Background
Maud Wood Park was born on January 25, 1871 in Boston, Massachusetts, United States.
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book
Lucy Stone, a chronicle play, by Maud Wood Park, based on Lucy Stone, pioneer, by Alice Stone Blackwell.
(Lucy Stone, a chronicle play, by Maud Wood Park, based on...)
Lucy Stone, a chronicle play, by Maud Wood Park, based on Lucy Stone, pioneer, by Alice Stone Blackwell. is a high quality paperback publication of a historical work on women's suffrage and is a popular title among those researching the historical suffrag
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Front Door Lobby
(The Front Door Lobby was the half-humorous, half-kindly ...)
The Front Door Lobby was the half-humorous, half-kindly name given to our Congressional Committee in Washington by one of the press-gallery men there, because, as he explained, we never used backstairs methods. Our work, which was done in the closing years of the long struggle to get votes for women, can hardly be understood with- out some knowledge of the previous history of the movement. For that reason I preface my account with a summary of events that led up to the final effort for the woman suffrage amend- ment to the Constitution. As early as the Colonial period, an occasional voice was lifted against the current injustices to women. But until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, those protests were merely sporadic. Then, between 1830 and 1850, a notable group of reformers began to demand equality for women. Lucy Stone, who was one of them, used to say that they taught woman's rights by pointing out woman's wrongs. And there were plenty of wrongs to point to in those days. Under the prevailing laws a married woman had no legal right to control her own property, to collect her own earnings or to have any say about the care and education of her own children. Her husband might bequeath to someone else the guardianship of her minor children--even, in some states, of an unborn child. Little public provision was made for the education of girls. In some places they were permitted to attend public schools only after boys had gone home in the afternoon, or, in rural districts, in spring, when boys had to work on the farms. Boston opened its first high school for girls in 1826, and so many entered that the authorities, by some process of inverted reasoning, decided to close the school eighteen months later. It was not opened again until 1852. Up to that time industrial and professional opportunities for women were almost nonexistent. Most of their chances to earn a living were supplied by domestic service and the needle trades.
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Maud Wood Park
Edit ProfileEducation
In 1898 she graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe, where she was one of only two students in a class of seventy-two to favor the vote for women.
Career
Early in her career Wood earned money by teaching in Chelsea High School in order to attend Radcliffe College.
For fifteen years Maud Wood Park was active in suffrage and civic work in Boston. She became chair of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association in 1900 and executive secretary of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government, which was devoted to combining work for suffrage with activities for civic betterment.
A charismatic speaker, Park traveled widely to enlist college women in the cause of suffrage. In 1916 her friend Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association (NAWSA), persuaded Park to join the NAWSA's Congressional Committee and to go to Washington to lobby directly for the federal suffrage amendment. Thus Park led the "front-door lobby" to win suffrage.
Park agreed to serve as first president of the League of Women Voters (LWV), the organization that succeeded the NAWSA. She said that the league's purpose should be to "promote reforms in which women will naturally take an interest in a greater degree than men-protection for working women, children, public health questions, and the care of dependent and delinquent classes. "
Though women's organizations divided in the 1920s, Park helped form the Women's Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC) in 1920, with representatives from nine other women's organizations, and then became its head.
Because of serious illness, Park resigned from the presidency of the league in 1924, but she continued for the rest of her life to lecture and work on behalf of women.
Achievements
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Maud Wood Park became first president of the League of Women Voters. Under Park's leadership the LWV adopted a thirty-eight-point program of legislative measures.
As the head of the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, Park succeeded in winning two important pieces of legislation: the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act of 1921 and the 1922 Cable Act, which granted independent citizenship to married women. The league also served to pressure the Women's Bureau to end child labor and promote social legislation on behalf of women.
Works
book
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Front Door Lobby
(The Front Door Lobby was the half-humorous, half-kindly ...)
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Lucy Stone, a chronicle play, by Maud Wood Park, based on Lucy Stone, pioneer, by Alice Stone Blackwell.
(Lucy Stone, a chronicle play, by Maud Wood Park, based on...)
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Front Door Lobby
Connections
While still a student, she married Charles Edward Park, a Boston architect, in 1897. The couple lived near the Boston settlement Denison House. Charles Park died in 1904.
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Born
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Died
May 8, 1955 (aged 84) -
Nationality
American