╣PAR@ ` aTEXT ` SEvans, Elizabeth Glendower1856╨1937reformerBorn on February 28, 1856, in New Rochelle, New York, Elizabeth Gardiner grow up from the age of three in Boston. She was educated privately. In May 1882, after a five-year engagement, she married Glendower Evans, a promising young lawyer, who died suddenly in 1886. Thereafter his widow used the name Elizabeth Glendower Evans. She soon developed an interest in a variety of social reform movements. In 1886 she was appointed a trustee of the Massachusetts reformatory system, a post she held until 1914. She contributed greatly to the development of a modern and progressive penal system by the state. Later she became active in the Women╒s Trade Union League. A visit to Great Britain in 1908╨1909 left Evans a committed socialist, and thereafter she took an increasingly active role in labor organizing. She was deeply involved in a weavers╒ strike in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1910 and even more so in the widely publicized Lawrence textile strike of 1912, where her personal prominence and credibility helped expose police brutality to public view. In 1911╨1912 she supported personally and financially the successful campaign for a minimum-wage law in Massachusetts. She was also a member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and in 1915 she accompanied her friend Jane Addams to the International Congress of Women at The Hague. From 1913 to 1935 she was a contributing editor of La Follette╒s Magazine and its successor, The Progressive. In the 1920s Evans was a national director of the American Civil Liberties Union. Of her many and varied involvements that in the Sacco and Vanzetti case was the most publicized and probably the deepest. She was at the center of fund-raising activities for the defense of the two anarchists accused of robbery and murder, and she became personally close to them, especially to Nicola Sacco. The publicity that aroused the interest of the nation and then of the world in the case stemmed in large part from her efforts, and she was instrumental in enlisting the active support of prominent liberals and radicals, many of them friends of long standing. When all proved of no avail, Sacco addressed his last words, ╥Farewell, Mother,╙ to her. Thereafter she lived for the most part in retirement. She died in Brookline, Massachusetts, on December 12, 1937. &styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ % 5¬ / !I ╬ 5¬ ╧ !I D !I ▐ O !I ╣ !I ╧ !I π !I ≥ !I ÷ 5¬ ≈ !I link ` HYPR D O
