Elizabeth Gardiner Glen-Dower Evans

• Elizabeth Gardiner Glendower Evans
• Born: February 28, 1856
• Died: December 12, 1937

Prison and labor reformer and suffragist, was born in New Rochelle, New York, to wealthy and aristocratic parents. Her father was Edward Gardiner, an architect from a venerable Boston family. Her mother, Sophia Harrison (Miffin) Gardiner, was the daughter of prominent Philadelphians. When Elizabeth, the fourth of five children, was three, her father died, and the family went to live in Boston with her grandfather. She attended private schools and was raised amidst Back Bay wealth conservatism.

In 1877 she met and became engaged to Glen-dower Evans, a Harvard undergraduate from a leading Pennsylvania family. He went on to Harvard Law School and then began legal practice in the office of a friend, the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. They were married in 1882. Their circle of friends included William James, Louis D. Brandeis, Charles Eliot Norton, as well as other members of Boston’s social and intellectual elite. After her husband’s sudden death in 1886, the childless Elizabeth Glendower Evans, as she was thereafter known, joined other prominent Bostonians in the burgeoning field of social work.

She was appointed a trustee of the Massachusetts Training Schools in 1886; Evans held the position until 1914. She quickly became a leader in penal reform and a recognized expert in reformatory training as well as administration. The center of an ever-widening circle of reformers, she assiduously used her network of personal connections to bring them together and to induce new people into social-reform work. Among the latter were Dr. Richard C. Cabot, who founded the medical social work department at Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as Jessie D. Hodder, whom Evans introduced to Cabot and who became superintendent of the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women, carrying out many of Evans’s ideas.

Evans believed that the purpose of reformatories was to rehabilitate offenders and that each case must be handled individually. In 1908, with Mary W. Dewson, the industrial economist, she conducted a survey of the inmates at two Massachusetts industrial schools. Evans and Dewson found that many of the juvenile delinquents were “feeble-minded” and not capable of leading normal lives. Their report insisted that these youngsters should not be in reformatories but should be placed permanently under custodial care at an institution designed for them. The reform schools could then go about the work of reclaiming the reclaimable.

Evans’s work on the reformatory trustee board brought her into contact with a wide range of ideas and social issues. Although she was raised an Episcopalian, her religious questioning led her to mysticism, a belief in the unity of all human beings, and an insistence that conscience be the guide to action. She took philosophy courses at Radcliffe College in the 1890s and increasingly turned her attention to social questions. In 1908-09 she toured England for four months so as to study socialism and trade unionism there. She came back a convinced socialist and suffragist and was thereafter a staunch ally of the women’s trade union and suffrage movements in America.

Beginning in 1910 she was involved with labor disputes. That year she picketed in a rainstorm in behalf of striking female weavers in Roxbury, Massachusetts. As the Women’s Trade Union League delegate in 1912 to the Boston Central Labor Union, she aided striking employees of the Boston elevated railroad. In 1919 she was on the picket line at 5:30 A.M. during a textile workers’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She bailed out arrested strikers, testified on their behalf, and was herself arrested.

The Women’s Trade Union League had begun a campaign in 1910 to establish a minimum wage law. In 1911 the league persuaded the Massachusetts legislature to appoint a committee of inquiry into the wages and living conditions of working women; Evans was named its only female member. She became a moving force behind the committee, raising money for its operation (it was inadequately funded) and providing its staff with office space in her home. The group studied four industries, determining that women and girls earned much less than the cost of living. It recommended adoption of a minimum wage law, which was enacted in 1912.

Evans, a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, spoke and lobbied for the vote. When World War I broke out, she joined the women’s peace movement and was a delegate to the International Congress of Women at The Hague, Netherlands, in 1915. There attendees condemned war as a means of settling international disputes.

During the 1920s Evans was a national director of the American Civil Liberties Union, championing free speech and the rights of aliens —both of which were threatened by public reaction following the war. She became an early as well as ardent supporter of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, whose defense was the cause for which she is best known. Her interest in the two anarchists was aroused during their trial, and she remained firmly convinced of their innocence, drawing prominent liberals such as Felix Frankfurter, H. L. Mencken, and Samuel Eliot Morison to their support. Evans wrote articles that publicized the trial, proclaimed the defendants innocent, and praised their personal qualities. She took a deep interest in the two men, engaging in a voluminous correspondence with them, visiting, and sending gifts while they appealed their conviction and awaited execution. Sacco called her Mother, and Vanzetti wrote in 1927 that the generosity and solidarity of Evans and their other friends “has written a wonderful paragraph in history ... it will never have been done in vain.”

In her later years Evans became interested in the cause of the striking Harlan County, Kentucky, miners and was involved with the antivivisection movement. She died from bronchopneumonia at her home in Brookline, Massachussetts, at the age of eighty-one. Her ashes were scattered over the grave of her husband in Boston’s Forest Hills Cemetery.

The main source of biographical information is the Elizabeth Glendower Evans Papers at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Her publications include the article, written with M. W. Dewson, “Feeble-Mindedness and Juvenile Delinquency,” Charities and the Commons, May 2, 1908. Notable American Women (1971) gives the most complete biography and Who’s Who in America (1920) provides some data. See also C. R. Henderson, ed., Prison Reform, vol. 3 (1910); A. Henry, Memoirs (1944); and F. Goldmark, Impatient Crusader: Florence Kelly’s Life Story (1953). For Evans’s important role in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, see M. Frankfurter and G. Jackson, eds., Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (1928). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, December 13, 1937.