Ruth Gage-Colby (1899-1984) was active in the world peace movement for seventy years. She was active in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, worked as a journalist covering the United Nations, and attended the Japanese Conferences Against A and H Bombs.
From the description of Collection, 1951-1985. (Swarthmore College, Peace Collection). WorldCat record id: 27964008
Ruth Gage was born in Olivia, Minnesota on February 1, 1899, the first of two daughters born to Lillian E. Knox and George Franklin Gage, an attorney and Renville County probate judge. She graduated from Olivia High School in 1915 and then attended Stanley College, a private women's college in Minneapolis, for one year. She returned to Olivia at the end of the 1916 school year and, along with her sister Lucille, was stricken with polio. Ruth survived, but her sister did not. The following year Ruth and her mother moved to Minneapolis where Ruth enrolled in the University of Minnesota. She graduated in 1919 with a degree in political science and on September 10th of the same year married Woodard L. Colby, a physician with whom she became acquainted when she was hospitalized with polio.
Following their marriage the couple spent two years in Venice where Woodard continued his study of pediatric medicine and where Ruth studied voice and volunteered to help distribute food through the American Friends Service Committee child feeding program. Ruth met Dorothy Detzer, national executive secretary for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 1924-1947, in Venice. Detzer was also working with the Quaker famine relief program and it may have been her influence that prompted Ruth to join the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom during its third international conference.
Upon their return to Saint Paul, Woodard joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota and Ruth gave birth in June of 1923 to a son named Gage. Over the next twenty years Ruth lived the life of a prestigious physician's wife. She attended meetings of women's social and literary clubs, formed her own business as an interior decorator and specialized in children's playrooms, supported Hubert H. Humphrey in his mayoral campaigns, served on the board of the Hallie Q. Brown Community House, and was active in the Minnesota branch of Save the Children Federation. She also sustained her membership in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, joined the Minnesota chapter, and rose to positions of leadership within the organization.
During the second world war, Ruth volunteered as the placement officer for the St. Paul Resettlement Committee, an organization that aided Japanese-Americans who were interned in Minnesota. Ruth also opened her own home to several refugees and provided shelter to the children of British author and pacifist Vera Brittain, John Catlin and Shirley Catlin (Shirley Williams).
At the close of the war Ruth and Dorothy Detzer attended the charter conference of the United Nations in San Francisco as non-governmental organization observers who represented the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. That experience deeply engaged Ruth and changed the course of her life. Immediately following the conference she went to New York and spent the remainder of her life devoted to the United Nations, first with UNICEF, then as a press correspondent, and later as program director for the Speakers Research Committee.
Ruth's role as a leader in the peace, disarmament, and human rights movements truly emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. She joined with Women Strike for Peace and participated in their first march in Washington on November 1, 1961 to protest nuclear weapons testing. She also served as the coordinator for the international league of Women Strike for Peace and worked with the Soviet Women's Committee to urge acceptance of the Test Ban Treaty during the Geneva disarmament negotiations. When United States involvement escalated in Vietnam Ruth joined Another Mother for Peace and supported the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Other organizations that Ruth joined and supported included National Organization for Women, Promoting Enduring Peace, National Peace Action Coalition, Arab American Women's Friendship Association, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Conference for New Politics, Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo), and the American Humanist Association. She also remained active with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and served as their U.S. representative to the United Nations during the mid-1970s.
Ruth Gage-Colby died in California on September 25, 1984. She is interred at the city cemetery in Hector, Minnesota.
Biographical information was taken from the collection.
From the guide to the Ruth Gage-Colby papers., 1912-1988., (Minnesota Historical Society)
