Education
Arnold studied business at Drexel Institute, Philadelphia, and agriculture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New New York
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Mary Arnold
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As young women, Arnold and Reed devoted five years (1901–1906) to farming a fifty-five acre plot. They next gained experience as urban organizers in New York City. Their employer, City and Suburban Homes Company, was a philanthropic organization building affordable, decent housing for the working poor.
Arnold and Reed lacked the social and racial prejudices of the era.
Although the Bureau of Indian Affairs expected them to enforce white cultural values, they instead accepted Karok practices and established a close working friendship with Essie, a native woman with three husbands. They were eager, Arnold said, not to be “ladies—the kind who have Sunday schools, and never say a bad word, and rustle around in a lot of silk petticoats”.
In the decades following their breakthrough experience of independent living and community education among the Karok, Arnold and Reed further developed their skills as organizers and activists in cooperative housing, cr unions, adult education, rural development, and Indian rights. Arnold worked in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Maine, New York, and Pennsylvania.
In Reserve Mines, Nova Scotia, Arnold and Reed helped the mining community establish cooperative housing.
Arnold was an active Quaker and a finance officer with the Women"s International League for Peace and Freedom. Arnold’s papers and correspondence are housed at Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College and the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2003, playwright Lauren Wilson adapted In the Land of the Grasshopper Song for the stage as a musical comedy, with music by Tim Gray, for production by the Dell’Arte theater troupe.
Membership
When Arnold and Reed accepted positions as so-called field matrons on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation in the Klamath River Valley of Northern California, they were charged to exert a “civilizing influence” upon the fewer than eight hundred members of the Karok nation, a vagueness they were to exploit to their own benefit and that of the Karok.
