Alice Morgan Wright (1873 - 1994) [Section 29 Lot 42]
Modernist Sculptor, Co-founder of New York State League of Women Voters, Recording Secretary for New York State Suffrage Party, Aided in the French and British Suffragist Movement, co-founder of the National Woman’s Party, Founder of Humane Education Society, successfully lobbied for the U.S. Humane Slaughter Act of 1958
Alice Morgan Wright was born on October 10, 1881, in Albany, N.Y. to Henry Romeyn Wright, a grocer who made a fortune during the Civil War, and Emma Jane Morgan. Her lifelong residence was 393 State Street in Albany overlooking Washington Park. Designed by Robert W. Gibson, he was well known for doing churches and private residences, most notably the Morton F. Plant House in 1905, which was later converted into the flagship store for Cartier in 1917.
Alice attended the St. Agnes School in Albany, later known as the Doane Stuart School. She attended Smith College, graduating in 1904. While at Smith College she met Edith Goode, who shared the same passions and interests. They were lifelong companions and worked together advocating for women rights, helping establish the National Women’s Party (NWP).
After graduating from Smith, Alice moved to New York City working for the Collegiate Equal Suffrage League, and attended the Arts Student League of New York, but not allowed to attend life studies class and instead watched boxing matches to learn the human form. In 1909 the League awarded her the Gutzon Borglum and the Augustus Saint-Gauden award for her work. She then studied in Paris, first at Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where another Albany based female artist Samantha Huntley studied, and later and Academie Colarossi in Paris. Whiles in Paris she studied with Jean Antoine Injalbert and was contemporaries of Herman Atkin MacNeil who later designed the Standing Liberty Quarter.
In Europe she became part of the suffrage movement in England and France. In 1910 she organized a speaking engagement in Paris and successful got Emmeline Pankhurst to speak. The two became close, and Alice helped organize a speaking engagement for Pankhurst in Albany while she was on tour in the United States the following year. Alice went to England, where she was an advocate for the National Women’s Social and Political Union, later arrested during a demonstration and spent two months in London’s Holloway prison.
While in prison friends smuggled in art supplies where you did a small bust of Pankhurst she shared a cell with. Unlike her fellow prisoners, Alice was not force-fed during their hunger strikes. Once out of prison she advocated for the release of her suffragist friends before returning to the U.S. in 1914. Back in Albany, she continued in the suffragist movement, serving as the recording secretary of the New York State Women’s Suffrage Party, and help establish New York State League of Women Voters.
Though her work was becoming well known globally in the art world, Alice waited until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to go back to sculpting fulltime. She and Edith divided their time between the family home on State Street and a farm in Woodstock, VT where Alice had her studio. However, Alice’s arthritis made it difficult for her to continue her work and with World World II, she became increasing political again.
Advocating for feminism to be an agenda items for the United Nations, Alice served as a delegate to the 1948 assembly in Paris. At the same time, she served as an organizer of the United Nationals Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Since childhood, Alice showed a love for animals, something she shared in common with fellow Albany female artists and contemporaries, Dorothy and Gertrude Lathrop. Additionally, Alice saw a connection between “feminism, environmentalism, and animal advocacy,” and “cruelty to animals goes hand in hand with cruelty of people.” Fellow feminists viewed her compassion of animals as to “conform to the female stereotype.”
Despite backlash from the feminist community Alice and Edith helped champion animal rights for the rest of their lives. In 1948 they helped establish the National Humane Education Society (NHES), National Humane Society. Through NHES the first animal care facility, Peace Plantation Animal Sanctuary was established in northern Virginia. Peace Plantation operated from 1950 - 1980 when it was relocated to Delaware County, N.Y. It operated in the Catskills until 2015 when due to operating constraints, it was forced to close.
Additionally, they lobbied politicians against use of animals in medical testing and scientific research. In 1957 Alice wrote to President Eisenhower in requesting to “put an end to the use of animals in atomic bomb tests.” To her success and animal activists, Congress passed the Humane Slaughter Act the following year.
Alice died on April 8, 1975, of respiratory failure. She was 93 years old. She was cremated and interred into her father’s plot on April 30, 1982. Alice and Edith’s legacy to animal rights continues with the Alice Morgan Wright / Edith Goode Trust.