Clara Arthur
American suffragist (1858–1929)
Clara Arthur (October 25, 1858 – July 26, 1929) was an American suffragist. She was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame. After suffrage was achieved in Michigan, she devoted her efforts to establishing playgrounds in the city of Detroit. Arthur is known as the "Mother of the Playground Movement".
Biography
Clara Arthur née Peters was born in 1858 in Saint John, New Brunswick, British North America. In 1885, she co-founded the Michigan Equal Suffrage Association, which she would be elected president of in 1906. As president, Arthur succeeded in amending the Constitution of Michigan to allow white women to vote on certain issues (such as on taxes and bonds). Arthur was also an important driver of the statewide effort to gain women's suffrage, which succeeded in 1918 after six years of campaigning.
Arthur learned about the playground movement through groups that constructed them in cities like Boston and Chicago. She began to promote the building of playgrounds; constructing Detroit's first playground in 1899 by converting an empty lot to a playground.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clara Arthur” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.