Park, Maud Wood (1871-1955), was a leader of the suffrage movement to grant American women the right to vote. She was the first president of the National League of Women Voters (NLWV, now the League of Women Voters).
Maud May Wood was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on Jan. 25, 1871. She was educated at St. Agnes School in Albany, New York. She was an exceptional student and became a schoolteacher at the age of 16. Eight years later, she enrolled as a student at Radcliffe College and completed the four-year course in just three years, graduating with the highest honors. In 1897, while still a student at Radcliffe, she married Charles Edward Park, a Boston architect. In 1898, her final year at Radcliffe, she invited the American women’s rights leader Alice Stone Blackwell to give a speech. Blackwell so inspired Park that she attended the 1900 convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in Washington, D.C. This was the last NAWSA convention to be presided over by the famous American women’s rights leader Susan B. Anthony.
Park believed that college women should join the fight for women’s voting rights. In 1900, she co-founded the Massachusetts branch of the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL) and toured the United States, organizing college women into the suffrage movement. In 1908, CESL chapters around the country united to form the National College Equal Suffrage League. Park was also a co-founder of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government, serving as its executive secretary from 1901 to 1907, and again from 1910 to 1916. In 1904, Charles Edward Park died. Maud Wood Park married Robert Hunter, a theatrical agent, in 1908.
In 1917, at the request of Carrie Chapman Catt, the head of NAWSA, Park moved to Washington, D.C., to coordinate NAWSA’s lobbying efforts. Park’s tireless work was a major factor in the 1920 passage of the 19th Amendment, extending voting rights to women. Park served as the first elected president of the NLWV from 1920 to 1924. During her presidency, she built the NLWV into a major nationwide organization with a broad interest in political and social reforms. In 1920, Park formed the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, a lobbying network representing many women’s reform organizations. She chaired the committee from 1920 to 1924. Park then retired from politics because of ill health. She spent the last 30 years of her life writing plays and working to establish the Women’s Rights Collection at Radcliffe College. Park died on May 8, 1955.
