User:Dddonald/Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis Otey

Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis Otey (4 October 1880-28 February 1974) was an economist and activist for woman suffrage in Virginia, an early member of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia (precursor to the League of Women Voters) who later joined the more radical National Woman’s Party to advocate for full equality for women in public and economic life.

Education
Elizabeth Lewis Otey attended preparatory school at Randolph-Macon Woman's College (later Randolph College) and graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1901 with a bachelor's degree in Greek and Mathematics. She attended the University of Chicago for one year before entering the University of Berlin where she studied sociology and economics. Upon completion of her thesis in 1907, she became the sixth American woman to earn her doctorate at the University of Berlin. Published in German and English, her thesis was a study of the cotton industry in the southern United States. Her study took up issues related to poverty in the South, barriers to industrialization, and the problem of child labor. She wrote openly about racism, sexism, and class conflicts."

Economist
After earning her doctorate at the University of Berlin, Otey lived in Washington, D.C. where she prepared reports and other documents for the Department of Commerce and Labor and the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was also a member of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, precursor to the National Conference of Social Welfare.

Otey returned briefly to Bryn Mawr in 1923 where she worked as a tutor in economics. She published The Cotton Mill Workers on Jones Falls, Baltimore for the Christian Social Justice Fund in 1924.

Sometime after the death of her husband in 1933, Otey returned to Washington, D.C. to work for the Social Security Administration and then the Foreign Economic Administration until her retirement in 1948.

Suffrage activist (draft)
Otey and her mother, Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis, were early members of the Lynchburg Equal Suffrage League which was affiliated with the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. Both served as board members and officers throughout the 1910s.

Otey demonstrated her support of woman suffrage through public activism. Along with Lila Meade Valentine, she spoke to the convention of the Virginia Federation of Labor in Danville, Virginia in xxxx and in 1913 she marched in a suffrage parade in Washigton, D.C. When Valentine was unable to attend the national suffrage convention in 1915, Otey and her mother were two of the three-person delegation sent in her place.

In 1912 and again in 1914, the Virginia General Assembly failed to pass suffrage amendments. Turning her attention to a federal amendment, Otey and other suffrage activists formed the Virginia chapter of the Congressional Unio for Woman Suffrage in 1915. In her hometown of Lynchburg, Otey established a suffrage education program in 1915. In 1917 she became the editor of The Lynchburg Woman's Suffrage News, with 5000 copies in its first printing.

1916 Republican State Convention

with mother, demonstration in 1917 calling out Wilson for his opposition to woman suffrage

clarified her support of more aggressive methods of National Woman's Party (successor to Congressional Union) rather than the ESLV. The Lynchburg News reported that she told the convention "We wanted to be disagreeable so that they would take notice."

delegation to Paris 1926, National Woman's Party refused admittance; opposition from LWV because of their support for full equality for women

Other public activity (draft)
Member of the Virginia Council of Defense during World War I.

cast her first vote for Socialist Eugene V. Debs in Nov. 1920. Nominated by Republican party as superintendent of public instruction, first woman nominated by a major party for statewide office in Virginia; unsuccessful

1931 on state Socialist Party's executive committee, unsuccessful run for House of Delegates from Lynchburg and 1933 nominee for United States Senate opposite Democrat Party leader Harry Flood Byrd

Family
Otey was the daughter of Elizabeth Dabney Langhorne Lewis and John Henry Lewis of Lynchburg, Virginia. Her mother was an activist for woman suffrage as was her great aunt, Orra Gray Langhorne (1841-1904). She was also first cousin of Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor (aka "Lady Astor), the first woman to serve in the British House of Commons.

Married to Lynchburg businessman, Dexter Otey, from 1910 until his death in 1933. They had one daughter, born in 1911.

Other possible sources

James M. Elson, Lynchburg, Virginia: The First Two Hundred Years, 1786–1986(2004), 334–335

Roanoke World-News, 21 July 1973

obituaries in Lynchburg Daily Advance and Lynchburg News, both 1 Mar. 1974; editorial tributes in Lynchburg News, 2 Mar. 1974, and Lynchburg Daily Advance, 4 Mar. 1974.