Contents

Collection Overview

Biographical Note

Scope and Contents of the Collection

Organization of the Collection

Search Terms

Madeleine Zabriskie Doty Papers 1880-1984

Finding Aid

Finding aid prepared by Susan Boone.

Encoding funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

2003

Biographical Note

Madeleine Zabriskie Doty was born in Bayonne, New Jersey, August 24, 1877. She received a B.L. from Smith College in 1900 and an L.L.B. from New York University in 1902.

After practicing law for five years in New York City, her interest turned to children's courts and delinquency and for three years she was secretary of the Russell Sage Foundation Children's Court Committee. As a member of New York's Prison Reform Commission in 1913, she voluntarily spent a week in prison to investigate conditions. Out of this experience she published Society's Misfits (1916) about juvenile and women's prison reform.

Doty's pacifist principles placed her among an international circle of pacifist women who believed that women's exclusion from warmaking councils gave them an objective view which made them more natural peacemakers than men. In 1915, with Jane Addams and forty-three other women from the U.S., she attended the Women's Peace Congress at The Hague. She then became a correspondent for the New York Tribune and Good Housekeeping. For the latter she traveled around the world and was in Russia during the 1917-1918 revolution. She published Short Rations: An American Woman In Germany in 1917 and Behind The Battle Line in 1918.

In 1919 she married pacifist, Roger Baldwin, who later founded the ACLU. They were divorced in 1925. Doty continued to play a part in the peace movement first as International Secretary for the WILPF in Geneva, then as editor of Pax International for the League of Nations. In 1936, foreseeing the collapse of the League, Doty decided that the only way to secure world peace was through education of the young. She created and organized the first Geneva Junior Year Abroad program for the University of Delaware, 1938-1939. Because it was impossible to continue during World War II, she studied at the University of Geneva, receiving a Ph.D in International Relations in 1934 at the age of 66. After the war she returned to the U.S. and between 1946 and 1949 she organized and ran another Geneva Junior Year Abroad program for Smith College.

Beginning in 1950 Doty taught history at Miss Harris's School in Florida. She retired at the age of 75. She returned to Geneva and lectured on American history at the University of Geneva until 1962 when she moved to Greenfield, Massachusetts, where she died October 14, 1963.

Return to the Table of Contents

Scope and Contents of the Collection

The Madeleine Zabriskie Doty Papers consist of 1.3 linear feet (4 document boxes) of correspondence, photographs, printed material, memorabilia, three small notebooks of day to day jottings kept during her last months, an incomplete typescript of her unpublished autobiography, and a printed copy of her doctoral thesis.

Over 300 letters dating from 1906 to 1963 form the bulk of the collection, most of which are from friends and associates in both this country and Europe. They include Jane Addams (1916-1914), Norman Douglas (1915-1918), Theodore Dreiser (1908-1909), Harry Emerson Fosdick (1959-1963), Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1931), John Galsworthy (1912-1919), Judge Ben Lindsey (1910-1914), Salvador de Madariaga (1954-1958), Thomas Mott Osborne (1914), Frances Perkins (1934-1942), Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence (1917-1962), Eleanor Roosevelt (1938-1947), Hugh De Selincourt (1918), H.G. Wells (1909-22), and Rebecca West (1918, n.d.). They write to her about their common interests in peace, socialism, prison reform, women's suffrage, child welfare, conditions in the countries of Europe before and after the wars, and the international education movement which culminated in the idea of a year of study abroad for American college students.

Also included in the correspondence series there are letters of a more personal nature from David Graham Phillips, early 20th century muckraker and novelist (1907-1910), and Roger Baldwin, writer, socialist, founder and director of the ACLU (1918-1963). (Doty and Baldwin were married from 1919-1925.) There is a small amount of family correspondence which includes three letters from Doty to her family written from Russia in 1917-1918 during the early days of the Russian Revolution. In addition there is a small amount of miscellaneous correspondence with publishers and business associates as well as a number of letters with indecipherable or unidentified signatures.

Within Series III there is a set of photographs which were originally intended to accompany her autobiography "Tap On The Shoulder" (1963). They include photographs of Roger Baldwin, David Graham Phillips, Emmeline and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, Eleanor Roosevelt, John Galsworthy, Mahatma Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, Salvador de Madariagra, Judge Ben Lindsey, Aleksandr Kerensky, and Maksim Gorkey. The incomplete manuscript of the autobiography is included in Series IV, along with her Ph.D thesis, "The Central Organisation For A Durable Peace, (1915-1919)," short diary entries, memos and articles.

Return to the Table of Contents

Search Terms

Return to the Table of Contents

Organization of the Collection

This collection is organized into four series:

• I. Biography
• II. Correspondence
• III. Photographs
• IV. Writings

Return to the Table of Contents

SERIES I. BIOGRAPHICAL

SERIES II. CORRESPONDENCE

SERIES III. PHOTOGRAPHS

SERIES IV. WRITINGS