Mary Ritter Beard - Suffrage Movement

Suffrage Movement

Beard became involved in the suffrage movement through her activism in labor organizations such as the Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) where she hoped to improve the conditions under which women labored. She came to believe that suffrage would hasten governmental regulation of economic conditions which would improve the lives of the working class. In addition to WTUL, Beard worked for the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later the Women's Political Union) and became a leader within the New York City Suffrage Party (NYCSP) where she helped edit its publication The Woman Voter. She left the NYCSP in 1913 to join the Congressional Union (CU) (later the National Woman's Party) at the request of the young feminists Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, where she became an executive member of its board and editor of its weekly magazine The Suffragist. As an important contributor to the CU, Beard helped plan strategy, organized and participated in demonstrations, lectured, wrote articles and testified before Congress on multiple occasions.