Doris Stevens (born Dora Caroline Stevens; October 26, 1888 – March 22, 1963) was an American suffragist, woman's legal rights advocate and author. She was the first female member of the American Institute of International Law and first chair of the Inter-American Commission of Women.
Born in 1888 in Omaha, Nebraska, Stevens became involved in the fight for suffrage while a college student at Oberlin College. After graduating with a degree in sociology in 1911, she taught briefly before becoming a paid regional organizer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association's Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CUWS). When the CUWS broke from the parent organization in 1914, Stevens became the national strategist. She was in charge of coordinating the women's congress, held at the Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915. When the CUWS became the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1916, Stevens organized party delegates for each of the 435 Congressional Districts in an effort to attain national women's enfranchisement and defeat candidates who were opposed to women's rights. Between 1917 and 1919, Stevens was a prominent participant in the Silent Sentinels vigil at Woodrow Wilson's White House to urge the passage of a constitutional amendment for women's voting rights and was arrested several times for her involvement. After the 19th Amendment secured women's right to vote, she wrote a book, titled Jailed for Freedom (1920), which recounted the sentinel's ordeals.
Once the right to vote was secured, Stevens turned her attention to women's legal status. She supported passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and worked with Alice Paul from 1927 to 1933 on a volume of work comparing varying impact on law for women and men. The goal in compiling the data was to obtain an international law protecting women's right of citizenship. The research was completed with the help of feminists in 90 countries and evaluated laws controlling women's nationality from every country. Gaining approval for the work from the League of Nations in 1927, Stevens presented the proposal Pan American Union in 1928, convincing the governing body to create the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM). In 1931, she joined the American Institute of International Law, becoming its first female member. In 1933, her work resulted in the first treaty to secure international rights for women. The Convention on the Nationality of Women established that women retained their citizenship after marriage and Convention on Nationality provided that neither marriage nor divorce could affect the nationality of the members of a family, extending citizenship protection to children.
Ousted from the CIM in 1938, and the NWP in 1947 over policy disputes, Stevens became vice president of the Lucy Stone League in 1951, of which she had been a member since the 1920s. She fought the roll-back of policies removing the gains women had made to enter the work force during World War II and worked to establish feminism as an academic field of study. She continued fighting for feminist causes until her death in 1963.
Early life Dora Caroline Stevens was born on October 26, 1888, in Omaha, Nebraska to Caroline D. (née Koopman) and Henry Henderbourck Stevens. Her father was a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church for forty years and her mother was a first generation immigrant from Holland. One of four children, Stevens grew up in Omaha and graduated in 1905 from Omaha High School.
She went on to further her education graduating from Oberlin College in 1911 with a degree in sociology, though she had originally pursued music. While in college, she was known for her romances and for being a spirited suffragist. Her unruly behavior and disdain for feminine propriety were cultivated during her college years. After graduation, Stevens worked as a music teacher and social worker in Ohio, Michigan. and Montana before moving to Washington, D.C., where she became a regional organizer with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
Suffrage In 1913, Stevens arrived in Washington to take part in the July picketing of the Senate. She did not plan to stay, but Alice Paul convinced her to do so. She was hired by the NAWSA, and was assigned to the newly formed Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CUWS), which had been created by Alice Paul and Mary Ritter Beard. At that time, the Congressional Union was a subdivision of the NAWSA, though it operated independently. Stevens was hired to serve as executive secretary in Washington, D. C., as well as serve as regional organizer and was assigned the eastern district. Paul had divided the nation into quadrants of twelve states each and assigned Stevens to the eastern area, Mabel Vernon to the middle west, Anne Martin to the far west, and Maud Younger to the south. The regional organizers were tasked with educating groups about the suffrage bills that were in Congress and garnering support from each state for ratifying national suffrage. Rather than follow the previous strategy of achieving enfranchisement on a state-by-state basis, the Congressional Union Strategy was full federal approval. This issue, caused a rift in the suffrage movement at the 1913 Convention, causing Paul and her supporters to break ties with the NAWSA and become an independent organization.
With the fissure, the Congressional Union began a reorganization to push for campaigns against Democratic candidates because they had not supported suffrage while they were in control of the legislature. Paul established an all-woman advisory council of suffrage workers and prominent women which included Bertha Fowler, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Helen Keller, Belle Case La Follette, May Wright Sewall and educators such as Emma Gillett, Maria Montessori, and Clara Louise Thompson, a Latin Professor at Rockford College, among others, to lend credibility to the new organization. Stevens became the national organizer, charged with organizing women in states in which they were able to vote to use their ballots and oppose any candidate not in favor of full enfranchisement of women. One of the first places Stevens traveled to was Colorado, where CUWS was successful in attaining commitment from one congressman to support the women's cause. Returning from that success in January 1915, she went to New York City and Newport, Rhode Island to campaign before heading west. She campaigned in Kansas, hoping to secure delegates for a convention planned in San Francisco for September.
