Background
Dingman was born on April 9, 1864 in Newark, New Jersey, the daughter of James Alva Dingman, a physician, and of Nettie Clyde Beveridge.
Dingman was born on April 9, 1864 in Newark, New Jersey, the daughter of James Alva Dingman, a physician, and of Nettie Clyde Beveridge.
Dingman attended Northfield Seminary, Northfield, Massachusetts (1893-1895), graduated from the New Paltz (New York) Normal School in 1899, and received the B. S. degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1910.
Dingman's teaching career began in the elementary schools of Spring Valley and Brooklyn, New York. Between 1910 and 1914 she taught history and economics at Dana Hall, a girls' boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Dingman abandoned teaching in 1914 because, she later explained, she disagreed with her superiors regarding "certain principles involved in the work. "
She became a traveling secretary for the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), and worked with Florence Simms in the relatively new industrial program that adapted the philosophy of the Social Gospel movement to YWCA work. Preceding the 1910 convention of the world YWCA, Simms had chaired a commission to study the possibilities for YWCA work among working women. The resolutions adopted by the international convention served as the basis for the national YWCA's interest in industrial work. Self-governing clubs were introduced as a means of extending YWCA activity to working women in the United States. This extension work was Dingman's major concern for three years.
In 1917 she was one of three American women selected by the YWCA national board to travel to France to survey conditions among women munitions workers. In cooperation with the French War Department, they were to formulate plans to assist the women. When the war ended, Dingman was given responsibility for all YWCA work in France and Belgium. Dingman was called to London in 1921 to join the world YWCA headquarters as social and industrial secretary of the World Committee. She served in that capacity for fourteen years, visiting more than forty countries in Europe and Asia in the course of compiling information on industrial conditions and organizing programs to assist working women. The headquarters organization sent her to the Far East in 1923 as industrial secretary for the Far Eastern Region, primarily to aid the China National Committee. During two years in China, she served on a multinational Commission on Child Labor appointed by the Shanghai Municipal Council. The committee's child labor code, intended for approval in June 1925, was never adopted because of the clashes of Chinese Nationalists with the authorities in Shanghai. In addition to her YWCA work, Dingman served as a delegate to the first meeting of the Institute of Pacific Relations at Honolulu in 1925.
In 1928 she was an industrial adviser to the Missionary Conference in Jerusalem, where she worked with Richard H. Tawney and Harold Grimshaw, among others, to establish the Social and Industrial Research Bureau of the International Missionary Council. Dingman was a delegate to the World Churches Conference at Oxford in 1937. In 1938 she visited India for three months and attended the All-India Women's Conference in New Delhi. In the spring of 1930, the YWCA transferred its headquarters from London to Geneva, Switzerland, the headquarters city of the League of Nations and the focal point of the work of a number of international organizations. For Dingman the move heralded a second major career transition. In 1931 fourteen women's peace organizations united their efforts through the formation of the Peace and Disarmament Committee, Women's International Organizations, which claimed a membership of 45 million women in more than fifty countries. Representatives of the member organizations chose Dingman as president of the committee. In that post she led the effort to focus public opinion on the disarmament problem, and served as the main advocate for member organizations before the League of Nations. One of Dingman's first tasks was to present petitions bearing the signatures of more than 8 million women to the World Disarmament Conference of 1932. In 1936 she again spoke for women when the seventeenth session of the Assembly of the League of Nations received an international delegation.
When she was reelected to the presidency in 1935, Dingman resigned her YWCA post and devoted all her efforts to promoting international cooperation. One result of her work was her detention in Italy in 1939. Fascist authorities offered no explanation, but Dingman had encouraged League of Nations sanctions against Italy in the Ethiopian war. Intervention by the U. S. State Department led to her release within twenty-four hours. Soon after returning to the United States, Dingman retired as president of the Peace and Disarmament Committee (January 1940). She retained the title of honorary president and continued her work in the peace movement as a lecturer on international affairs.
Dingman attended the first conference of the World Federation of United Nations Associations as an American delegate in 1946, and during that year and again in 1948 she lectured abroad for the British United Nations Association. The United Nations recognized her long-time interest in child welfare by naming her as consultant for the International Union for Child Welfare in 1948. She served as the union's representative to the United Nations until 1954, at which time she retired. She died on March 21, 1961, in Berea, Kentucky.