Marion Marsh Todd
Marion Marsh Todd was a prominent lawyer, economic reformer, and an early leader in third-party politics in the United States, born in Plymouth, New York. She was one of seven children in a New England family and pursued education at public schools and Ypsilanti State Normal School. After marrying Boston lawyer Benjamin Todd in 1868, she became involved in social reform movements advocating for temperance, woman suffrage, and economic changes. Todd faced personal challenges, including the death of her husband shortly after they moved to California, but she persevered in her legal studies and was admitted to the California bar in 1881.
Her political engagement deepened as she contributed to the platforms of the California Greenback Labor Party and later helped form the Union Labor Party. Todd was notable for being one of the first women to run for state office when she was nominated for attorney general. She transitioned from law practice to writing and lecturing, producing influential works that critiqued monopolistic practices and advocated for public ownership of railroads. Throughout her life, she remained committed to addressing economic injustices and providing a voice for the socially disenfranchised. Todd's legacy includes a body of work that reflects her dedication to reform and the struggles of her era, though details of her later life remain unclear.
Subject Terms
Marion Marsh Todd
- Marion Marsh Todd
- Born: March 1, 1841
- Died: 1914c.
Lawyer, economic reformer, and third-party leader, was born in Plymouth, New York, one of seven children of Abner Kneeland Marsh and Dolly Adelia (Wales) Marsh, both of New England. In 1851 her father, a Universalist preacher, moved the family to Eaton Rapids, Michigan, where he died the following year. After attending public school and Ypsilanti State Normal School, Marion Marsh worked as a teacher until 1868, when she married Benjamin Todd, a Boston lawyer. A believer in greater public opportunities for women, Benjamin Todd encouraged his wife to join him in reform work, and for several years she lectured in behalf of temperance, woman suffrage, and political and economic reform. The Todds had one child, Lula.
After the family moved to California for the sake of Benjamin Todd’s health, Marion Todd in 1879 entered Hastings College of Law in San Francisco (only recently opened to women) and specialized in finance law. Her husband died in 1880, and although she was obliged to leave law school in 1881 without a degree, she was admitted to the California bar the same year.
While practicing in San Francisco, Todd became interested in reform, apparently as an outgrowth of her previous activities. At the 1882 convention of the California Greenback Labor party she made important contributions to the platform. Nominated for the office of attorney general, she campaigned throughout California and polled more votes than any other Greenback nominee in one of the first bids for state office made by an American woman. She helped organize the Anti-Monopoly party in 1883 and in 1884 she attended the conventions of the Anti-Monopoly and the Greenback parties, campaigning actively for General Benjamin Butler, the presidential candidate of both parties.
After moving back to Michigan in the mid-1880s, Todd was a delegate to the general assembly of the Knights of Labor in 1886. She was a founding member of the Union Labor party, which sought to join farm and labor votes for economic reform, and in 1891 she was a delegate to the Cincinnati convention that founded the People’s party. Her activities in this period reflected the social discontents generated by the Panic of 1877, which disrupted the steady growth of American capitalism and disclosed its inherent systemic weaknesses for the first time.
After Todd gave up private law practice in 1883, she depended on lecturing and writing for her income. Newspaper accounts of her addresses testify to their solid content and anecdotal wit and to the persuasive platform style of the speaker. She was also an effective writer, publishing her first book, Protective Tariff Delusions, in 1886. In 1890 she became editor of the Express, a national reform weekly published in Chicago. One of her first series for the magazine was expanded into a book, Professor Goldwin Smith and His Satellites in Congress (1890), a crushing refutation of the Cornell historian’s polemics against woman suffrage.
Like other female reformers of the time, Todd believed that such causes as temperance and woman suffrage must temporarily yield to the search for a solution to the gravest social evil of the day—the threat to the American home resulting from unemployment, bankruptcies, fore-closures, and other dislocations attributed by reformers to the power of a moneyed oligarchy created by government policies during and after the Civil War. This was the theme of Pizarro and John Sherman (1891), “a tale of a crime perpetrated by a set of men in high places, clothed with congressional honors, the depth of whose treasonable design language fails to portray.”
Next to banks, Todd believed, the greatest threat to American society came from the monopolistic power of privately owned transportation and communications systems. In Railways of Europe and America (1893), based on exhaustive research into government documents from the industrialized countries, she concluded that “the people should own the railroads instead of the railroads’ owning the people.” Her most ambitious work, the book went through a second edition in 1895.
Like Mary Elizabeth Lease, Ignatius Donnelly, and other Populist writers, Marion Todd then turned to the novel of protest. Rachel’s Pitiful History (1895), Phillip: A Romance (1900), and Claudia (1902) were fictional indictments of capitalism and suggestions for better societies.
In her later years Todd returned once more to Michigan. She lived for a while in Eaton Rapids and in 1914 was living in Springport. There is no record of her death.
Rachel’s Pitiful History contains summaries and reviews of Todd’s published works. See also A. L. Diggs, “The Women in the Alliance Movement,” Arena, July 1892; F. E. Willard and M. E. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century (1893; reprinted 1967); and Notable American Women (1971).