Monday, December 04, 2006

Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson Papers, 1903-1940 : Biographical/Historical Note

Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson Papers, 1903-1940 : Biographical/Historical Note: "Grace Gallatin was born in Sacramento, California on January 28, 1872. In 1888 she began writing articles for San Francisco newspapers under the pen name of Dorothy Dodge, and in 1892 graduated from Packer Collegiate Institute, in Brooklyn, NY. She married Ernest Thompson Seton in 1896, a founder of the Boy Scouts of America. Their daughter Ann (known as 'Anya') was born in 1904. Active for women's rights, Grace Seton served as vice president and president of the Connecticut Woman's Suffrage Association (1910-20), was president of Pen and Brush (1898-1939), and with her husband, helped to organize the Girl Pioneers (later the Camp Fire Girls) in 1910. During World War I, she organized and directed a women's motor unit to aid soldiers in France. She was President of the National League of Pen Women from 1926 to 1928 and from 1930 to 1932. She helped organize an international conference of women writers at the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933 and arranged an exhibit of 3,000 books by women, which later became the core of the Biblioteca Femina at Northwestern University. In the 1920s and 1930s Seton visited Japan, China, Indochina, Hawaii, Egypt and Latin American and later wrote books about her travels, including A Woman Tenderfoot (1900) and A Woman Tenderfoot in Egypt (1923), Chinese Lanterns (1924), Yes, Lady Saheb (1925). Seton divorced in 1935. In the 1940s she followed Yogananda, traveling to his ashrams. She died in Palm Beach, Florida, March 19, 1959."

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