Mary McHenry Keith

Early life Mary McHenry was born in San Francisco, California on November 20, 1855, to John McHenry and Ellen Josephine Metcalfe McHenry. John McHenry was a Judge and Louisiana Supreme Court Justice who moved to California in 1850 and continued to work as a judge in San Francisco. McHenry completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1879 at the University of California, Berkeley.

As of result of the activist work of Clara Shortridge Foltz and Laura de Force Gordon, the newly formed University of California College of the Law, San Francisco began admitting female students just as McHenry completed her undergraduate degree. Behind her father's back, Mary enrolled in law school, and in 1882 she became the first female graduate from Hastings. She worked for a short time as a lawyer, specializing in probate cases. Upon her marriage to prominent landscape artist William Keith in 1883, Mary stopped practicing law and focused her attention on activist causes, most especially women's and animal rights issues. The issue of coeducation is one that Keith addressed as president of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae before turning to suffrage causes in 1891. Her desire to support women's full development and her belief that women had a duty to participate in society were foundational to her participation in women's activist organizations. With a membership of over 200, the Berkeley Political Equality Club was one of the largest suffrage organizations in California and throughout the West Coast of the US.

Mary is reported to have first met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1871, but developed a friendship with Stanton when in 1895 Stanton and Anna Howard Shaw were visiting California's state suffrage convention in San Francisco and various other suffrage events in the state. As she did with Anthony, Keith engaged in regular correspondence with Stanton throughout the suffrage campaigns.

Although the 1896 suffrage campaign in California was unsuccessful, Keith continued to work through the Berkeley Political Equality Club to recruit more suffrage supporters through lectures and lobbying of state politicians. In 1901 Carrie Chapman Catt, then President of the National American Suffrage Association, encouraged local organizations to expand their efforts, and this further motivated Keith to revive and expand the membership of the Berkeley Political Equality Club. Keith is credited with inspiring women to join women's organizations and social groups for personal and societal improvement, and helping to sway them to the cause of woman suffrage. A 1902 Berkeley Gazette article on Keith provides a sense of the activist and woman:"Mrs. Keith is a dainty little blue-eyed, rosy woman, whose gray hair is a good many years in advance of her face and still further ahead of her heart. Somehow she doesn't suggest suffrage in the least... You can't, when chatting with her in her artistic little parlor, imagine her presiding over a meeting of 'long-haired men and short-haired women'... The fact is, she is not at all fierce on the subject of her theories, but she has the knack for coaxing people over to her way of thinking. The most determined anti-suffrage women give in to her... her husband gives in to her." Although she often got to speak to audiences who were supportive of woman suffrage, she was also concerned by the number of people, especially women, who remained uncommitted or indifferent to the cause and needed to be slowly and cautiously convinced of its necessity. She promoted the cause of suffrage at these and other women's organizations within and outside the state. Keith may have contributed as much as $15,000 to local, state and national suffrage work. Keith also had a weekly column in the Oakland Inquirer.

On October 10, 1911, voters in California again considered the issue of woman suffrage. While the state's major cities voted against suffrage, voters in smaller towns and more rural areas were more likely to support suffrage. Keith's Berkeley Political Equality Club is recognized as a strong force in the approval of California's 1911 vote for woman suffrage, because although Alameda County overall was anti-suffrage, Berkeley residents voted 2,417 to 1,761 in favor of fully enfranchising women in the state. Her advocacy for animal rights led to her service to the Humane Society, the California Audubon Society, as an officer for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) and as a trustee of the Latham Foundation for the Promotion of Humane Education. After William Keith's death in 1911, she helped to catalogue, preserve and exhibit his paintings.

Resources The Keith-McHenry-Pond Family Papers, 1841-1961 are located at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See also Brother Cornelius, Keith, Old Master of California, volumes 1 and 2.