Ida Mae Thompson (1866 – 1947) was an American suffragist. She was active in the

Equal Suffrage League of Virginia The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia was founded in 1909 in Richmond, Virginia. Like many similar organizations in other states, the league's goal was to secure voting rights for women. When the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constituti ...

and later worked for the

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; from 1935 to 1939, then known as the Work Projects Administration from 1939 to 1943) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to car ...

's Historical Records to obtain and archive records from the suffrage movement in Virginia.

Biography

Thompson was born on November 7, 1866, in

Drakes Branch, Virginia Drakes Branch is a town in Charlotte County, Virginia, Charlotte County, Virginia, United States. The population was 530 at the 2010 United States Census, 2010 census. Geography Drakes Branch is located southeast of the center of Charlotte Count ...

. In 1886 the family moved to Richmond. Thompson supported herself as a typist and stenographer. In 1913 Thompson began working at the Richmond headquarters of the

. She served as headquarters secretary and took care of the day-to-day responsibilities of the office manager; ordering supplies, arranging rent payments, speaker schedules, event planning, and organization mailings. Thompson took on more planning duties, along with Edith Clark Cowles, in the running of the Richmond office when the president,

Lila Meade Valentine Lila Meade Valentine (born Lila Hardaway Meade; February 4, 1865 – July 14, 1921) was an American education reformer, healthcare advocate, and one of the main leaders of her state's participation in the Women's suffrage in the United States, wo ...

, was ill. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 Thompson became active in the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia's successor organization, the Virginia

League of Women Voters The League of Women Voters (LWV) is a nonpartisan American nonprofit political organization. Founded in 1920, its ongoing major activities include Voter registration, registering voters, providing voter information, boosting voter turnout and adv ...

. She first served as executive secretary of the Richmond LWV and then executive secretary of the Virginia LWV. Thompson assisted Cowles with her contributions to the chapter on Virginia to ''

History of Woman Suffrage ''History of Woman Suffrage'' is a book that was produced by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Ida Husted Harper. Published in six volumes from 1881 to 1922, it is a history of the women's suffrage movement, ...

'', published in 1922. In the 1930s, during the

Great Depression The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and ...

Thompson continued working for the LWV, but took another job as a clerk for the

U.S. Department of Labor The United States Department of Labor (DOL) is one of the executive departments of the U.S. federal government. It is responsible for the administration of federal laws governing occupational safety and health, wage and hour standards, unem ...

National Re-Employment Service. In the mid-1930s Thompson added another job as a clerk and researcher for

's Historical Records project to assemble historical documents pertaining to suffrage in Virginia. In 1936 Thompson contacted former members of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia requesting any records, papers, stories and ephemera documenting the woman suffrage movement in Virginia. She had mixed results, with some members having disposed of their records and others being able to locate the historical items requested. Thompson herself had the records she kept from the Richmond headquarters, which she donated. The collected material became the ''Equal Suffrage League of Virginia Records'' housed at the

Library of Virginia The Library of Virginia in Richmond, Virginia, is the library agency of the Commonwealth of Virginia. It serves as the archival agency and the reference library for Virginia's seat of government. The Library is located at 800 East Broad Street, tw ...

. The collection consists of 31 boxes of primary documents from the suffrage movement in Virginia on the local and state level including materials from the

National American Woman Suffrage Association The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was an organization formed on February 18, 1890, to advocate in favor of women's suffrage in the United States. It was created by the merger of two existing organizations, the National Woma ...

(NAWSA) and the LWV along with the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia. In 1938 Thompson, who never married, moved into the Home for Needy Confederate Women (now the ''Stan and Dorothy Pauley Center'' on the grounds of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond). She died on July 24, 1947, in

Richmond Richmond most often refers to: * Richmond, British Columbia, a city in Canada * Richmond, California, a city in the United States * Richmond, London, a town in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, England * Richmond, North Yorkshire, a town ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Thompson, Ida Mae 1866 births 1947 deaths People from Charlotte County, Virginia Suffragists from Virginia