Colton was a founder of Toledo's League of Women Voters in 1921, a member of the National Woman's Party in the 1930s, and served as a delegate to Carrie Chapman Catt's Woman's Centennial Congress in 1940.
Olive A. Colton was born in Toledo in 1873 and died there in 1972. She was the daughter of Abram W. Colton (1834-1909), president and general manager of the Lake Erie Transportation Company and officer of other transportation firms, and Catherine (Van Home) Colton, a descendant of the prominent Knickerbocker family of New York. Her only sister, Cornelia, wife of E. Griswold Hollister, was a leader in Republican politics and the musical life of Toledo.
Olive Colton attended the Smead School for Girls, majoring in history, and for many years remained active in the Smead School Associations. She traveled in Europe frequently and developed an extensive collection of postcards. One of her early interests was in the “romance of royalty,” the title of her first published work (1908). Her interest in woman suffrage appears to date from the beginning of her friendship with Amy G. Maher in the 1910s.
A founder of the League of Women Voters of Toledo in 1921, she served as president twice and in 1930 was elected honorary president for life. She appears to have been a member of the National Woman’s Party during the 1930s. She participated in Carrie Chapman Catt’s National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War’s conferences in Washington from 1925 to 1933. She was also a delegate to Mrs. Catt’s Woman’s Centennial Congress in 1940.
As a public speaker, Miss Colton gave talks for the Child and Family Agency and during World War II, for the Toledo chapter of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies.
During the late 1940s, she made donations to Albert Einstein’s Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, to the American Association for the United Nations, the Committee for the Marshall Plan, and to other causes.
Miss Colton’s essays display a variety of intellectual interests: peace, women’s suffrage and rights, and Emerson and his association with the Berkshire Mountain region. She remained a Progressive long after the Progressive Era. In her old age, her political philosophy remained to the left of center.
From the guide to the Olive A. Colton Papers, 1867-1961, (Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections, The University of Toledo)
