Mary Wilson Thompson

Mary Wilson Thompson (October 30, 1866 – April 2, 1947)

In a memoir written in the 1930s, Thompson explained her position against women's suffrage: I have always opposed votes for women. It is constitutional with me. It is not that I feel women cannot vote or are not the mental equal of our men folks, but I feel that it is duplicating our work. It is putting an extra burden on the women and it has weakened materially our power with the legislatures. The same year she wrote to Willard Saulsbury, US Senator from Delaware, asking that he use his franking privileges to send 260 thousand pieces of anti-suffrage literature to West Virginia. He declined.

Thompson bought a lot on Park Avenue in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, from Irénée du Pont and constructed a large two-story summer home there in 1927 she dubbed Mon Plaisir (French, "my pleasure"). She designed the home herself with the assistance of her son, who was studying architecture at Princeton University. It had large screened-in porches (or "mosquito parlors") necessitated by the presence of mosquitos. Mosquitos were so incessant that Thompson was forced to wrap newspaper around her ankles while gardening. Thompson enlisted Governor C. Douglass Buck to create two Civilian Conservation Corps camps at Lewes and Slaughter Beach to eradicate the mosquitos and their habitat.

Thompson was active in numerous civic causes and organization, including historic preservation and fighting infantile paralysis.

Historian Richard B. Carter wrote “Had she lived in a slightly later age, she could easily have won election to high political office (had she wished to pursue it). Yet she refused to consider that women should be made the political equals of men. She was a paradox of the passing of the Victorian era from Delaware.” Death and legacy Mary Wilson Thompson died on April 2, 1947, at her home Brookwood Farm in Greenville, Delaware.

Thompson had five children.