Arriving in California in June, Stevens accompanied a group of women led by Charlotte Anita Whitney to meet with House Appropriations Committee members who were meeting at the Palace Hotel, in San Francisco. The women had been assured that they would be able to present their issues, but the chair, Representative John J. Fitzgerald of New York, refused to allow it. Undaunted, Whitney and Stevens continued their planning efforts for the Panama Pacific Exposition CUWS Congress in San Francisco. In San Francisco at the CUWS headquarters in 1915, Stevens discussed the strategy of employing a "million-vote smile", positing that smiling was a useful tool in the fight to win over men's support. "Smile on men and they will give you a vote. Look severe and they won't," she stated. However, when Alice Paul arrived two weeks before the event, she canceled choral events, a parade and a mass meeting that had been planned for the Scottish Rite Hall. Stevens had been involved in supervising each of these events, though local women planned and orchestrated them. Paul did keep the luncheon and a ball to be held at the California building of the exposition. After the September Congress, Stevens had planned to remain in San Francisco and run the exposition booth of CUWS, but she was forced to return to Washington because the eastern delegate Margaret Whittemore had left due to her marriage. Stevens immediately began planning for a convention to be held in Washington in December.
At the beginning of 1916, Stevens announced the policy that the CUWS had organized in twenty-two states and planned on recruiting delegates for each of the 435 House Districts. The delegates were required to form committees to press Congressional Members to favor suffrage and make them aware that their constituents were in favor of women attaining the vote. Another strategy Stevens began implementing early in 1916 required CUWS members to go to other states in which women were allowed to vote, establish residence and register to vote. In this way, they could vote in state and national elections in the hope of filling the legislature with legislators who favored suffrage. Stevens registered to vote in Kansas that year. On June 5, 1916, the CUWS became the National Woman's Party (NWP), having a single platform to acquire a constitutional amendment for national women's suffrage. After attending the NWP convention in Chicago in June, Stevens headed to a convention in Colorado. By October, Stevens was organizing and managing the NWP election campaign in California.
Arrest Due to the United States' entry into World War I, some suffragists stopped their activism in 1917 because it might be seen as "unpatriotic;" Stevens, instead, insisted that it was "arrogant of Wilson to fight for democracy abroad when women were not included in democracy at home." In January after a delegation of NWP members had a disappointing meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, it was decided that they would protest at the White House every day, standing as Silent Sentinels until Wilson recognized the importance of their cause. The women maintained their post for over a year disregarding weather conditions and the threat of arrest. Though she performed other organizational tasks, such as organizing the North Carolina branch of the NWP in March, Stevens participated as a sentinel. She and fifteen other women were arrested for picketing at the White House on Bastille Day, in July 1917, charged with obstructing the sidewalk, and served three days of their 60-day sentence at Occoquan Workhouse before receiving a pardon from President Wilson. The women were placed within the prison population, given no toothbrushes, combs or toiletries and were surprised that they were required to share a water dipper with the rest of the prisoners.
Stevens met her first husband, Dudley Field Malone, when he represented her for her protest in front of the White House. He had been serving as an Assistant Secretary of State in the Wilson cabinet, but was converted to the suffragist cause and resigned his post. He appeared with Stevens at fundraising events and helped raise thousands of dollars for their cause, which was gaining momentum, as President Wilson finally endorsed enfranchisement. Between 1918 and 1919, Stevens continued alternating speaking engagements and picketing. She was arrested again, along with Elsie Hill, Alice Paul and three "Jane Doe" suffragists at the NWP demonstration of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in March 1919. On September 4, 1920, the fight was won when Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby proclaimed the necessary 36 states had ratified the 19th Amendment with Tennessee's ratification. Stevens published the quintessential insider account of the imprisonment of NWP activists, Jailed for Freedom, in 1920.
Over the years, Stevens held several important NWP leadership positions, including Legislative Chairman and membership on the executive committee. In 1920, Alva Belmont was elected president of the NWP and Stevens served as Belmont’s personal assistant, even writing Belmont's autobiography. Belmont and Steven's relationship was contentious, but the younger Stevens accepted years of control by Belmont over many of her personal actions. Traveling to Europe with Belmont for work of the NWP, Belmont insisted that Steven's fiancé could not join them and when he did, Belmont removed to France without Stevens.