Maud Younger was an American suffragist, feminist, and labor activist.
Background
Younger was born on January 10, 1870 in San Francisco, California, one of five children (four girls and a boy) of a dentist, William John Younger and his first wife, Annie Maria (Lane) Younger. Her mother died when Maud was twelve years old. It was a prosperous, well-connected family; two of her sisters married Austrian barons, and her father moved to Paris in 1900.
Education
Younger was educated in private schools in San Francisco and New York City. But social reform was in the air, and one summer early in the 1900's the young socialite stopped off on her way to Europe to spend a week at the College Settlement in New York. She stayed there for five years.
Career
Seeking to better working conditions for women, Younger became a waitress, joined a union, and after spending most of one summer on the job published an account of her experiences in one of the leading reform magazines of the period, McClure's, under the title "Diary of an Amateur Waitress: An Industrial Problem from the Worker's Point of View" (March, April 1907). On her return to San Francisco she joined the local waitresses' union and became its president. Her interest in the working woman afterwards led her to become active in the Women's Trade Union League and the National Consumers' League. In 1911 she was one of the leaders in securing the passage by the California legislature of an eight-hour-workday law for women. The next year, in New York City, she gave her aid, in the courts and on the picket line, to a strike for better working conditions at Macy's department store (the "White Goods Strike" of 1912). Like many reformers, Maud Younger considered suffrage for women a necessary step toward remedying the evils she saw around her. In 1911, in addition to her work for the eight-hour law, she took an active part in the campaign for a state suffrage amendment, organizing the Wage Earners' Equal Suffrage League, speaking widely, and driving a six-horse suffrage float down San Francisco's Market Street in the Labor Day parade. She had the satisfaction of seeing the amendment adopted by popular vote in that October. She subsequently aided similar campaigns in other states. As her interests shifted to the national scene, she became an active member of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, an organization begun in 1913 by Alice Paul, who strongly advocated that the fight for woman suffrage be conducted at the national rather than the state level. In 1916 Maud Younger was the keynote speaker at a convention held in Chicago to organize the Woman's Party and to mobilize the votes of enfranchised women in the coming presidential election. Meanwhile she had moved to Washington, D. C. , to participate in the campaign for a federal suffrage amendment. Late in 1915 she became the first lobby chairman of the Congressional Union, continuing in that post after it merged with the Woman's Party in 1917 to become the National Woman's Party. Her lobbying, which was based on a detailed card index of information about Congressmen and Senators which might suggest ways of approaching them, was resourceful, patient, and persistent. In addition, her ardent speeches, widely delivered, helped to swing public support behind the suffrage cause. In 1917, when the suffragists resorted to their strategy of "perpetual picketing, " sending delegations of women daily to the gates of the White House with banners proclaiming their cause, she not only took part but rendered significant service by publicizing the wholesale imprisonment of the women pickets, their mistreatment, and the denial of justice to them in the courts. Indignation and sympathy for these imprisoned pickets helped to bring the final passage of the Nineteenth Amendment by Congress in 1919. Remaining active in the woman's movement, Maud Younger served on the advisory committee for the new Women's Bureau when it was set up in the Department of Labor in 1920. In the international field, she played an important role in the founding of the Inter-American Commission of Women in 1928. As congressional chairman of the National Woman's Party she helped in 1923 to launch the proposed "Equal Rights" amendment to the federal constitution, designed to remove the remaining legal restrictions upon women, and campaigned for it until her death. She died of carcinoma at her ranch in Los Gatos, California, where, following cremation, her ashes were scattered.
Personality
A high-spirited, magnetic person, Maud Younger was held in affectionate esteem by her contemporaries in the labor and suffrage movements. As an effective lobbyist, a clear, forceful writer, a picturesque, moving, and witty speaker, potent in molding public opinion, she indubitably advanced both causes.