Papers of Wenona Osborne Pinkham, 1893-1934

Suffragist, reformer, and lobbyist Wenona Osborne Pinkham was born September 4, 1882. When she was five, her parents traveled to eastern Colorado in a prairie schooner accompanied by two horses and a cow, settling in a sod house. Her father, a teacher, wished to try his hand at farming. Following several years of deprivation, the family moved to a small town where her father secured a post as principal. Later she graduated from the public schools in Denver and from the University of Denver where she received a BA in 1910. She taught in the Denver public schools and was a founder and president of the North Side Neighborhood House in Denver. In 1911 she married Henry W. Pinkham, a Unitarian minister and socialist, and they moved to Boston, Massachusetts. As state chair for the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, 1913-1915, Pinkham spoke to audiences as an example of a woman voter, since Colorado had granted women suffrage years before. In 1917, she became executive secretary of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government and remained in this position when the organization became the Boston League of Women Voters. In late 1922 she left the league and became associate executive secretary of the Massachusetts Civic League, which promoted social welfare legislation and such issues as paying prisoners for their work. From 1923 until her sudden death in 1930, Pinkham served as the Massachusetts Civic League's executive secretary. Pinkham was also a member of the American Association of Social Workers, the Consumers' League of Massachusetts, the Women's City Club, and the Women's Trade Union League. Her only child, Louisa Catherine, was born in 1915.