Alice Paul: 

Equal Rights for Women

After she turned 90 in 1975, Alice Paul, co-author of the Equal Rights Amendment, showed a reporter a red, white and blue doll. 

“This is Miss Liberty, who didn’t get her liberty in 1776,” Dr. Paul said. “If you are going to have liberty, you have to have what the ERA is – an equality in everything about earning a living, everything in the economic life of a woman.” 

One of the nation’s most famous women's rights advocates and a part-time Ridgefielder for 40 years, Dr. Paul was then living in Altnacraig convalescent home on High Ridge. The next year, she returned to her native New Jersey, where she died in 1977.

Alice Stokes Paul was born in 1885 in Moorestown, N.J., at “Paulsdale,” a large farmhouse that is now a museum devoted to her life and legacy. Her banker father and suffragist mother were both Quakers who promoted equality for women in work and education. “When the Quakers were founded…one of their principles was and is equality of the sexes,” Paul said years later. “So I never had any other idea…the principle was always there.” 

After graduating first in her class from a private school,  Paul attended Swarthmore College, then a Quaker institution, one of whose founding supporters was her grandfather. Over the years she earned a half dozen bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in social work as well as the law. “I took law so I would be more able to help our cause,” she told Linette Burton of The Ridgefield Press in a 1968 interview. That cause was women's rights, no doubt influenced by that Quaker heritage. 

After two years as a social worker in New York City, she went to Great Britain in 1907 to study and joined suffrage campaigns of Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters. She was jailed three times in England. 

Returning to the States in 1912, she “breathed new life into the ebbing suffrage movement,” her Press obituary said. The National Woman Suffrage Association sent her to Washington, D.C., to direct its campaign for a federal suffrage amendment. She led protests and marches, the most famous of which was in 1913 on the night before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, when 8,000 women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. (Wilson at the time opposed a Constitutional amendment to allow women to vote.)

Paul founded the National Woman’s Party in 1916 and the following year, she and 16 others at a rally were arrested for obstructing traffic and sentenced to six months in a workhouse.  When they went on a hunger strike, the women were force-fed and moved to a psychopathic ward as a way to discredit them. Their treatment sparked a public outcry, and 22 days after their arrest, they were freed.

A year later, President Wilson gave his support to suffrage but it took two more years for the Senate, House, and the required 36 states to approve the Constitutional amendment.

Having a part in the passage of the 19th Amendment “was the most useful thing I ever did,” Paul said. 

Recalling these years in the 1975 interview, Dr. Paul mentioned the song that imprisoned women used to sing, at first in England.  “It was ‘shoulder to shoulder, friend to friend,’” she said.  “We brought it back to this country when we came. And any time anybody went back to prison, we always took our song along.” 

In 1921, Dr. Paul and Crystal Eastman drafted the Equal Rights Amendment, aimed at guaranteeing equal treatment for the sexes.  It stated simply: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

Starting in 1923, the ERA was introduced into every session of Congress till 1972 when it was finally passed and sent to the states for ratification. Only 35 of the needed 38 legislatures ratified it,  the congressional approval expired, and the ERA failed to be adopted. (Current efforts to pass an ERA amendment seem to be in legal limbo.) 

 In 1938 Paul founded the World Woman’s Party that successfully pressured for an equal rights pledge in the United Nations charter.  Two years before her 1977 death, she expressed her disappointment that the Equal Rights Amendment had not been adopted. “The great victory was getting the vote,” she had said. But “it’s unthinkable that we can’t complete it with economic equality.”

Dr. Paul had a home at 513 Branchville Road from the 1930s until 1976. Overlooking John’s Pond, the place was chiefly a retreat where she could rest from her busy work schedule in Washington.

Alice Paul is widely recognized today, especially on the occasion of the centennial of the 19th Amendment. “Few individuals have had as much impact on American history as has Alice Paul,” says the Alice Paul Institute, an organization headquartered in her Moorestown birthplace that promotes her legacy and her life’s work for gender equality. “Her life symbolizes the long struggle for justice in the United States and around the world. Her vision was the ordinary notion that women and men should be equal partners in society.”

Paul has also been recognized in a singular way: She is among the very few American women whose face appears on both a U.S. stamp and a U.S coin. And her numismatic commemoration came about in a rather unusual fashion.

