Mary Garrett Hay

• Mary Hay
• Born: August 29, 1857
• Died: August 29, 1928

Temperance worker, suffragist, and a major organizer of the successful campaign to give the vote to women, was born in Charlestown, Indiana, the eldest of five children of Andrew Jennings Hay and Rebecca H. (Garrett) Hay. Her father, a physician, was a native Kentuckian; her mother was from Pennsylvania. She had one brother. In the Hay home politics was a daily topic of conversation, and Andrew Hay, an active Republican, often took his daughter to political meetings.

After finishing her preparatory education in local schools, Mary Hay spent two years at Western College for Women, in Oxford, Ohio (1873-74). She returned home just as the Women’s Crusade was beginning in the Midwest. Bands of women were using prayer and persuasion to close down illegal saloons, and the temperance issue revived with a new vigor.

Hay joined the newly formed national Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), as well as the local Charlestown organization and the state body. By 1885, when she was directing a department of the national WCTU, she had been persuaded by Zerelda Gray Wallace, a well-known temperance and woman suffrage worker, to support the drive for the franchise. Hay became an officer in the Indiana suffrage association and also became acquainted with Carrie Chapman Catt, who was organizing women in the Midwest and West to work for state suffrage amendments. The two women quickly became close friends and coworkers, in a relationship similar to that of WCTU president Frances E. Willard and her secretary Anna Gordon.

In 1895 Catt formed the organization committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which was designed to help obtain passage of state suffrage amendments. It supported state organizations by providing a central office, fund-raising assistance, field workers, and guidance in founding new branches. Hay became Catt’s chief aide in this work and moved to New York to establish the committee’s national headquarters.

The nature of the committee’s work was political, and it was here that Hay began to make a national reputation. Her first major test came in the 1896 California referendum campaign, during which she organized suffragists at every level, down to precincts. Although the campaign failed, it provided valuable experience for the future and quickly became a model for organizers elsewhere.

In 1900 Hay resigned from her job with the organization committee to work in an unofficial capacity as principal assistant to Catt, who had been elected president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Not until 1910 did Hay assume another prominent office, becoming president of the New York Equal Suffrage League and also of the New York City Woman Suffrage party. She held both posts until 1918.

In 1915 and 1917 she led and organized the fight for state suffrage amendments in New York. There, as in California, she organized her forces carefully at all levels. Although the first campaign failed, the second succeeded. So great was the plurality in New York City, where Hay had concentrated her efforts, that it offset the antisuffrage vote upstate.

The New York victory suddenly increased Hay’s standing in the eyes of legislators, for she spoke with the voice of hundreds of thousands of new voters. Her rising influence was symbolized by events at the July 1918 convention of the state Republican party, which chose candidates and a platform for the local and congressional elections in the fall. To the convention came more than a hundred women delegates, most of them suffragists. Many were put on committees, the chief honor going to Hay, who was appointed head of the platform committee, the most prestigious position except for the chair of the convention itself.

Among the committee’s fifty-one members were several who had labored to keep New York women from voting; nevertheless, Hay obtained a platform that included unanimous support for a federal suffrage amendment. An account in the New York World observed that this victory meant the passing of the old guard. The antisuffrage opposition, it noted, had made its only stand in the platform committee and had lost. The paper went on to describe Hay’s reading of the platform to the assembled convention, as “worth the experiment of bowing to a woman boss. Five feet four tall; of substantial proportions, white of hair and wearing a flannel skirt and white silk waist, the first woman chairman of a party Resolutions Committee in this state conducted herself like a veteran.”

The suffragists knew that the victory in New York had greatly increased the likelihood of passage of the constitutional amendment in Congress. Their attention therefore turned to Washington, where Hay was given the task of steering the Republican congressional delegation in the right direction. Here too victory was achieved, early in 1918, when Congress passed the amendment, and Hay’s activities shifted to campaigning for ratification in the states, an effort that did not end until 1920.

Meanwhile, Hay was appointed to the Republican Women’s National Executive Committee and in 1919 became its chair. The next year, however, she was forced to resign, on a charge of disloyalty to the party, because she tried to prevent the renomination and reelection of antisuffragist Senator James Wadsworth of New York.

Aside from her partisan political work, Hay belonged to the New York City League of Women Voters, which she chaired from 1918 to 1923. She was president of the New York State Federation of Women’s Clubs from 1910 to 1912, and from 1914 to 1918 was a director of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Active until the last day of her life, she died at seventy-one of a cerebral hemorrhage, in the home of Carrie Chapman Catt. The two women had lived together since the death of Catt’s husband in 1905. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in New York.

Mary Hay never claimed to be an intellectual or a theorist. Quickly bored with talk, she had a gift for political organization. In an era during which women did not have the right either to vote or to hold political office, she was an expert whom politicians consulted on women’s issues.

Most of the Hay papers are scattered among several collections. A few are in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; others are in the collections of Maud Wood Park, Leonora O’Reilly, and Carrie Chapman Catt, at Radcliffe, and in the collections of Catt and of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in the Library of Congress. The best biographical account is in Notable American Women (1971), which may be supplemented with material in E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vols. 4-6 (1902-22). Hay’s relationship with Catt is discussed in M. G. Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt (1944). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1932). Obituaries appeared in The Nation, September 19, 1928, and in The New York Times, New York World, and The New York Herald Tribune, August 31, 1928.