Evans, Elizabeth Glendower, 1856-1937

Social reformer Elizabeth Glendower Evans was involved in prison reform, support of striking workers, the Massachusetts campaign for the first minimum wage act for women, the movement for women's suffrage, and peace. She was a contributing editor and financial supporter of La Follette's Magazine and the Progressive, and national director of the American Civil Liberties Union (1920-1937).

Elizabeth Glendower Evans (February 28, 1856 - December 12, 1937), was born Elizabeth Gardiner in New Rochelle, New York, the fourth of five children of Edward and Sophia Harrison (Mifflin) Gardiner. EGE's father died when she was three years old and, as she writes in her "Memoir," "We were imported to Boston by my father's father, William Howard Gardiner, where we grew up as poor relations of a very aristocratic family." After two years in Brookline Mrs. Gardiner moved her family into Boston . EGE attended private schools; in her teens, "Going to church became my one interest." She attended Trinity Church, where she was inspired by the teachings of Phillips Brooks. EGE taught Sunday school and planned to become a missionary until, in 1877, she met Glendower Evans, then a student at Harvard College and a close friend of William James. They were married in 1882, after GE had finished Harvard Law School and entered a Boston law firm.

Their marriage was brief because GE died suddenly in 1886. During these four years, according to EGE's "Memoir," the "doors were always open to the friends he made. In those days I don't think I ever talked at all. I used to sit by the fire and listen and listen...." The friends she listened to included Louis Brandeis and William James, but it was her husband who had the greatest influence on EGE. From their first meeting he encouraged her to read more widely; literature, politics, social issues, and public service were the major topics of his letters and their discussions. After GE's death EGE added his name to hers and, as the following chronology shows, dedicated her life to studying social conditions and helping others.

EGE was extremely generous with the money she inherited, often sacrificing her own needs to help both individuals and the causes she supported. She died in 1937 at the age of 81 in Brookline, Massachusetts.

More biographical material is available in this collection (see Series I for EGE's "Memoir," diaries, articles, and tributes by others). See also the article in Notable American Women (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), which includes a list of additional sources. In the Jessie Donaldson Hodder papers (A-23) at the Schlesinger Library there are ten folders of EGE material, including correspondence and a diary . There is EGE correspondence in the La Follette Family collection in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.