Mary Jean Crenshaw Tully

Mary Jean Crenshaw Tully (1925–2003) was an American women's rights activist. She co-founded the Westchester chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and was the president of the national organization's Legal Defense and Education Fund from 1971 to 1977. She also served as president of the Fund for Women's Rights and co-founded the New York National Women's Political Caucus and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. She directed the Midlife Institute at Marymount Manhattan College from 1981 to 1986. She also funded the Tully Crenshaw Feminist Oral History Project, which documented the experiences of women involved in the early years of NOW.

Early life and education Mary Jean Crenshaw was born on December 15, 1925, at Fort Sill in Oklahoma to Maude Gresham and Benjamin Mills Crenshaw IV. She was a descendent of Meriwether Lewis. Her father was in the US Army and she grew up as an Army brat. During her childhood, her family moved from Moscow, Idaho, to Fort Davis in Panama, before moving to Sioux City, Iowa, Fort Lewis in Washington, and then to San Francisco, where she attended Lowell High School.

Activism and women's rights organizations In the late 1940s, Tully was involved with the NAACP in Schenectady, New York. Later, while living in Kansas in 1952, she was on the state board of the League of Women Voters. Tully also served as an editor of NOW's newsletter. During the mid-1970s recession, Tully convened an Economic Think Tank for NOW in 1974 with Betty Friedan. Friedan later said of Tully, "Mary Jean was the first person to think big enough about fund-raising for the movement."

Tully served as president of the Fund for Women's Rights from 1971 to 1981. When the touring exhibition of Judy Chicago's feminist art installation The Dinner Party was having difficulty securing funding in 1978, Tully arranged for a meeting between organizer Diane Gelon and representatives from the Ford Foundation.

She was one of the founders of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy in 1976. She served as co-chair for the organization and was a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus for New York.

Tully died of a heart attack on December 27, 2003, at White Plains Hospital in White Plains, New York.

Personal life Tully married Charles Robert Tully in 1947. She had five children and divorced in 1991. Towards the end of her life she lived in Armonk, New York.