's paper, this time as an assistant editor and columnist.
Her column, "The Galley", became a pulpit for her views on women's rights, civil rights, urban planning and most anything else that interested her. The column became widely popular, and by the time she quit the newspaper in 1923 she had become something of a local celebrity.
For the next 60 years, Douglas supported herself through her writings. She became a prolific freelancer, churning out over 100 articles, mostly fiction. Forty of her stories ran in the Saturday Evening Post, and many had environmental themes with settings and characters drawn from her frequent visits to the Everglades.
By 1940, Douglas' attention was focused on the Everglades. She spent five years researching what little science existed about the vast, buggy tract of wilderness, and soon understood its profound importance in the ecology of South Florida.
When "River of Grass" was published in 1947, the book sold out its first printing in a month. The book galvanized public interest in protecting the Everglades against development and made a lasting impact on the future of Florida's conservation and land-use policies.
But a burgeoning population in South Florida would soon threaten to undo whatever progress had been made to protect the Everglades from the encroachment of developers. Throughout the 1950s, ‘60s and much of the ‘70s, the Everglades suffered enormous damage from drainage projects and large agricultural enterprises. At the age of 79, Douglas founded the Friends of the Everglades, a grassroots membership organization that helped stop the construction of a proposed jetport to be built in the Everglades' pristine Big Cypress region.
By 1980, Douglas' tireless advocacy for saving the Everglades had earned her the everlasting admiration and respect of conservationists around the world.
Douglas lived to be 108, most of those years spent living with her cats in her Tudor-styled cottage she built in 1924 in Coconut Grove. Her ashes were scattered over the 1.3-million-acre Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness Area in the Everglades National Park. Douglas' house and property is owned by the State of Florida and since 2007 has been maintained by the Florida Park Service as a lasting memorial to a remarkable "woman who saved the Everglades."
The name "Marjory Stoneman Douglas" will resonate forever as one of the most important voices to emerge from the dawning of environmental consciousness in 20th Century America. A lifelong crusader for conservation and women's rights through her writing and speaking, Douglas will always be remembered as "the woman who saved the Everglades." This is largely thanks to her environmental classic, "The Everglades: River of Grass" published in 1947, and her subsequent grassroots campaign to bring a halt to land-use practices that threatened the region. She was inducted into the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame in 1986 and the National Wildlife Federation in 1999.
Although Douglas grew up in an Episcopal household, she described herself as agnostic throughout her life, and forbade any religious ceremony at her memorial. Douglas tied her agnosticism to her unanswered prayers when her mother was dying. However, she credited the motivation for her support of women's suffrage to her Quaker paternal grandparents whose dedication to the abolition of slavery she admired, and proudly claimed Levi Coffin, an organizer of the Underground Railroad, was her great-great-uncle.
Views
As a young woman, Douglas was outspoken and politically conscious of the women's suffrage and civil rights movements. She was called upon to take a central role in the protection of the Everglades when she was 79 years old. For the remaining 29 years of her life she was "a relentless reporter and fearless crusader" for the natural preservation and restoration of South Florida.
Quotations:
“There was no organized environmental movement until the late 1960s, and little understanding of what ecology is about. Back in the 1920s, a few of us sensed that water was the key to the health of the Everglades, so perhaps we were untutored environmentalists even then.”
"People don't seem to realize that the energy that goes into sex, all the emotion that surrounds it, can be well employed in other ways."
Membership
Douglas served as a charter member of the first American Civil Liberties Union chapter organized in the South in the 1950s.
Personality
Douglas was known for haughtily dismissing reporters who had not read her books and asked uninformed questions. She enjoyed drinking Scotch and sherry; as friend and neighbor Helen Muir remembered her. Douglas never learned to drive and never owned a car. Her house also had no air conditioning, electric stove, or dishwasher.
She was attached to several men after her divorce, counting one of them as the reason she enlisted in the Red Cross, as he had already gone to France as a soldier. However, she said she did not believe in extramarital sex and would not have dishonored her father by being promiscuous. She told Klinkenberg in 1992, frankly, that she had not had sex since her divorce, saying "I wasn't a wild woman." However, she was fond of saying she used the emotion and energy instead on her work.
Physical Characteristics:
Despite Douglas' demure appearance — she stood at 5 feet 2 inches (1.57 m) and weighed 100 pounds (45 kg), and was always immaculately dressed in pearls, a floppy straw hat and gloves — she had an uncanny ability to get her point across. She was known for speaking in perfect, precise paragraphs, and was respected for her dedication and knowledge of her subjects; even her critics admitted her authority on the Everglades.
Quotes from others about the person
She would come up and have a sherry, and then I would walk her home, and then she'd walk me back, and we would have another sherry. What fun she was.
Connections
After drifting with college friends through a few jobs to which she did not feel well-suited, Marjory Stoneman met Kenneth Douglas in 1914. She was so impressed with his manners and surprised at the attention he showed her that she married him within three months. He portrayed himself as a newspaper editor, and was 30 years her senior, but the marriage quickly failed when it became apparent he was a con artist. The true extent of his duplicity Marjory did not entirely reveal, despite her honesty in all other matters. Douglas was married to Marjory while already married to another woman. Marjory's uncle persuaded her to move to Miami and end the marriage.
Father:
Frank B. Stoneman
Mother:
Lillian (Trefethen) Stoneman
Friend:
Lillius ("Lilla") Eleanor Shine
Marjory wrote that Shine "remained my first and best friend all my life in Florida."
