Mary
Ritter,
the daughter of Eli Ritter, a lawyer, and Narcissa Lockward, a schoolteacher,
was born in Indianapolis in 1876. While at DePauw University she met
Charles Beard. After their marriage in
1900 the couple moved to England where Beard continued his studies
at Oxford University.
The Beards lived in Oxford and Manchester,
where they became close friends of Emmeline
Pankhurst and her two daughters, Christabel
Pankhurst and Sylvia Pankhurst.
At the time the women were members of the socialist
reform group, the Independent Labour Party.
They were also active in the National Union of
Women Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), but later formed the more militant
Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
The couple returned to the United States in 1904 to continue graduate
studies at Columbia University. Inspired by the work of the Pankhursts
and the Independent Labour Party, Mary became
involved in the struggle for women's suffrage
and social reform.
In 1907 Beard began working for the Women's Trade
Union League, an organization that was attempting to educate women
about the advantages of trade union membership.
The organization also supported women's demands for better working
conditions and tried to raise awareness about the exploitation of
women workers. Other leading figures in the organization included
Jane Addams, Margaret
Robins, Mary McDowell, Margaret
Haley, Helen Marot, Agnes
Nestor, Florence Kelley and Sophonisba
Breckinridge.
Beard also joined the American
Woman Suffrage Association and in 1910 became editor of its New
York journal, the Women Voter.
Beard was able to persuade a large number of talented writers and
artists to contribute to the journal including Ida
Proper, John Sloan, Mary
Wilson Preston, James Montgomery Flagg,
Robert Minor, Clarence
Batchelor, Cornelia Barnes
and Boardman Robinson.
Disillusioned with the failure of the American
Woman Suffrage Association to achieve the vote for women, Beard
joined in 1913 with Alice Paul, Lucy
Burns, Mabel Vernon, Olympia
Brown, Belle LaFollette, Helen
Keller, Maria Montessori, Dorothy
Day and Crystal Eastman to form
the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage
(CUWS). It was decided that the CUWS should employ the militant methods
used by Emmeline Pankhurst and the Women's
Social and Political Union in Britain. This included organizing
huge demonstrations and the daily picketing of the White House. Over
the next couple of years the police arrested nearly 500 women for
loitering and 168 were jailed for "obstructing traffic".
Beard spent much of her time writing and in 1915 published Woman's
Work in the Municipalities. This was followed by A
Short History of the Labor Movement (1920). Working with
Charles Beard,
she wrote a two volume history of the United States, The
Rise of American Civilization (1927). This was followed
by America in Midpassage (1939)
and The American Spirit (1942).
The couple also collaborated on A Basic History
of the United States (1944).
Mary and Charles Beard were proponents
of what became known as the New History. They challenged the primacy
of military and political explanations of the past by examining economic
and social factors in more detail. In Beard's books she demonstrated
the central role that women had played in history. This was reflected
in her book On Understanding Women
(1931) and America Through Women's Eyes
(1933), a collection of accounts by women who had played an integral
part in the development of America's history.
In On Understanding Women she
highlighted a problem that faced feminist historians. "Women
have been engaged in a continuous contest to defend their arts and
crafts, to win the right to use their minds and to train them, to
obtain openings for their talents and to earn a livelihood, to break
through legal restraints on their unfolding powers. In their quest
for rights women have naturally placed emphasis on their wrongs, rather
than their achievements and possessions, and have retold history as
a story of their long Martyrdom. Feminists have been prone to prize
and assume the traditions of those with whom they had waged such a
long, and in places bitter conflict. In doing so, they have participated
in a distortion of history and a disturbance of the balanced conceptual
thought which gives harmony and power to life."
Beard was a strong supporter of women's education
and in 1934 published A Changing Political
Economy as it Affects Women, which was a detailed syllabus
for a women's studies course. However, despite a great deal of campaigning,
she was unable to persuade any college or university to adopt what
would have been America's first women's studies course.
In 1935 Beard joined with the veteran peace campaigner, Rosika
Schwimmer, to create the World Centre for Women's Archives. The
main objective for the centre was to preserve the records of women's
contributions to history. They chose the motto for the archive: "No
documents, no history." The venture was brought to an end in
1940 as a result of her failure to raise enough funds to pay for the
centre.
Beard's next project was to analyze how the Encyclopaedia
Britannica had systematically excluded the role of women.
For example, she claimed that the entry for the 'American Frontier'
was "extremely narrow and bigoted" and ignored "women's
civilizing role" and the "co-operative enterprises which
elevated the individualistic will to social prowess". Beard also
criticised the omissions of subjects such as Hull
House from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
She worked for 18 months on a multi-disciplinary critique of the information
in the encyclopaedia, but her report, A Study
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Relation to its Treatment of Women,
was ignored by the company.
Beard was an active member of the Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom. Although a strong
anti-fascist, Mary, like her husband, Charles
Beard, was opposed to the United States involvement in the Second
World War.
Beard's most important book Woman as Force
in History: A Study of Traditions and Realties was published
in 1946. In the book she attacked historians and social scientists
for the misuse of the generic man and for their omissions and distortions
of the record of women. She pointed out that women of the ruling class
often wielded great power, and women suffered as much or more from
from their class position as from their gender. It was with the development
of capitalism, she argued, that "discrimination on account of
sex, regardless of class, became pervasive."
This was followed by The Force of Women in
Japanese History (1953). After the death of Charles
Beard she published the book, The Making
of Charles Beard (1955). Mary Ritter Beard
died in August, 1958.
