On behalf of the National Women’s History Museum, I wish to extend sincere sympathies to everyone there, especially to her mother, Ruth, whom she honored with her name change many years ago, and to her daughter Alice. Alice, she spoke of you with the pride that mothers have for accomplished daughters. Mary understood the value of grandmothers and mothers and daughters yet to come, and those personal links underscored much of her public work.
And of course, you, Dave – Mary and I spoke several times of how fortunate each of us has been in our choice of husbands! From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being the kind of man who understands and supports and can be depended upon to do the right thing, whether that thing is great or small. I have particularly fond memories of when Mary, you, and your Uncle John came to dinner at our house -- and I want to recognize him, too, and acknowledge again the annual John Crawford Art Festival in Ruskin, Florida, which he endowed.
Such memorializing was always on Mary’s mind, even before she became ill. She was driven by a powerful force to insist that women especially be memorialized, that the achievements of American women be remembered like those of men. As everyone listening to this knows, she spent her life “writing women back into history” as a founder of the National Women’s History Project.
After we became friends, I reminded Mary that our first communication had been when she sent a letter to my publisher, Prentice Hall, which they forwarded to me, in which she heatedly protested my omission of the National Women’s History Project from my American Women’s History: A-Z. I called her and apologized, explaining that because NWHP was only about a decade old at the time, I didn’t yet think of it as “history.” She did, though. She knew that Women’s History Month and the Project would succeed and that NWHP itself would become history.
After that rather rough beginning, we became good – if geographically distant – friends. Mary liked to write and wrote well. I always looked forward to seeing something from her, whether it came from the post office – as did her annual holiday cards – or later, by e-mail. Our exchanges included oddball questions that few others would find worth pondering, but they showed the depth of her interest in women’s history.
Once she raised the topic of colors and flowers in the suffrage movement: was it true, she asked, that white and purple were the colors and white lilies the flower? The creativeness of the query sent me back to the thousands of pages in the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage. The last three volumes were written or co-written by Susan Anthony’s press secretary, Ida Husted Harper -- a Californian who shared with Mary and me an interest in color and flowers -- and there was a surprising amount of information to satisfy our curiosity. Delaware suffragists, for example, used jonquils as their symbol, and when women demonstrated at the 1916 National Democratic Convention in St. Louis, they created a “golden lane” of yellow ribbons and carried yellow parasols. Only Mary would ask a question like that, though. She was unique.
We also enjoyed each other’s company at the 150th anniversary of the women’s rights movement in Seneca Falls, New York. I wrote a book aimed at that 1998 event – which actually was published near you, by ABC-Clio in Santa Barbara. When I listened to my phone messages later, I was thrilled to hear one from Mary, saying that she had run through the Rochester airport looking for a pencil to mark things in the book. It made me so happy to know that she -- who knew so much about women’s history -- found pencil-worthy information. Mary always was learning and loving to learn and more than willing to share ideas and sources.
One of her great characteristics, in fact, was her openness about including others on whatever agenda she was promoting. I still can see her standing at the front of a bus as NWHP participants did a tour of women’s sites in Washington, DC. We were on our way to the house where Mary McLeod Bethune lived after Franklin Roosevelt appointed her as the first African-American to head a federal agency. Mary (Ruthsdotter, not Bethune) explained all this and then spotted me and said something like: “You’re from Florida, Doris, and she was from Florida. Get up here and add to what I’ve said.” Like Eleanor Roosevelt, Mary was a natural networker who immediately grasped who should know what about whom – and she brought it all together to selflessly promote women’s history.
After her retirement from NWHP, she became very supportive of the National Women’s History Museum, which plans to build a museum dedicated to American women on the National Mall in Washington. Mary contributed generously to NWHM, and her family has asked that others do the same. NWHM is proud to include Mary on its Honor Roll listed online and in its Chronicle of American Women. Both of these will be part of the museum when it is completed – and this is the first museum authorized by Congress and located in our nation’s capital. It is right and fitting that Mary would be named in it.
From afar, my love and good wishes to all who loved Mary Ruthsdotter. I shall memorialize her for the rest of my life.
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