Marie Stuart Edwards

Marie Stuart Edwards was a suffragist and social reformer from Peru, Indiana. She served as president of the Woman's Franchise League of Indiana (1917–1919); publicity director of National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) during the Nineteenth Amendment's passage in 1920; and vice president of the National League of Women Voters (1921–1923).

Early life and education

Edwards was born to Thomas Arthur and Ada (Ellsworth) Stuart in Lafayette, Tippecanoe County, Indiana on September 11, 1880. Edwards married Richard Elbert Edwards in 1904 and they had one son, Richard Arthur (1909–1984).

Career

Suffrage and World War I During the 1910s, Edwards campaigned for women's suffrage in Indiana and nationally. In 1917, she became the president of the Woman's Franchise League of Indiana (WFL), succeeding Dr. Amelia Keller, serving until 1919. The same year Edwards was elected, the Indiana General Assembly passed the Maston-McKinley Partial Suffrage Act, granting Hoosier women the right to vote in municipal, school and special elections.

The United States entering World War I on April 2, 1917, led most suffragists, with the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) at the helm, to pivot to the war effort. Suffragists hoped demonstrating their patriotism and civic duty would lead to a federal amendment. The WFL followed suit with Edwards and Helen Boyd serving on the committee of the Indiana League for Woman's Service, which recruited women to make 2 million shirts for the army and registered 50,000 women for war work by October 1, 1917. However, suffrage work did not cease during the war and Edwards still had hope for women's suffrage in Indiana. At a WFL meeting in 1918, Edwards entreated members to resume lobbying for the passage of a constitutional amendment, as the "withdrawal of voting privilege has enormously increased the number of women interested in suffrage" and "we can never again be the negligible quantity we were before." Under her guidance, the organization undertook an extensive membership drive and a petition for the federal amendment, training speakers and canvassers, which had 283 branch leagues across the state by October 1918. These efforts led to a new partial suffrage law, with a new constitutional amendment passing the first hurdle in the General Assembly in early 1919. Meanwhile, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment had finally passed the U.S. Congress and was sent to the states for ratification. When Indiana became the 26th state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment on January 16, 1920, Edwards was sitting in each chamber of the General Assembly while each body voted. As part of her duties as treasurer and manager of the national speakers bureau for the League, she traveled across the United States for speaking engagements. She was the first woman to sit on the Peru Board of Education and in 1921, she was appointed to the Indiana State Board of Education by Governor Warren T. McCray. In the latter position of authority, she served as a member of the Indiana Committee on Mental Defectives, a state-sponsored eugenics organization pushing a "better babies" agenda and conducting studies of families in more than 20 counties. Edwards led the local Works Progress Administration board in Miami County during the Great Depression, while also serving as chairman of the 10th Anniversary and Memorial Fund of the League.

Marie Stuart Edwards was honored with a bronze statue in front of the Peru Public Library, where she trained and organized fellow suffragists in her hometown. Dedicated on August 26, 2021, the statue depicts Edwards as a young woman standing by her bicycle as she was recorded as the first woman to ride a bicycle in her birthplace of Lafayette.