Nathan, Maud, 1862-

New York society woman and social reformer, Nathan was president of the New York Consumers' League from 1897 to 1917; vice-president of the National Consumers' League; a suffrage worker; and delegate to international congresses for peace, suffrage, working women, and social betterment.

Mrs. Maud Nathan who send this box of her archives is a distinguished member of a distinguished line of Spanish-Portuguese Jews who lived in New York for eight generations. Among her close relatives as her contemporaries were Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo and Emma Lazarus. Robert Nathan, novelist and poet, is her nephew. Her husband, Frederick Nathan, was likewise a prominent figure and they graced many a platform together during the suffrage campaign. Mr. Nathan organized the International Men's League for Woman Suffrage - an invaluable aid for the cause.

In these archives which elaborate her autobiography, are materials relative to her long public career. They cover her helping to found the New York Consumers' League and later the National Consumers' League; her work for woman suffrage which began when she discovered that she could not get hearings before the state legislature in behalf of her interest in social welfare work as easily as voting men if at all; her activities in connection with the peace movement; her contacts with men and women in high places in Europe and the Orient, her influence in her own country as well as in foreign countries and their acknowledgment; her role as singer; her function as hostess; and innumerable other features in her life. She was a member of the D.A.R. She has placed in these scrapbooks some of her published work as letters and articles. She has also inserted poems, articles, and other items which impressed her so much with their power that she made them part of herself. There are tributes to her from notable persons on this side and the other side of the Atlantic.

Pictures illuminate this story of a great American.

By Mary R. Beard, July 1944