(1)
Mary Ritter Beard,
Women's Work in Municipalities (1915)
If this new evaluation of woman's work in civilization
seems to err on the side of women, we shall be satisfied if it helps
to bring about a re-evaluation which shall include women not in an
incidental way but as people of flesh and blood and brain - feeling,
seeing, judging and directing, equally with men, all the great social
forces which mold character and determine general comfort, well-being
and happiness.
(2)
Mary Ritter Beard, On Understanding Women (1931)
Women have been engaged in a continuous contest
to defend their arts and crafts, to win the right to use their minds
and to train them, to obtain openings for their talents and to earn
a livelihood, to break through legal restraints on their unfolding
powers. In their quest for rights women have naturally placed emphasis
on their wrongs, rather than their achievements and possessions, and
have retold history as a story of their long Martyrdom.
Feminists have been prone to prize and assume the traditions of those
with whom they had waged such a long, and in places bitter conflict.
In doing so, they have participated in a distortion of history and
a disturbance of the balanced conceptual thought which gives harmony
and power to life.
(3)
Mary Ritter Beard,
On Understanding Women (1931)
Those who sit at the feast will continue to enjoy
themselves even though the veil that separates them from the world
of toiling reality below has been lifted by mass revolts and critics.
(4)
In July 1935, Rosika
Schwimmer
wrote to Mary Ritter Beard suggesting a Women's Archive. She replied
on 21st July, 1935.
Your project it has my fullest sympathy. I think
it imperative to put this material together. No doubt we have many
of the same reasons for seeing it that way but it does me great good
to learn that one so competent as you stands ready to assume the task.
I shall be only too happy to tell you how I visualize the thing, parts
of which I have longed to tackle myself but have not done and see
no way to do myself. I look forward with the keenest enjoyment to
meeting you - a privilege far too long denied me.
(5)
Mary
Ritter Beard became
increasingly involved in the Women's Archive project as this letter
to Rose Arnold Powell indicates ( 10th August, 1935).
Your familiarity with Susan B. Anthony's passion
for preserving her own and Mrs. Stanton's archives - meaning more
than the personal interest of course - will make you receptive of
course to this broad plan for a great international feminist archive
which Rosika Schwimmer has drawn up. I don't know where you stand
on the issue of war and peace but I entertain, as one of my feminist
props, the belief that time and again in history women have had to
take over men's bankrupt societies and that the Schwimmer-Addams'
and other feminists' attempts to take charge of the western world
in 1915 was a great outburst of the same sort of responsibility.
All the correspondence and the interviewing connected with the drive
for peace are in Mme. Schwimmer's keeping. But she is getting on in
years and is by no means well. Nor can she afford to house this archive
any longer. It is good feminist material and should not be lost by
burning or by boxing for no one to read.
What is even more on my mind in championing the enclosed plan is some
way to recapture the imaginative zest of women for public life. It
is perilous for society if they retreat to private interests to the
exclusion of interests in the common life represented by the State.
(6)
Mary Ritter Beard, Woman as Force in History (1946)
Women have been active, assertive, competent contributors
to their societies, but when women believe they are passive, and without
influence, their collective strength is undermined. The very idea
of women's oppression takes hold of women's minds and oppresses them.
But women could be freed from the ideological bondage by discovering
their own powerful creative history and using the knowledge to create
new social relations.
(7)
Mary Ritter Beard, letter to her son William Beard, on the death of
Charles Beard (undated)
As for my being free now, I have had as much freedom
all along as I really cared for. I loved sitting at home with my darling
every night and being at his side all the days. Outsiders and even
you and Miriam (William's sister) because of your comparative youth
could not fully comprehend our mutual happiness in working, jabbering,
and getting such exercise as we took in our simple ways. This is an
absolute truth.
(8)
Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past (1981)
Early in my undergraduate studies I had first
read Mary Beard's Woman as Force in History. Somehow, I was
able to connect with her central idea, that women have always been
active and at the centre of history. I was struck as by a sudden illumination,
by the simplicity and truth of her insight. Mary Beard had arrived
at that conviction the same way I had, by herself having been an engaged
participant in women's work in society.
(9)
Karla Biutrago, The Writing of Women's History in the United States
(1995)
Mary
Beard's basic thesis and what became the focus of her life's work
is the assertion that women have always been a very real, although
neglected, force in society. Without denying that women had legitimate
grievances, Beard maintained that feminist protest from the eighteenth
century to the twentieth had devalued women's history by expounding
women's subordination. The myth that women were or are only a subject
and oppressed sex is not only wrong, she argued, but it is counterproductive
because as women accept that designation of themselves and their pasts,
their collective strength is undermined. The very notion of oppression
imprisons women's minds and oppresses them. She believed women could
only be freed from that ideological bondage
by discovering their own powerful, creative history and using that
knowledge to create new social relations. Beard saw her job, her intellectual
work, as political, designed to reach all women and persuade them
of the power of their pasts and, moreover, of their futures.
Women are made to seem invisible, she said, not simply
because history has been written by evil men or because women have,
in fact, been invisible but because these men, as well as most of
the professional women and radical feminists of her day, focused their
concern on those areas of the community in which men predominate.
Beard placed herself in opposition to the militant feminists of her
time who called for absolute equality. Such simple-minded slogans,
she insisted, deny the power and force of the total community of women,
deny the existence and value of a distinct female culture.
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