Blanche Ames Ames

Blanche Ames Ames (February 18, 1878 – March 2, 1969) was an American artist, political activist, inventor, writer, and prominent supporter of women's suffrage and birth control.

Personal life

Born Blanche Ames in Lowell, Massachusetts, Ames was the daughter of Adelbert Ames, a West Point graduate who became a Civil War General and Mississippi Governor, and Blanche Butler Ames, who attended the Academy of the Visitation and enjoyed painting and the arts. The fourth of six children, she was the sister of Adelbert Ames Jr., a prominent scientist. She was also granddaughter to Civil War General and Massachusetts Governor Benjamin Butler and actress Sarah Hildreth Butler.

Ames attended the Rogers Hall School in Lowell. She was later one of few women of her time to attend college, earning a B.A. in Art History and a diploma in Studio Art from Smith College in 1899. She was the president of her graduating class. One of Ames' grandchildren was George Ames Plimpton, famed sportswriter. It is now open to the public as Borderland State Park.

Artist Ames was a talented artist in a variety of media. Her work included portraiture, primarily done in oil paint, botanical illustration, and political cartoons. She had a studio in her home in North Easton, Massachusetts. Blanche Ames Ames continued to illustrate orchids throughout their life together, eventually designing the decorations which now appear at both of their graves.

Ames's etchings are on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and her oil painting can be seen at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Columbia University. She was president of the Easton Woman Suffrage League, and, from 1915 to 1918, she was Treasurer of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage League. Massachusetts did not legalize contraception for married women until 1966, the last state in the nation to do so, and Ames set the standard for perseverance in the decades-long effort.

In 1941 Ames also served as a board member and later as President of the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston.

Inventor Ames held patents for inventions which included a hexagonal lumber cutter and a method for entrapping enemy aircraft. She wrote the biography in response to John F. Kennedy's 1956 book Profiles in Courage. Profiles criticized Adelbert Ames in favor of his Reconstruction Era rival Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, a key leader of the "Mississippi Plan" that suppressed African-American voter turnout and ultimately led to Adelbert Ames's resignation as governor of Mississippi. Prior to publishing the book, Ames had frequently written Kennedy asking him to retract his criticism of her father in order to "bring your views into accord with the trend of modern historical interpretation of the Reconstruction Period.”

Patents

. - Archived version