Stantial, Edna Lamprey

Edna Lamprey Stantial was secretary of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government and archivist of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. As Maud Wood Park's close friend and secretary, ELS helped MWP gather the papers that MWP gave to Radcliffe College in 1943. These papers, the Woman's Rights Collection, formed the nucleus of the Women's Archives, later the Schlesinger Library. Throughout the 1950s, ELS continued to collect, sort, and "catalog" papers that she added to the WRC, and others that she donated to the library. She also organized MWP's personal papers, which she gave to the Library of Congress in the 1970s, and edited MWP's Front Door Lobby. MWP lived with ELS and her husband Guy immediately before MWP's death in 1955. Ironically, although she was responsible for saving numerous suffragists' manuscript collections, little biographical information is available about ELS in this collection or elsewhere.