Ida Rauh
American feminist, actress, sculptor and writer (1877-1970)
Ida Rauh (March 7, 1877 – February 28, 1970) was an American suffragist, actress, sculptor, and poet who helped found the Provincetown Players in 1915. The players, including Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, Eugene O'Neill, and others, first performed in a structure owned by Mary Heaton Vorse in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Later, the group moved to a theater on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Rauh directed the first production of O'Neill's one-act play Where the Cross Is Made for the opening of the permanent Provincetown Playhouse at 133 Macdougal Street in November 1918, and in the Village she became known for her intensely emotional acting.
Biography
Rauh graduated from the New York University law school in 1902, but never practiced law. She became involved with the Women's Trade Union League, including efforts to assist in the shirtwaist-makers strike in New York in 1909. Soon after, she traveled to England to join other militant women in the fight for women's suffrage. Returning to New York, she helped Mabel Dodge organize her Village salon and became active in the feminist group Heterodoxy, formed in 1912.
After her marriage to the writer and editor Max Eastman in New York in 1911, Rauh made a point of keeping her maiden name. In some places, such as Eastman's home town of Elmira, this was considered scandalous, the "first step on a slippery slope that led to feckless wives of loose morals, easy divorce, and free love".
The public source identifies “Ida Rauh” as american feminist, actress, sculptor and writer (1877-1970). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Rauh, American and feminist.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q16006833. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1877, 1970, 1915 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ida Rauh” 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.