Induction Category:
Reformers
Inducted:
2020
Known as a fierce supporter of both suffrage and labor causes, Emily Pierson was one of the foremost progressive organizers in the state of Connecticut at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Born in Cromwell, Connecticut in 1881, Pierson was raised by parents who ran a greenhouse company renowned for its hot house roses. Socialite Pierson attended Vassar College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1907, and then went on to get a master’s degree in education from Columbia College in 1908. After graduating, she became a high school teacher in Bristol, Connecticut.
But this was only the beginning of Emily’s illustrious career. Soon after moving back to Connecticut and inspired by a speech she heard in 1909 by the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst, Pierson joined the leaders of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association and soon became its state organizer. Together with Katherine Houghton Hepburn, she formed the Hartford Political Equality League, an organization devoted to the vote, as well as to moral reform. They believed that women’s suffrage would aid, among other causes, in the elimination of venereal disease and sex trafficking.
As an organizer for the Connecticut suffrage movement, Pierson gave speeches and organized events. Perhaps her best-known event was the “Trolley Campaign” of early 1912, where suffragists handed out thousands of pamphlets and tracts about women’s suffrage to captive trolley riders in Hartford, New Haven, and Fairfield. At one stop in Hartford, Pierson addressed a lunchtime crowd of 400 Underwood Typewriter employees, implored them to consider organized labor. “There is being born among women,” one writer who was present at the event noted, “a feeling of solidarity…”.
In 1914 Pierson was also one of the organizers of the Hartford branch of a nationwide suffrage parade where she presided as head marshal and led, along with a woman on a white horse, more than 1,000 suffragists riding in decorated floats and cars.
In later years—after the 19th Amendment was ratified—Pierson attended Yale University, graduating in 1924 with a medical degree. She then worked as a school doctor and the town health director of Cromwell. She traveled internationally to lecture on women’s and children’s health issues, particularly in Russia and China. But she never gave up the fight on her own home turf. More than two decades after her Trolley Campaign, she walked the picket line at the 1935 strike of the Colt Firearms workers. Now a physician and a health officer, she was quoted as saying, “It’s a case of the weak against the strong, isn’t it?”
Emily Pierson died in 1971 in Middletown, Connecticut. She was 89 years old.
