Marie Jenney Howe (1870–1934) was an American feminist organizer, writer, and suffragist. She is best known for founding the influential feminist debating society Heterodoxy in Greenwich Village, New York City, in 1912, and for her biography of the French writer George Sand.
Early Life and Education
Marie Hoffendal Jenney was born in Syracuse, New York, to Marie Saul and Edwin Sherman Jenney. Sources vary on her birth year, with some listing 1870 and others December 26, 1871. She graduated in 1897 from the Unitarian Theological Seminary in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and was ordained as a Unitarian minister in 1898. She worked as an assistant minister to Mary Augusta Safford in Sioux City and Des Moines, Iowa.
Career and Activism
Howe was active in the Consumers' League of Cleveland and later in New York became a leader in the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). She later left NAWSA to join Alice Paul's Congressional Union, which became the National Woman's Party.
In 1912, she founded Heterodoxy, a feminist literary and debating club whose membership included Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Fannie Hurst, Crystal Eastman, Inez Milholland, and many other prominent female intellectuals and activists. During World War I, the group was monitored by authorities and had to change meeting locations frequently. Howe was taken into custody by the United States Secret Service in 1919 for questioning about her radical political activities.
Writing and Later Life
In 1926, Howe moved to Paris to research the life of George Sand. She published George Sand: The Search for Love in 1927, a critically acclaimed biography. She also edited and translated George Sand's Intimate Journal (1929), with assistance from Sand's granddaughter Aurore Sand.
Howe wrote several plays, including An Anti-Suffrage Monologue (1912), a satirical lecture published by NAWSA; Telling the Truth at the White House (1918, with Paula O. Jakobi); Impossible George (1935); and The Cigar Smoker (1936, with Rose Emmet Young).
Personal Life
She married political reformer Frederic C. Howe in 1904. The couple moved to New York City in 1910. She maintained a close lifelong companionship with writer and editor Rose Emmet Young, with whom she collaborated on multiple works.
Death
Marie Jenney Howe died on February 28, 1934, at the age of 63.
