Papers of Mildred Adams, 1936-1963

Mildred Adams (this is the name she uses professionally) was born in Morrison, Illinois. She studied economics and Spanish at the University of California at Berkeley and later at Columbia and Yale. Adams is a writer, editor and translator. During World War II she served in the educational division of the Columbia Broadcasting System. She has been a reporter, wrote many feature articles for The New York Times, was a correspondent for The Economist of London, and has written many books, including The Right to be People, a history of the struggle for suffrage. She still lives in New York City, where she first went to visit at the invitation of her aunt, Gertrude Foster Brown. It was through her aunt's suffrage activities that Adams met Carrie Chapman Catt and herself became involved in women's rights.

Gertrude Foster Brown, 1868-1956, had studied piano in America and Europe and was both a performer and lecturer. In 1910 she became active in the suffrage movement and for the next ten years was a leader of the New York State Woman's Suffrage Association. Brown worked closely with Carrie Chapman Catt and in 1917, at Catt's request, she became general manager of the periodical, Woman Citizen (formerly The Woman's Journal). Brown was also in charge of the Woman's Ambulance Corps that the suffragists sent to France during World War I. After the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, Brown continued her association with Catt in the League of Women Voters and the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, which, during World War II, became the Women's Action Committee for Victory and Lasting Peace.

Brown was a member of the first Carrie Chapman Catt Memorial Fund Committee. The Fund was established in 1947 by the LWV as a living memorial to Catt and had as its aim "...to spread practical knowledge of how democracy works in a free country, and how the individual citizen assumes responsibility for government." Lucile W. Hemings was the first chairman of the Fund and became its first president. In 1961 its name was changed to the Overseas Education Fund.