Viewing war negatively and fighting for peace is millennia old. Members of the Religious Society of Friends (also called the Quakers or the Friends) have often worked for peace and helped others for almost as long as their faith has existed. Mildred Scott Olmsted put her faith into action and became a leading voice for peace, women’s rights, and social justice in the first half of the 20th century.
Olmsted was born in Glenolden, Pennsylvania, on December 5, 1890. Her father, Henry J. Scott, was a lawyer who did not try to hide his dislike for his younger daughter, nor did he treat his wife with particular respect. Her mother, Adele Hamrick, may have known no better, since she had been raised to simply be a high-society beauty, but she resisted financially by overspending regularly. Olmsted witnessed her parents fighting but also had her own share of fights with her father over several matters from the time she was a child. Similarly, Olmsted witnessed her paternal aunt forced to live with their family simply because she was unmarried and therefore dependent upon a male family member.
Olmsted graduated from the Friends’ Central School in 1908 then went to Smith College in Massachusetts, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in history; in 1974, the college honored her with an LHD (Doctor of Humane Letters). It was at Smith that Olmsted met her lifetime friend and perhaps lover, Ruth Mellor. After graduation, Olmsted immediately enrolled in the Pennsylvania School of Social and Health Work, earning a graduate level certificate in 1913. Her first job was running a “settlement house” for young children of the working class of Philadelphia as well as helping conduct surveys of children with mental, emotional, and physical disabilities in the area.
Peace was a suitable passion for women, but supporting women’s rights, especially sexual freedom, was quite shocking in the early part of the 20th century. Olmsted had been an advocate for women’s rights, particularly the right to vote, while in college, even though it resulted in her being teased. Massachusetts was more conservative than Pennsylvania, where both the women’s rights movement and abolitionism had their birthplace. Olmsted participated in a 1913 suffrage parade in Philadelphia even though she was still living at home with her father, who forbade her. She also worked in a “tea room” where the servers handed out information about women’s rights to men who came in. In a 1987 interview in The Salina Journal, she recalled marching for women’s right to vote against her father’s wishes, then also ignoring the advice of both father and husband when it came time to exercise her vote; her father was a Republican, her husband a Democrat, but sometimes Olmsted voted Socialist.
Olmsted was determined to keep working, since her childhood had turned her against marriage. In 1915 she was hired as the field secretary for the Main Line Federation of Churches. It was through that job that she discovered that the Bryn Mawr Hospital lacked a social work department, so Olmsted wrote a proposal and was hired as their first social worker. With steadfast persistence against the head nurse, who disliked this new department, Olmsted expanded her responsibilities until she was also doing outreach to public schools and well-baby clinics.
Olmsted met Margaret Sanger at the clinics and joined the Main Line Birth Control League, whose educational meetings were considered illegal at the time. Even though friends and family warned her that such illegal information would ruin her reputation, Olmsted thought it was her part of her job as a social worker to aid women and families in learning how to decrease the number of children they had. In 1918 she worked at the Girls Protective League near an army camp in Laurel, Maryland, which helped morally and practically educate girls and young women.
At some point Olmsted joined the YMCA, because she was sent to Paris on that organization’s behalf to organize recreation for troops awaiting demobilization after the Great War. Part of Olmsted’s program included weekly talks on post-war politics. Her first guest was Jane Addams, who was traveling to meet other peace activists who would form the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). While the troops enjoyed these talks, her superiors in the YMCA didn’t.
Next Olmsted went to Berlin to feed needy children as part of her work with the American Friends Service Committee. It may have been during her Germany residency that she met Allen Seymour Olmsted II, a Philadelphia lawyer who shared her views on peace and was willing to accept that she would never promise to “love, honor, and obey” him. The two were married in 1921 and had a son, Peter. Later they adopted a daughter, Enid, and another son, Anthony. Mellor would often accompany either Olmsted or the married couple on their travels and even lived with them up until her death in 1989. Olmsted’s husband preceded both women in death in 1977.
In 1920, Olmsted returned to Philadelphia to work for the White-Williams Foundation on juvenile delinquency as well as doing volunteer work at the local WILPF. By 1922 she was its executive secretary, a position she held until 1966. She excelled at recruitment, and during her tenure the Pennsylvania chapter of the WILPF accounted for a third of the entire organization’s membership. Even though Olmsted suffered a heart attack in 1930, she recovered and continued her work. She served on both the National (National Administrative Secretary from 1934-1966; then as Executive Director Emerita) and the International (National Administrative Secretary from 1937-1953) executive committees of the WILPF. During her tenure at the WILPF, she organized conferences between American and Mexican women (1928) as well as American and Soviet (1961) women to try to cross political and ethnic lines in the pursuit of peace.
While working for peace was something that Quakers were known for, it was not always a popular position, nor an easy one. During World War II, Olmsted’s husband joined her religion as the two continued advocating for peace, even though it was certainly unpopular to do so at that time in the United States. Even though Olmsted witnessed the early horrors of Nazi Germany herself in 1934, she continuously advocated for non-military ways to try to control the fascists. Her work with conscientious objectors prior to and during the Second World War brought forth social charges of disloyalty and later communism, but the Olmsteds continued their peace activism. Olmsted was a well-respected speaker in her own right for decades.
Olmsted did not limit her fight for social justice just to women and peace. In her 60s and 70s she joined the Civil Rights movement, marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., in both Selma and Washington. She maintained her membership with the Society of Friends and worked at both the local and national level for the religious organization. She also joined and often rose to positions of authority within other groups, such as Philadelphia SANE, Promoting Enduring Peace, the Upland Institute of Crozer Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union, and the United Nations Council of Non-Governmental Organizations.
Olmsted received several awards during her lifetime for her work. In 1972, the city of Philadelphia awarded her the SANE Peace Award. The WILPF recognized her work many times and gave her their first Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986. In 1987 Swarthmore College also gave her an honorary doctoral degree.
As she neared the end of her life, Olmsted refused to slow mentally, even if a car accident in 1980 forced her to stop joining marches for causes she advanced. She continued to speak out, give interviews, and work with other activists as best she was able. When she died on July 2, 1990, she was 99 years old.
The Olmsted family home, called Thunderbird Lodge, was left to the Rose Valley Centennial Foundation in 2015 on the condition that they maintain the historical value of the house while doing work to promote the causes she cared about. Her papers are part of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection.