Queer Places:
Smith College (Seven Sisters), 9 Elm St, Northampton, MA 01063
New York University, 70 Washington Square S, New York, NY 10012
83 Washington Pl, New York, NY 10011
Madeleine Zabriskie Doty (August 24, 1877 – October 14, 1963) was an American journalist, pacifist, civil
libertarian, and advocate for the rights of prisoners, as well as the
International Secretary for the Women's International League for Peace and
Freedom. Beginning of the 1920s
Emily Greene Balch lived
and worked at the Maison International in Rue du Vieux Collège in Geneva, on
and off, for 12 years. During a Zürich meeting, she received a cable
terminating her 20-year-long academic job at Wellesley College, on the grounds
that she had been employed ‘to teach economics, not pacifism’. Left with no
means of support and no pension at the age of 52, Balch had celebrated her
dismissal by smoking a cigarette with
Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
and the American lawyer Madeleine
Doty; along with its dislike of independent women, Wellesley had a strict
taboo on smoking.
Madeleine Zabriskie Doty was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, August 24, 1877
to Samuel and Charlotte Zabriskie Doty.[1] She
received a B.L. from Smith College in 1900, an L.L.B. from New York
University in 1902, and a Ph.D. in International Relations from Geneva
University in 1934.[2][1]
After practicing law for five years in New York City, her interest turned
to children's courts and delinquency and for three years she was secretary of
the Russell
Srage Foundation Children's Court Committee. As a member of New York's
Prison Reform Commission in 1913, she voluntarily spent a week in prison to
investigate conditions, adopting Maggie Martin as her alias.[3] She
described inhumane conditions in women's prisons, and advocated dramatic
changes relating to prison management, prisoner autonomy, and prison
activities. In addition to recommending improvements in food and sanitation,
she advocated for the prisoners having a say in the way that the prisons were
run. To that end, she proposed a system of prisoner self-government. [3]
Out of this experience she published Society's Misfits (1916)[4] about
juvenile and women's prison reform. After the publication of this text, New
York State prison administrators experimented with some of her
recommendations.[3]
Florence Harding and Madeleine Doty in Japan
Doty's pacifist principles placed her among an international circle of
pacifist women who believed that women's exclusion from war-making councils
gave them an objective view which made them more natural peacemakers than men.
In 1915, with Jane Addams and
forty-three other women from the U.S., she attended the Women's
Peace Congress at The
Hague. On this journey, she represented the Women’s
Lawyers Association and worked as a reporter for Century Magazine and a
special correspondent for the New York Evening
Post.[5]
She then became a correspondent for the New
York Tribune and Good
Housekeeping.[6] She
reported from Hamburg, Germany for the Tribune in 1916,[7] and
reported that it was "like a dying city" as the citizens were starving.[1] For
Good Housekeeping, she traveled around the world and was in Russia during the
1917-1918 revolution. She published Short Rations: An American Woman In
Germany[8] in
1917 and Behind The Battle Line[9] in
1918.
On her return to the U.S. in 1917, Doty became an editor with her friend
Crystal
Eastman of Four
Lights, the radical paper of the New
York Woman’s Peace Party. In a letter on January 13, 1917, to Dr.
Maria
Montessori, Fannie
May Witherspoon, a Christian
socialist and another co-editor of Four Lights, described the purpose of
the paper as “striking what seems to us a much-needed note of internationalism
in these days of universal warfare and national strife ... the contributors
will be chiefly women, and the issues of feminism and peace will naturally go
hand in hand.”[5] Reporting
war news from a feminist and pacifist lens, it published articles featuring a
“gender-based critique of American society and democracy.”[10]
Doty continued to play a part in the peace movement first as International
Secretary for the WILPF in
Geneva, where she moved in 1925,[1] then
as editor of Pax
International for the League
of Nations.
In 1919 she married pacifist Roger
Baldwin, who later founded the ACLU.[11] Doty
had been Crystal
Eastman's roommate, which is how she met Baldwin. Doty and Baldwin
literally vowed to maintain a "free marriage," with neither requiring monogamy
of the other.[12] Doty
retained her maiden name, had an active public career, supported herself
financially, and employed a domestic servant to manage the reproduction of the
household.[13] However,
they were divorced in 1925.
In 1936, foreseeing the collapse of the League, Doty decided that the only
way to secure world peace was through education of the young. She created and
organized the first Geneva Junior Year Abroad program for the University
of Delaware, 1938-1939. Because it was impossible to continue during World
War II, she studied at the University
of Geneva, receiving a Ph.D in International Relations in 1945 at the age
of 66. After the war she returned to the U.S. and between 1946 and 1949 she
organized and ran another Geneva Junior Year Abroad program for Smith
College.[2]
Beginning in 1950 Doty taught history at Miss
Harris's School in Florida. She retired at the age of 75. She returned to
Geneva and lectured on American history at the University of Geneva until 1962
when she moved to Greenfield,
Massachusetts, where she died October 14, 1963.[1]
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