Vida Dutton Scudder

[1] In 1885 she and Clara French were the first American women admitted to the graduate program at Oxford, where she was influenced by York Powell and John Ruskin.

[1] When French died in 1888, Scudder joined the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, a group of Episcopal women dedicated to intercessionary prayer and social reconciliation.

Also in 1888, she joined the Society of Christian Socialists, which, under William Dwight Porter Bliss, established the Church of the Carpenter in Boston and published The Dawn.

[1] Having received a leave of absence from Wellesley for 1894–1896, Scudder spent a year in Italy and France studying modern Italian and French literature.

[3] In Scudder's famous speech, she declared, I would rather never again wear a thread of woolen than know my garments had been woven at the cost of such misery as I have seen and known past the shadow of a doubt to have existed in this town. ...

If the wages are of necessity below the standard to maintain man and woman in decency and in health, then the woolen industry has not a present right to exist in Massachusetts.

[1] Unlike Eugene Victor Debs and other Socialist leaders, Scudder supported President Woodrow Wilson's decision to intervene in the First World War in 1917.

She joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1923, the same year she gave a series of lectures before the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in Prague.