Martha Gallison Moore Avery

Martha Gallison Moore-Avery (April 6, 1851 – August 8, 1929) was an American socialist who later converted to Catholicism and became an anti-Socialism activist.

Later, in Ellsworth, Maine, she started a millinery business and became actively involved in religious life, joining the local Unitarian church.

She also joined the Nationalist Club, a local society created to promote the ideas of socialist utopian author Edward Bellamy.

After the defeat of their motion by the convention, they withdrew from the socialist party and became fervent anti-socialists, jointly publishing a book, Socialism: The Nation of Fatherless Children, in 1903.

She was a proponent for the organization of labor unions, strike action, and collective bargaining, and was intensely involved in the new Catholic social justice movement.

In 1922, she became the president of the Common Cause Society, a Catholic labor organization, and would remain in that position for the rest of her life, in the process becoming one of the major proponents of a public welfare state in the US, as she felt that otherwise laissez-faire capitalism would destroy the family just as effectively as Marxism.