Madeleine Zabriskie Doty

Madeleine Zabriskie Doty, JD, PhD (August 24, 1877 – October 14, 1963) was an American journalist, pacifist, civil libertarian, and advocate for the rights of prisoners, as well as the International Secretary for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Early life and education Madeleine Zabriskie Doty was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, August 24, 1877, to Samuel and Charlotte Zabriskie Doty. She received a B.L. from Smith College in 1900, an L.L.B. from New York University in 1902, and a Ph.D. in International Relations from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in 1945. While at NYU she became a charter member of the Nu chapter of Alpha Omicron Pi.

Career

Advocacy for prisoners After practicing law for five years in New York City, her interest turned to children's courts and delinquency and for three years she was secretary of the Russell Sage Foundation Children's Court Committee. As a member of New York's Prison Reform Commission in 1913, she voluntarily spent a week in prison to investigate conditions, adopting Maggie Martin as her alias. She described inhumane conditions in women's prisons, and advocated dramatic changes relating to prison management, prisoner autonomy, and prison activities. In addition to recommending improvements in food and sanitation, she advocated for the prisoners having a say in the way that the prisons were run. To that end, she proposed a system of prisoner self-government. about juvenile and women's prison reform. After the publication of this text, New York State prison administrators experimented with some of her recommendations.

She then became a correspondent for the New York Tribune and Good Housekeeping. She reported from Hamburg, Germany for the Tribune in 1916, and reported that it was "like a dying city" as the citizens were starving. in 1917 and Behind The Battle Line in 1918.

Pacifism On her return to the U.S. in 1917, Doty became an editor with her friend Crystal Eastman of Four Lights, the radical paper of the New York Woman's Peace Party. In a letter on January 13, 1917, to Dr. Maria Montessori, Fannie May Witherspoon, a Christian socialist and another co-editor of Four Lights, described the purpose of the paper as "striking what seems to us a much-needed note of internationalism in these days of universal warfare and national strife ... the contributors will be chiefly women, and the issues of feminism and peace will naturally go hand in hand."

Doty continued to play a part in the peace movement first as International Secretary for the WILPF in Geneva, where she moved in 1925, Doty had been Crystal Eastman's roommate, which is how she met Baldwin. Doty and Baldwin literally vowed to maintain a "free marriage", with neither requiring monogamy of the other. Doty retained her maiden name, had an active public career, supported herself financially, and employed a domestic servant to manage the reproduction of the household. However, they were divorced in 1925.

The Madeleine Zabriskie Doty papers are held in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College: "The collection was a bequest of Doty and her executor, Katherine S. Strong, in 1964 and 1989."

In 1962, she moved to Greenfield, Massachusetts, where she died on October 14, 1963.

Writings