File:Doris Stevens and Dudley Field Malone 1923 (49706758786).jpg

A brief account of how I found this 1920s “power couple” as we would say today. I was recently given a book on the Ziegfeld Follies by friends of mine and was reading about the fascinating and mysterious model and showgirl, Dolores. The book (The Ziegfeld Follies by Marjorie Farnsworth) mentions that Dolores’s wedding in May 1923 in Paris was witnessed by only two people, American divorce lawyer and activist, Dudley Field Malone, and his second wife who was unnamed. In checking out who D F Malone could be, I found a lot of interesting details about his life and career, but also, to my astonishment, that his second wife was Doris Stevens, a remarkable feminist and progressive that I had come across before. Their marriage only lasted 8 years before they were divorced in France. The New York Times wrote, “Her plea was based on the alleged impossibility of two persons of equally strong mind living harmoniously together.”

Some brief biographical material:

Dudley Field Malone Born 3 June 1882, NYC, died 5 Oct 1950, Culver City CA

Dudley Field Malone is an American attorney, politician, liberal activist, and actor. Malone is best remembered as one of the most prominent liberal attorneys in the United States during the decade of the 1920s and for his unsuccessful 1920 campaign for Governor of New York.

Malone served as Third Assistant Secretary of State in the Wilson Administration (1913) and later, as Collector of the Port of New York (1913-1917). Notably, he was the official who cleared the S.S. Lusitania to sail for Britain with her cargo of munitions, a violation of America’s neutrality. Lusitania was famously sunk by German U-Boats 7 May 1915. In 1917, Malone broke from Wilson and the Democratic Party over their tepid support for woman’s suffrage. He won the release of a group of Silent Sentinel demonstrators led by Alice Paul who had been arrested while protesting outside the White House. In 1920 Malone ran unsuccessfully for Governor of New York as the candidate of the Farmer-Labor Party. From 1920 on, Malone devoted himself to his law practice, specializing in international divorce cases of wealthy individuals and becoming known as "the greatest international divorce lawyer." He established a branch office in Paris along with former Judge William H. Wadhams.” In 1925, Malone was part of the defense team led by Clarence Darrow, in the famous Scopes trial. High school teacher John T. Scopes was tried in Tennessee for teaching evolution in the public schools in violation of the recently passed law banning such actions.

From 1921 to 1929, Malone was married to writer and progressive activist Doris Stevens.

Doris Stevens

Born 26 Oct 1888 Omaha NE

Died 22 Mar 1963 NYC

“Doris Stevens…was an American suffragist, woman's legal rights advocate and author. She was the first female member of the American Institute of International Law and first chair of the Inter-American Commission of Women. Born in 1888 in Omaha, Nebraska, Stevens became involved in the fight for suffrage while a college student at Oberlin College. After graduating with a degree in sociology in 1911, she taught briefly before becoming a paid regional organizer for the National American Woman Suffrage Association's Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CUWS). When the CUWS broke from the parent organization in 1914, Stevens became the national strategist. She was in charge of coordinating the women's congress, held at the Panama Pacific Exposition in 1915. When the CUWS became the National Woman's Party (NWP) in 1916, Stevens organized party delegates for each of the 435 Congressional Districts in an effort to attain national women's enfranchisement and defeat candidates who were opposed to women's rights. Between 1917 and 1919, Stevens was a prominent participant in the Silent Sentinels vigil at Woodrow Wilson's White House to urge the passage of a constitutional amendment for women's voting rights and was arrested several times for her involvement. After the 19th Amendment secured women's right to vote, she wrote a book, titled Jailed for Freedom (1920), which recounted the sentinel's ordeals. Once the right to vote was secured, Stevens turned her attention to women's legal status. She supported passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and worked with Alice Paul from 1927–1933 on a volume of work comparing varying impact on law for women and men. The goal in compiling the data was to obtain an international law protecting women's right of citizenship. The research was completed with the help of feminists in 90 countries and evaluated laws controlling women's nationality from every country. Gaining approval for the work from the League of Nations in 1927, Stevens presented the proposal Pan American Union in 1928, convincing the governing body to create the Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM). In 1931, she joined the American Institute of International Law, becoming its first female member. In 1933, her work resulted in the first treaty to secure international rights for women. The Convention on the Nationality of Women established that women retained their citizenship after marriage and Convention on Nationality provided that neither marriage nor divorce could affect the nationality of the members of a family, extending citizenship protection to children. Ousted from the CIM in 1938, and the NWP in 1947 over policy disputes, Stevens became vice president of the Lucy Stone League in 1951, of which she had been a member since the 1920s. She fought the roll-back of policies removing the gains women had made to enter the work force during World War II and worked to establish feminism as an academic field of study. She continued fighting for feminist causes until her death in 1963.”