Harper, Ida A. Husted

▪ American journalist and suffragist

née  Ida A. Husted 

born Feb. 18, 1851, Fairfield, Ind., U.S.

died March 14, 1931, Washington, D.C.

 journalist and suffragist, remembered for her writings in the popular press for and about women and for her contributions to the documentation of the woman suffrage movement.

      Ida Husted married Thomas W. Harper, a lawyer, in 1871 and settled in Terre Haute, Indiana. Her husband became a prominent attorney and politician and an associate of socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, and she began writing for local newspapers, although not with his approval. For 12 years she contributed a column entitled “A Woman's Opinions” to the Terre Haute Saturday Evening Mail, and from 1884 to 1893 she wrote a woman's column for the Firemen's Magazine (later the Locomotive Firemen's Magazine), a union publication.

      In 1887 Harper helped organize a state woman suffrage society and became its secretary. She was divorced in February 1890. Following further newspaper work, she attended Stanford (California) University (1893–95). In 1896 she took charge of press relations for the campaign by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) for a state suffrage amendment in California. As a result of her work in that campaign she was asked by Susan B. Anthony (Anthony, Susan B.) to become her official biographer, and in 1897 she took up residence in Anthony's home in Rochester, New York. The first two volumes of the Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony appeared in 1898; a third was published in 1908. She also collaborated with Anthony on the fourth volume of the History of Woman Suffrage (1902).

      Harper chaired the press committee of the International Council of Women in 1899–1902 and was a delegate to council conventions in London in 1899 and Berlin in 1904. During 1899–1903 she edited a woman's column in the New York Sunday Sun, and from 1909 to 1913 she edited the woman's page in Harper's Bazaar. She was also a correspondent for newspapers in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York City. In 1916 Carrie Chapman Catt (Catt, Carrie Chapman) asked Harper to head the newly formed Leslie Bureau of Suffrage Education within the NAWSA. The steady stream of letters, articles, and pamphlets that issued from her office in Washington, D.C., played a large role in the successful campaign for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In 1922 she published the fifth and sixth volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, bringing the coverage up to 1920.

* * *