Blanche Ames Ames
Blanche Ames Ames (February 18, 1878 – March 2, 1969) was an American artist, political activist, inventor, writer, and prominent supporter of women's suffrage and birth control.
Blanche Ames Ames
March 2, 1969 (aged 91)
American
Artist, political activist, inventor, writer
4
Women's rights activist[edit]
Ames held a lifelong passion for women's rights. including women's voting rights. In 1915, when Massachusetts voters would decide whether to allow women the right to vote, Blanche attended 40 events throughout the commonwealth to spread the word of female equality.[13] She was president of the Easton Woman Suffrage League, and, from 1915 to 1918, she was Treasurer of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage League.[4] Ames lobbied for women's voting rights at a Republican National Convention. She combined her art with her activism as the art editor of the longest running women's rights newspaper, the Woman's Journal.[2]: 117 From 1913 through 1916, Ames hired a news clipping service to collect suffrage news, including cartoons, to inspire her work.[2]: 117
Ames also supported birth control. In 1916 she helped found the Birth Control League of Massachusetts, an affiliate of Margaret Sanger's group, the American Birth Control League, and served as first President.[4][5] In this role Ames helped to form The Doctors Bill to Clarify the Law, which regulated the ability of doctors to provide birth control counseling to married women with health problems, and later helped establish universal access to birth control.[14] Massachusetts did not legalize contraception for married women until 1966, the last state in the nation to do so, and Ames set the standard for perseverance in the decades-long effort.[15]
In 1941 Ames also served as a board member and later as President of the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston.[4] NEH was managed by women serving purposely only women and children. They intended to give medical care services to the same sex . In 1952 because of financial circumstances they opened up to the possibility of employing male staff. Ames fought to keep the hospital as only female staff and administration through funding methods.[16]
Author[edit]
At age 80, Ames wrote a biography about her father, Adelbert Ames, called: "Adelbert Ames, 1835-1933; General, Senator, Governor, the story of his life and times and his integrity as a soldier and statesman in the service of the United States of America throughout the Civil War and in Mississippi in the years of Reconstruction" (1964).[2]: 118 [17] She wrote the biography in response to John F. Kennedy's 1956 book Profiles in Courage. Profiles criticized Adelbert Ames in favor of his Reconstruction Era rival Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, a key leader of the "Mississippi Plan" that suppressed African-American voter turnout and ultimately led to Adelbert Ames's resignation as governor of Mississippi. Prior to publishing the book, Ames had frequently written Kennedy asking him to retract his criticism of her father in order to "bring your views into accord with the trend of modern historical interpretation of the Reconstruction Period.”[18]