 In 2007, the United States Mint began producing what it called “the First Spouse Coins.” Each was aimed at honoring the wife of a president, and each was issued at the same time their husbands were honored on circulating $1 coins, minted in the Presidential Coin Series. A problem was that some presidents had no spouses when they were in office. One was Chester A. Arthur, whose wife, Ellen, had died in 1880, a year before he took office. In seeking a woman appropriate as a “first spouse” coin corresponding to Chester Arthur, mint officials picked Paul, who was never a spouse to anyone, much less a president, and who spent much of her most active years battling presidents like Woodrow Wilson. The mint explained that she was “a leading strategist in the suffrage movement, who was instrumental in gaining women the right to vote upon the adoption of the 19th Amendment and thus the ability to participate in the election of future presidents.”  The mint added a second reason: She was born on Jan. 11, 1885, during the term of President Arthur.

In 1995 Paul had been honored on a 78-cent stamp. That 78 cents was the amount needed to mail a three-ounce letter, and prompted a Philadelphia Inquirer writer to note an irony: “Paul was a diminutive little woman of 90 pounds, and she appears on a stamp that goes on oversized, overweight mail of the 3-ounce variety.”

There were 100 million copies of her face printed on that stamp, while only 13,000 of the gold coins were struck. Alice Paul would have probably been embarrassed by all those paper and gold faces — she had always promoted  the “cause,” never herself.

Laura Curie Allee Shields:

Flowers in Her Footsteps

It was a steaming July day in 1920 when Laura Curie Allee got a call from the headquarters of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, soon to be the League of Women Voters, asking her for help in getting the 36th and last state, Tennessee, to ratify the 19th amendment. 

Mrs. Allee had been a leader in the suffrage movement regionally.  Among the people she frequently worked with was Katharine Houghton Hepburn

Soon, she, Miss Mary Olcott and Mrs. James Stokes headed for Ohio to convince U.S. Senator Warren G. Harding, who was running for president, to get neighboring Tennessee to vote for the amendment. 

At Harding’s office, Miss Olcott was their spokesman and her strong personality apparently led to a clash with a Harding aide, who soon told them to leave the office. But after they had departed, Mrs. Allee realized she had forgotten her gloves and went back to retrieve them. The aide, who had apparently calmed down, looked at her and asked why they had come to see the candidate. Mrs. Allee explained. 

“Why didn’t you just say so?” the aide said, adding that she should never have let Miss Olcott do the speaking.  

The three were then ushered into the office of the senator who, when he learned where the women came from, said: “I have an aunt who lives in Ridgefield. Do you know her? Mrs. Northrop.” Mrs. Allee knew her well – both belonged to the Congregational church. “That was open sesame,”

Mrs. Allee said later. The group explained their mission convincingly and, on July 21, Senator Harding announced that he was urging Tennessee to ratify the Amendment. Tennessee did so Aug. 26, and three months later, Mr. Harding was elected president of the United States – with a plurality that no doubt included three newly enfranchised Ridgefield women. 

Mrs. Allee  and her husband, Dr. William H. Allee, moved to town in 1906 and lived in the house they called Homeland at the corner of Main and Market Streets. The place had been the Hurlbutt homestead and included Hurlbutt’s meat market on Market Street. 

Dr. Allee, who practiced in Wilton, was a leader in improving Ridgefield schools. He was also active in procuring the vote for women (one clever example of which will be described in his profile). He died in 1929. 

In 1933, Laura married James Van Allen Shields (1871-1954), a patent lawyer who was involved in the music recording industry in its early days.

Throughout her life Laura Shields was active in the support of schools, the League of Women Voters, and other community organizations, and helped in the effort to acquire the Keeler Tavern. 

She also wrote a 353-page autobiography, called “Memories,” self-published in 1940.

In 1953, The Press reported a comment about Mrs. Shields on the occasion of her 20th wedding anniversary: “It is said that a good woman does not always find flowers in her footpath, but they are always growing in her footsteps.”

She died in 1968 at the age of 97 and is buried in Paterson, N.J., alongside her first husband.  

Lillian Moorhead: 

Ahead of Her Time

Men had populated the Board of Selectmen for 265 years, when, in November 1973, that all changed: Lillian Moorhead was elected the first woman ever to hold a seat on the board. 

“Womenpower” did it, she said the day after the election. “I hope my election will encourage more women to run for office.”

It may, indeed, have have helped do just that, for in the years after her election, women began winning more and more seats in town government, often holding majorities on boards and commissions. And eight years after her pioneering win, Ridgefield elected its first woman chief executive, Elizabeth Leonard, who, ironically, defeated Moorhead for the job of first selectman.

“I was in favor of a state income tax and Liz creamed me,” Moorhead said 10 years later. (In 1991, after years of debate, the income tax was finally adopted. “It takes the state a while to catch up with me,” Moorhead said afterwards with a smile.)

A native of New Jersey, Moorhead was born in 1932. She and her husband, James, had lived in the South and on the West Coast before moving to Ashbee Lane in 1963.

