LETTERS: 15 Autograph Letters Signed, primarily to Stantial, but also to Alice Stone Blackwell, Ellis Meredith, Martha Gelhorn, and Harold Freedman;
Maud Wood Park
Park, Maud Wood. Suffrage Correspondence. 1935-1951.
16 Autograph Letters Signed, primarily to Stantial, but also to Alice Stone Blackwell, Ellis Meredith, Martha Gelhorn, and Harold Freedman; May 12, 1935 – June 15, 1951; many on Eastland Park Hotel (Portland, Me.) stationery, a few on personal letterhead; one incomplete; folding creases; a few instances of wrinkling, one note chipped with no loss of text. Also present are 5 holiday cards and postcards, signed by Park.
Park’s significance to the suffrage movement is immeasurable. As a young woman she co-founded the College Equal Suffrage League, served as chair of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, and was executive secretary of the influential Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government. Her most crucial role came in the final years of the suffrage struggle, when she chaired the N.A.W.S.A.’s Congressional Committee, formed as part of the group’s aggressive “front door policy.” Following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Park became the first president of the League of Women Voters, as well as the head of the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee. She later assembled and donated the historic “Women’s Rights Collection” to Radcliffe College. The materials below relate to these and other activities. (NAW IV, pp. 519-22)
In addition to the highlights below, the letters pertain to the health of family and friends; publication and response to Park’s play, Lucy Stone, which was based on Alice Stone Blackwell’s biography of her mother; travel arrangements and plans; well wishes; and thank-you’s. The letters to Stantial reveal not only a respectful working relationship, but an intimate and affectionate friendship as well. In the last years of her life, Park lived for a time with Edna and Guy Stantial in Melrose, Mass.
Highlights:
Typed Letter Signed, “Maud Wood Park,” to Martha Gellhorn, one leaf folded once; signed in pencil, with pencil annotation in Stantial’s hand, “Suffrage Archive Committee.”
A founding document of the present archive. Park informs Gellhorn that all members of the old N.A.W.S.A. board will be receiving a copy of the same letter, bearing the “good news that Edna Stantial has been designated as official archivist for a documentary history of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.” Park requests that any letters, literature, meeting minutes, propaganda and memorabilia of any sort be sent to Stantial, to facilitate her important task of preserving “a record of our day-by-day struggle for women’s freedom.”
4 ALS to Alice Stone Blackwell, (July 1, 1939 – January 26, 1949), in which Park expresses deep admiration and respect for her fellow suffragist and her collaborator on Lucy Stone. A letter dated September 12, 1944, with the Second World War in its advanced stages, captures the sentiment conveyed in all four:
I can find no adequate words in which to tell you how much I think this world of ours has been bettered because you were born into it.
With all the distressing and horrifying reports that come to us nowadays it’s a special relief to remember your wisdom and courage and your lifelong devotion to the needs of the weak and oppressed.
ALS to Ellis Meredith, October 28, 1948, thanking her for statements and verses which Park and Stantial will add to the Radcliffe Collection of papers related to the women’s movement, and requesting a biographical sketch for the same. Park also makes clear her position on a piece of pending legislation which had been controversial among women’s rights activists since its original introduction in 1923: “I’m hoping that you will do everything possible to bring defeat of the shocking ‘Equal Rights’ Amendment despite its inclusion in the Democratic and the Republican Party Platform.” Park was far from alone in her sentiments on the proposed amendment— many prominent women’s rights advocates, the League of Women Voters, and even
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