| Maud Younger |
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Born in San Francisco, California, Maud inherited a fortune early in life, making possible private school, trips abroad, and, in 1901, a trip to New York.
She stayed at the New York Settlement, planning to observe poverty and slums for a week. She stayed five years, and became an advocate of trade unions, woman suffrage and protective legislation for working women.
She took a job as a waitress, first in New York and then in San Francisco. She joined the Waitresses' Union while working in New York, but found that in San Francisco she'd have to organize one -- which she did. Known as the "millionaire waitress" she became president of the union local.
She fought for the California eight-hour-day law, and helped push it through by organizing testimony from affected workers and by lobbying.
She joined the fight for women's vote as well, working on the California campaign in 1911 and concentrating on organizing working women and representing their interests in the suffrage movement. She became infamous for her suffrage float, pulled by a team of six horses which she herself drove.
She returned to New York, working with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union against subcontracting.
In 1913, when the militant wing of the suffrage movement led by Alice Paul began its active campaign for a federal suffrage amendment, Paul tapped Younger as her "lieutenant." The keynote speech at the National Woman's Party founding convention was Maud Younger's. She delivered the memorial oration for Inez Milholland Boissevain. She lobbied Congress, she organized protests and demonstrations, and she wrote for McCall's Magazine.
In 1920, in the last months of the long struggle for suffrage, Younger traveled to Paris where her father was dying. She returned to San Francisco to settle his business affairs, and then returned to the East Coast in a well-publicized (and, given the state of the roads at that time, dangerous) cross-country automobile trip, alone.
She threw herself into working for women in new ways, now that the Suffrage Amendment was law: with the Women's Trade Union League, the Women's Bureau and the National Consumers' League.
She was instrumental in 1923 in seeing that an Equal Rights Amendment was presented to Congress, beginning a long (and, to this day, unsuccessful) legal struggle for women's equality. She died in 1936 in California, still active in that work.
| Maud Younger on the Web |
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The 1911 California Campaign Begins
Maud Younger's role is mentioned in this longer article, giving context to her contributions to the suffrage campaign.
| On this site |
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Text copyright 1999-2006 © Jone Johnson Lewis.