She was a liberal Democrat who won the 1973 election alongside First Selectman Louis J. Fossi, also a Democrat, but more of a conservative. Despite Ridgefield’s heavy Republican majority, the two Democrats controlled the board, holding two of its then three seats.

“Lou is a native, a very popular guy,” Moorhead said, explaining the win years later. “Also, there was Watergate and the beginning of the women’s movement.”

Moorhead was re-elected four times, holding her seat until 1983 when she retired. As a selectman, she was an especially strong advocate for creation of the Housing Authority that eventually built the Ballard Green senior housing project.

“There were few believers in the Housing Authority in those early days,”  Fossi told Moorhead in front of more than 200 people who gathered for her retirement party in 1984. “But you acted out of concern for people who are less fortunate than most of us.”

Fossi and Moorhead often disagreed on issues, and votes sometimes found her in the minority, despite party affiliations.

“It’s better to be ahead of the times than behind them, and Lillian, you were ahead of them,” said Judge Romeo G. Petroni, a lifelong Republican, at the retirement dinner. “You have your principles and you stood behind them, even when Lou didn’t understand.”

Moorhead later served many years on the Housing Authority she helped to create. She was also on the Youth Commission, was a trustee of Danbury Hospital, and was a board member of the NAACP, and Regional Y. She was a founding member of the Women’s Political Caucus, which was active here in the 1970s and 80s, and which successfully pressed for the conversion of the Boys Club into a Boys and Girls Club. She also belonged to Friends of the Library, Meals on Wheels and the League of Women Voters.

Professionally, she tried on several different career hats, last of which was as a Realtor. She was well-regarded at that: In 1984, Governor William O’Neill appointed her a member of the Connecticut Real Estate Commission.

When she was moving to Martha’s Vineyard in 1991, she told a Press interviewer, “I used to be a newcomer. Now I’m a townie. It happened in the blink of an eye.”

A 1984 Press editorial said of Moorhead: “One of the most independent thinkers among recent selectmen, she was not afraid to stand up for positions that may have been unpopular with the administration and even with her party. Yet always her positions were enlightened ones, well-considered and with the community’s best interest  in mind.”

When Moorhead died of cancer in 1997 at the age of 65, her daughter, Sarah, observed, “My mom was one of those individuals who truly touched the souls of everyone who was lucky enough to have met her. She embraced life with such determination and zest and tried to impart that to others.”

Emily Eaton Hepburn: 

Landmark’s Builder

Ridgefield had many notable “summer residents,” New Yorkers who built weekend and vacation retreats that, more often than not, qualified as mansions. Emily Eaton Hepburn was among the more remarkable of these part-time Ridgefielders, but her accomplishments have been largely overlooked locally. 

A prominent figure in New York City’s intellectual, civic, and business scene over a half century, Emily Hepburn at the age of 61 built one of New York’s landmark hotels. The New York Times once called her “a real estate novice who created one of New York’s most distinctive skyscrapers.” 

The Vermont native was an 1886 graduate of Saint Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. where she met her husband, Alonzo Barton Hepburn, then a lawyer and state banking official. He became a leading New York City banker and was named United States comptroller of the currency by President Benjamin Harrison. 

   The Ridgefield Press took note of their impending arrival in May 1908. “Mr. A.B. Hepburn,

one of the most prominent financiers of the country, former comptroller of the currency and now president of the Chase National Bank of New York, is building one of the most handsome homes to be seen in this town of beautiful homes,” the newspaper said.   The report was a bit misleading. Emily, not Barton, was actually overseeing the design and construction of “Altnacraig,” a magnificent mansion on High Ridge whose name could be translated, “high rock.”  The building later became a well-known nursing home, also called Altnacraig, whose residents included suffragist Alice Paul. Altnacraig burned to the ground in a suspicious 1994 blaze, and was replaced with a house of similar size. (Pictures of Altnacraig are in the Old Ridgefield photos collection.)

   Barton also met an unlucky end: He was run over by a bus while crossing a city street in 1922. “He was benefactor to Hepburn Hospital in Ogdensburg, N.Y., and six libraries in St. Lawrence County, N.Y., all of which are named for him,” reports St. Lawrence University, where his and Emily’s family papers now reside.

   Emily Hepburn had long been active in civic and charitable organizations including the New York Botanical Garden, City History Club for children, Inwood House girls reformatory, and the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Here, she was a member of the Ridgefield Garden Club, a group that both beautified and promoted the town. 

She was also active in the suffrage movement and, after women had won the right to vote, she addressed a new need in New York: Housing for young, working women. After the war, many recent college-graduate women were coming to New York to seek careers. In 1924 Mrs. Hepburn and several others built the American Woman’s Association, a high-rise residence for working women, at 353 West 57th Street.

