Doris Stevens

Doris Stevens (born Dora Caroline Stevens; October 26, 1888 – March 22, 1963) 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 to 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.