Mary Fitzbutler Waring (1870–1958) was an American physician who succeeded Mary McLeod Bethune as president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC) from 1933 to 1937.
Early life Mary R. Fitzbutler was born in Amherstburg, Ontario and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of William Henry Fitzbutler and Sarah Helen McCurdy Fitzbutler. Both of her parents were physicians; her mother was the first black woman to earn a medical degree in Kentucky,"Fitzbutler House: Honoring Dr. William Henry Fitzbutler" University of Michigan Medical School. and her father was the first black graduate of the University of Michigan's medical school.Patrick Reed, "Louisville's Pioneers in African-American Healthcare" Kentucky Educational Television (February 1, 2016). Mary R. Fitzbutler studied at the Louisville National Medical College (which her father owned and operated);Gordon R. Tobin, "Fitzbutler College" University of Louisville School of Medicine. she graduated from the National Medical College of Chicago in 1923.Mary R. Fitzbutler Waring, Notable Kentucky African Americans Database, University of Kentucky Libraries.
Career Mary Fitzbutler taught for several years as a young woman. She was an officer in the Illinois Federation of Women's Clubs in 1913. During World War I, Waring was chair of Red Cross Work for the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs; she was also chair of the organization's Department of Health and Hygiene for many years. She organized a canteen,"Dr. Mary Fitzbutler-Waring" The Broad Ax (December 21, 1918): 4. via Newspapers.com and nurses' training classes in Chicago for African-American women, during the war.Emmett Jay Scott, Scott's Official History of the American Negro in the World War (Homewood Press, 1919): 400."Mary Fitzbutler Waring" in Notable Black American Women (Gale, 1996), at Biography in Context. After the war, she attended the 1920 International Council of Women meeting in Christiania, Norway. She was appointed to the advisory board of the Frederick Douglass Home in 1923. She regularly wrote columns on public health topics for women's publications, including National Notes.Susan Lynn Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women's Health Activism in America, 1890–1950 (University of Pennsylvania Press 1995): 30–31. Stephen Knadler, "Unsanitized Racial Allegories: Biomedical Politics, Racial Uplift, and the African American Woman's Risk Narrative", American Literature 85(1)(2013): 93–119. doi: 10.1215/00029831-1959553.
In 1933, she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs. During her presidency, one of her policy initiatives was a drive to destroy toy guns."Mary Waring to Launch Drive Against Toy Guns", Pittsburgh Courier (December 28, 1935): 8. Via Newspapers.com.
Personal life Mary R. Fitzbutler married educator Frank B. Waring in 1901. She was widowed when he died in 1923. She married again, to Charles F. Cantrell, in 1930.Who's Who in Colored America Volume 6 (1942): 540. She died in 1958, aged 88 years, in Chicago."The Week's Census", Jet (December 18, 1958): 47.
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