Hepburn was dissatisfied with the result, however, and on her own, planned a better building, with a more modern architect. “The boxy, unornamented American Woman’s Association clubhouse

had been simple to the point of drab, the ‘International Style’ with a migraine, designed by the otherwise traditionalist Benjamin Wistar Morris,” wrote Christopher Gray in The Times. “Mrs. Hepburn went to John Mead Howells, son of American author William Dean Howells, and a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts.” 

   Hepburn almost single-handedly set about gaining support for the project, including selling stock (one of the stock purchasers was Sara Roosevelt, mother of Franklin Delano Roosevelt).  The

result was the 380-room Panhellenic House at First Avenue and East 49th Street, completed in 1928, described in early promotional brochures as “a club-hotel for women.”  The 28-story, orange-brick building is considered one of the great Art Deco skyscrapers in New York.

   “I wanted to prove that women could do big business,” Hepburn once said about her late-blooming career. The quotation appears “Daughter of Vermont,” a biography of her published in 1952, four years before her death.

   The hotel was not just a residence, but also a place where women could, in today’s parlance, “network,” and learn from each other. One supporter of the project called it “a training school for leadership, a mental exchange” for women.

    Hepburn, who also built and lived in an apartment building at nearby 2 Beekman Place, found occupancy rates at the Panhellenic House declining during the Depression, and opened the building to men as well as women, renaming it the Beekman Tower Hotel. The hotel continued in business until 2013 when it was converted to long-term residential suites.

 The Beekman, incidentally, is a block from the United Nations. The Times once reported that, “according to legend,” Hepburn “persuaded the Rockefellers to buy the East River land for the United Nations.” 

How’s that for good business sense? 

Hildegarde Oskison: 

Writing Was in Her Blood

In 1950, when Hildegarde Oskison had turned 79 years old and had written nearly two dozen books, she announced that she would retire from writing and commence to enjoy what others   had written. She did not, however, retire from community involvement and continued to attend Ridgefield Town Meetings and First Congregational Church activities and could be seen each day walking to the post office from her home on East Ridge and later, The Elms Inn. 

During her long career, Oskison had probably out-produced her more illustrious grandfather, publishing 23 books and many newspaper and magazine pieces, usually under her maiden name, Hildegarde Hawthorne.

One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s seven grandchildren, Hildegarde Hawthorne was born in New York City in 1871 but spent much of her youth growing up in England, Germany, Jamaica, and Long Island — her father, Julian Hawthorne, was a journalist, novelist and poet who moved around a lot. 

She had little formal education, outside of tutors and her parents, but clearly had inherited her family’s love of writing. When she was only 16, her first short story was published in St. Nicholas, a magazine for children, and she continued to write for young people throughout her life.

When she was 20, Harper’s published the first of her articles aimed at adults and she went on to produce hundreds of pieces on travel, gardening, and other subjects, as well as to write many ghost stories. Among her 23 books were half dozen biographies, including one on her grandfather, called

“The Romantic Rebel,”  and others on  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. She also wrote six Westerns aimed at young readers, several histories, a book on gardening, and many travelogues.

“The travelogues, such as Corsica (1926), are highly descriptive, personal accounts,” said biographer Jane Stanbrough. “Of her histories, ‘California’s Missions’ (1942) is a very interesting and directly related account of those missions and the men who founded them. It is a well-written work that still deserves to be read.”

As for those Westerns, Stanbrough characterized them as “superficial and hackneyed.”

In 1920, she married John Milton Oskison (1874–1947), a writer and journalist who was the first person of American Indian descent to graduate from Stanford University.  They lived for many years in California where Hildegarde became a frequent hiker and camper, and often established friendships with both backwoodsmen and American Indians. She produced three books on California and used her wilderness experiences in writing her Westerns.

During World War I, Oskison assisted the soldiers by serving with the YWCA troop support services in France and with the Red Cross. At the same time, she provided dispatches to The New York Times and The New York Herald about aspects of the war she was witnessing. In the 1920s she also wrote many book reviews for both papers.

In the early 20th Century, Oskison was active in the woman’s suffrage movement and took

part in many rallies.

She came to Ridgefield around 1940, living on East Ridge; by then, she had been separated from her husband. By the late 1940s, she had moved to The Elms Inn on Main Street. She died in 1952 at the age of 81.

Her last article, written for Reader’s Digest when she was nearly 80 years old, described her aunt, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, a writer who after a troublesome marriage to an alcoholic who died of cirrhosis,  became a Catholic nun. In 1901, as Mother Mary Alphonsa, O.P., Rose Hawthorne established  the Rosary Hill Home for terminally cancer patients, which still operated today in Hawthorne, N.Y., by an order of nuns that she founded.