Equal Suffrage.
[Suffrage]. [Woodbury]. Sumner, Helen L. Equal Suffrage. The Results of an Investigation in Colorado Made for the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League of New York State. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1909.
8vo; 282 pp.; + 20 of Appendices; blue cloth printed in gold gilt; t.e.g; binding is darkened along top and fore-edges (apparently where it extended beyond its neighbor books on a bookshelf) and there is wrinkling to the cloth along the front panel’s fore-edge; interior fresh, the book sound; about very good.
First edition. Helen L. Sumner Woodbury (1876-1933), labor historian and government official, and suffragist, graduated from Wellesley College in 1898, obtaining her B.A. in three years. The Wellesley faculty in the 1890s included Katharine Lee Bates, Katharine Coman, Emily Green Balch and Mary Whiton Calkins, all activists on emerging social and economic questions. Helen Sumner, obviously influenced by them, published her first book in 1896, a novel White Slave or “The Cross of Gold” which defended free silver during the Bryant campaign. She interrupted her graduate study at the University of Wisconsin for a 15-month field investigation of woman suffrage in Colorado, financed by the Collegiate Equal Suffrage of New York. The resulting book, “Equal Suffrage” was highly regarded. It is Sumner’s first major book, though she had collaborated with scholars in several historical texts. The study was prompted by the 12-year anniversary of complete woman suffrage in Colorado and was to be conducted in a thoroughly “impartial and scientific manner.” Sumner provides charts, tables and detailed analysis of pertinent questions to support the study. With an introduction by Helen Thomas Flexner.
Sumner continued to support women’s causes. She marched in the important 1913 women’s suffrage demonstration in Washington, DC. She authored important history of labor texts, eventually joining the Children’s Bureau as assistant chief after its creation. She collaborated with Robert Morse Woodbury, whom she married, in The Working Children Of Boston (1922). Later the Woodburys joined the staff of the Institute of Economics, which we know as the Brooking Institute. A pioneer in the field of labor history and labor problems, especially as related to women and children, Sumner’s work was influential. Franklin, pp. 123-124. Krichmar 2033. NAW III, pp. 650-652.
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