Mary Hillard Loines

(1844–1944) Mary spent fifty years battling for women's rights. In 1869 she was elected a secretary of the Brooklyn Equal Rights Association and selected in May of that year as a Brooklyn delegate to the first convention for the American Suffrage Association.

Elected as chairman of the Legislative Committee in the New York State Woman Suffrage Association in 1898, Mary helped lobby the legislature from 1902-1905 to allow all tax-paying women in cities with a population of less than 50,000 to vote on all special taxation questions, a campaign that did not succeed. In 1899 Mary was accompanied by the then Governor of New York State, Theodore Roosevelt, to one of the many suffrage conventions which she attended over the course of her lifetime. She was also able to meet privately with Roosevelt, along with a small group of New York activists, to consult about enfranchising women in New York.

Mary led the Brooklyn Woman's Suffrage Association between the years 1899 and 1919 and was heavily involved in the logistics of the League of Women Voters after women's enfranchisement. *courtesy alexanderstreet.com