Biographical Sketch of Eliza Hardy Lord



Biographical Database of Militant Woman Suffragists, 1913-1920
 
Biography of Miss Eliza Hardy Lord, 1843-19??
 

By Rachel Twomey, undergraduate, SUNY Oneonta

Eliza Hardy Lord was born in 1843 in Massachusetts. She moved to Shelter Island in Suffolk County, NY in 1850. She remained single.

Eliza Hardy Lord attended Elmira Female College, graduating with the class of 1864, at approximately twenty-one. When Western Reserve University in Ohio established its College for Women—later known as the Flora Stone Mather College-- Lord became the Dean of the College for Women. She worked there from 1888-1892, and was not only Western Reserve University’s first woman faculty member, but the first woman dean in the United States. In 1915 the Elmira College Bulletin mentions an "inspiring address" that Miss Lord gave at the annual reunion. She was also a trustee of the Elmira College Alumni Association from 1916 to 1922.

Lord supported the suffrage movement from 1910 to 1920, and was a member of both the National American Woman Suffrage Association and the National Woman's Party. As one of the first generation of women to graduate from college, she often led contingents of college graduates in suffrage parades, including the March 3, 1913 procession in Washington DC. In February 1917, Lord participated in College Day, a large gathering of NWP supporters picketing the White House to demand presidential action on the suffrage amendment. In 1920 she moved to Yonkers, Ward 4, in Westchester, New York, where she lived until her death.

Sources:

“Women in Big Pageant, Unprotected, Battle Through Avenue Mobs,” Washington Herald, March 4, 1913, 1, 4; “Dr. Anna Shaw to Join Leaders,” Washington Herald, October 22, 1913, 2; “Suffrage Parade Heads are Named,” Washington Times, March 19, 1914, 11; “College Women Pickets,” Courier-News [Bridgewater, New Jersey], February 3, 1917, 11; Eliza Hardy Lord, “Women as Teachers,” The National Exposition Souvenir: What America Owes to Women, ed. Lydia Hoyt Farmer (Buffalo: Charles Wells Moulton, 1893): 222-231; The Suffragist 5, no. 56 (February 7, 1917). Ancestry.com (accessed March 2016). Nathaniel Ball. Archivist and Curator, Elmira College.

Library of Congress, http://www.case.edu/its/archives/Women/women.htm (accessed March 2016).

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