Maud Nathan was an American social reformer, feminist and suffragist for women's right to vote. She was known best for her work as president of the Consumers' League of the City of New York.
Background
Maud Nathan was born on October 20, 1862 in New York City, New York, United States. She was the first daughter and second of four children of Robert Weeks Nathan and Anne Augusta (Florance) Nathan. The Nathans, a wealthy, closely knit Sephardic Jewish family, had been established in New York society since the early eighteenth century. Other distinguished family members included Maud's younger sister, Annie Meyer Nathan, founder of Barnard College, and her cousin, Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo. Maud grew up in New York and in Green Bay, Wisconsin. When she was twelve, her father suffered business reverses, sold his seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and moved his family to Green Bay, where he worked as a railway passenger agent.
Education
As a child in New York she attended Mrs. Hoffman's School and the Gardiner Institute, both private girls' schools. Her formal education ended with her graduation from the Green Bay public high school when she was fourteen.
Career
During the 1880's, she worked with the Women's Auxiliary for Civil Service and the New York Exchange for Women's Work and as a director of the Mt. Sinai Hospital's nursing school. She taught English to young Jewish immigrants at the Hebrew Free School Association.
In 1890, she became one of the first members of the Consumers' League of the City of New York, an organization formed to assist women retail clerks in gaining better working conditions. Nathan's first assignment with the league was to investigate working conditions in retail stores. She had not known that women worked standing up for over sixty hours, for two or three dollars a week. She was shocked by the filth that lay behind the elegant exteriors of New York's department stores and by the petty cruelties that marked relationships between employers and workers. This investigation transformed her from a restless, but unquestioning and sheltered, young matron into "an articulate being. "
After the Nathans' only child died in 1895, Nathan devoted herself full-time to the New York City Consumers' League. In 1897, she became the league's president, an office she held for twenty-one years. In 1898, she was elected to the National Consumers' League executive board. Other organizations, notably the General Federation of Women's Clubs and the Women's Municipal League, also claimed her energies. The New York City Consumers' League accomplished its most productive work under her leadership. It publicized the deplorable conditions under which many women worked in New York stores and factories. It compiled a "white list" of merchants who met league standards for conditions and wages, and urged the public to patronize these shops exclusively. When efforts to appeal directly to consumers did not produce dramatic results, the organization turned to the state for special legislation to protect women workers. The league led campaigns for statutory limitation of women's working hours and a minimum wage for women. Nathan encouraged league members to regard themselves as an auxiliary force of factory and mercantile inspectors. The league's work was not without limitations: The organization was never sympathetic to the labor movement. Its membership policy excluded not only employers but workers, which meant that league members could never engage in meaningful dialogue with their constituents. In addition to being an energetic administrator and a talented speaker, Nathan helped expand traditional notions of philanthropy into a more useful conception of social service. Unlike nineteenth-century philanthropists, she realized the futility of social action that did not attempt to eradicate the basic causes of poverty; and unlike twentieth-century social workers, she did not think reform was the special province of professionals. Nathan emphasized the power of consumers to bring about economic improvements by refusing to purchase merchandise manufactured and sold under poor conditions. When she talked about consumers, she generally meant women.
By the late nineteenth century, women had become American society's primary consumers, and as such, they played a special role in the American reform movement. Signifiicantly, the majority of Consumers' League members were affluent women who had the leisure and the means to devote themselves to reform activities.
By emphasizing consumer responsibility, Nathan was also working to change the image of women.
She served as a vice-president of the New York Equal Suffrage League and worked as the chairwoman of the 1912 Progressive party woman suffrage committee.
Nathan resigned from the Consumers' League late in 1917. She died in New York and was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery.
Women need not be frivolous, she stressed; they could be vital, socially concerned citizens.
In her suffrage work she emphasized that winning the vote was not an end in itself, but a necessary means for women to work more effectively for social and industrial reforms.
Connections
On April 7, 1880, Maud married her cousin Frederick Nathan, a New York stockbroker, but she found married life limited in possibilities for what she called "self-expression. " The birth of her daughter Annette Florance in 1887 helped alleviate her discontent but did not dispel it.