Edith Goode (1882-1970)
Alice Morgan Wright (1881-1975)
Major Accomplishments: Goode served as HSUS board member between 1958 and 1967; Goode and Wright donated a 140-acre farm in Loudoun County, Virginia to The HSUS, which was developed into the National Humane Education Center; and they both pushed to include animal protection issues in international agreements.
By Bernard Unti
In more than a half century of humane work, The HSUS has attracted many outstanding supporters—generous, energetic, and unselfish people dedicated to the cause of animals. Even by that standard, however, Alice Morgan Wright and Edith Goode stand out, not simply for what they gave to the cause in life, but for the continuing humane work underwritten by the charitable trusts they had to foresight to establish. Today, their common interest in supporting education and in widening the scope of animal protection to foreign countries is still being sustained through the grants programs administered by the Edith J. Goode Residuary Trust and the Alice Morgan Wright-Edith Goode Fund.
Goode, a native of Springfield, Ohio, was raised in Washington, D.C., which became her lifelong home. Together with her mother, she was a founder of the National Woman's Party (NWP) and a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She devoted her entire life to public service and to campaigns for women's rights, peace, and population control.
Wright, a native of Albany, New York, pursued similar interests while forging an international reputation as a modernist sculptress whose work focused on the human figure. She displayed a strong revulsion to cruelty as a child, refusing to go to church after asking her mother where all of the women's furs had come from.
A Partnership Is Born
After meeting at Smith College, Wright and Goode become lifetime companions, bonded by impassioned commitments to woman's suffrage, racial justice, peace, international understanding, and animal welfare. For half a century, the two women advanced their shared vision of a better world with intensity, inventiveness, and deep conviction about the necessity of concerted political action.
After graduation from Smith, Wright attended the Art Students League in New York City, where she was not permitted to sit in on drawing classes with nude male models. Instead, to develop her knowledge of anatomy, she attended boxing and wrestling matches.
Wright, who exhibited in the controversial New York Armory Show of 1912, was greatly influenced by Cubism and Futurism. She also showed her works at the Royal Academy of Art in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Salon des Beaux Arts in Paris, the Salon d'Automne, the 1939 New York World's Fair, the Albany Institute of History and Art, and the Philadelphia Institute of Art.
While traveling to Paris in 1909, Wright met Emmeline "Fanny" Pankhurst, and joined her National Women's Social and Political Union. In 1912, Wright joined Pankhurst and others in a public demonstration in London, and was arrested and imprisoned in Holloway Prison, where she performed hard labor and participated in hunger strikes with other suffragists.
After living and working for a number of years in Greenwich Village, Wright returned to Albany, where Eleanor Roosevelt was a frequent visitor to her home on State Street. In 1921, one year after passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in the United States, Wright became a founding member of the League of Women Voters of New York State.
Making Room for Animals
Between 1945 and 1947, Wright was chairperson of the NWP, and she and Goode played a significant part in its work during this era. By this time, too, the two had begun to devote their attention to the mistreatment of animals. Among other actions, they attended the San Francisco conference of 1945, at which the United Nations was founded. Their main goal was to get equal rights for women onto the agenda of the nascent organization, but the conference also marked the start of their efforts to bring animals into the framework of international agreements concerning human rights, citizenship, and the United Nations.
A dozen years later, Goode and Wright reported, "We believed that there should be a declaration also of the rights of animals, involved as animals are in the welfare of human society," but, they lamented, the United Nations steered clear "of any responsibility for animals."
Wright's activism for animals was not limited to pushing for their rights, either. Wright strongly pursued population control, understanding its impact on the welfare of animals and the environment. Among other actions, she pressed the issue at the 1949 United Nations meeting in Paris. Unbridled growth of the human population, she once wrote, comes "at the cost of countless cruelties to the other sentient races of creation."
Building a Concept of Kindness
Fatefully, Goode and Wright attended the 1954 American Humane Association meeting in Atlanta, which sparked the formation of the National Humane Society, predecessor of The HSUS. A charter member of The HSUS and a generous supporter during its earliest years, Goode served as a board member of The HSUS between 1958 and 1967, and played a highly active role in its work.
In one of her most important contributions, Goode threw herself into the campaign for a federal humane slaughter bill. In May 1956, after more than a year of effort, Goode, together with HSUS founder Fred Myers, secured the endorsement of the 11 million member General Federation of Women's Clubs for the bill. The Humane Slaughter Act was ultimately passed in 1958.
Together, Goode and Wright pressed The HSUS to enter the international arena, influencing the organization's support for the World Federation for the Protection of Animals (predecessor of today's World Society for the Protection of Animals) and its efforts to gain consultative status with UNESCO and later with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC). The two women were deeply convinced that every humane society should persuade UNESCO to build the concept of kindness to animals into its basic worldwide educational message.
In 1957 Goode and Wright initiated efforts to get a United Nations conference working toward a Law of the Sea treaty to adopt a conservation provision to ensure that commercial killers of marine life use humane methods. In 1958, their effort bore fruit, as a special committee of the U.N. Conference on the Law of the Sea adopted a resolution asking states "to prescribe, by all means available to them, those methods for the capture and killing of marine life, especially of whales and seals, which will spare them suffering to the greatest extent possible."
During the post-World War II era, Goode and Wright became deeply disturbed by the use of animals in the testing of bombs and other weaponry, and about the technological power unleashed by nuclear science. In 1957, Wright wrote a letter to President Eisenhower asking him to "put an end to the use of animals in atomic bomb tests."
Providing for a Better (Humane) Education
Humane education was another shared interest, and it was Goode who persuaded Dorothy Thompson to write a piece in favor of humane education for the Ladies' Home Journal, which published the story in 1960. The article led to thousands of inquiries, just as The HSUS was making its first serious efforts to produce professional humane education materials.
In 1963, Goode and Wright donated a 140-acre farm in Loudoun County, Virginia to The HSUS. After its development in 1965, the property became the site of the National Humane Education Center (NHEC), complete with demonstration animal shelter. The sponsors originally envisioned NHEC as a state-of-the-art operation that would serve as a training center for the care, housing, and euthanasia of animals, and for a few years, under the leadership of Phyllis Wright and Dale Hylton, it was just such a model.
Recalling the enthusiasm that Goode shared with Myers about the NHEC, longtime staff member Patrick Parkes remembers Goode telling him that "no matter what we do for animals suffering under all kinds of conditions and circumstances, in the long run the public attitude towards kindness, towards the obligation we all have towards animals, will determine how the animals will fare." Humane education, she told Parkes, was the way to accomplish this.
In 1974, The HSUS sold the Loudoun County property, and the National Humane Education Center became the home of the Loudoun County, Virginia Animal Shelter. Renovated in 2000, it serves the needs of one of Virginia's fastest-growing counties.
Leaving a Lasting Legacy
In their twilight years, Goode and Wright both took steps to continue their commitment to animal welfare through the creation of endowed trusts. Since their deaths the Edith J. Goode Residuary Trust and the Alice Morgan Wright-Edith Goode Fund have supported The HSUS and hundreds of other organizations in a broad range of activities aimed at the reduction and elimination of animal suffering.
In order to make plain her commitment, Wright, who died at age 95, drafted a unique last will and testament. It included an entire clause devoted to her beliefs concerning cruelty to domestic and wild animals, and her desire to encourage others "to befriend all Earth's creatures on land, in the sea and in the air; to defend them against the ravages by mankind and inspire in human beings compassion for all."
Although Goode and Wright witnessed only limited progress in their goal of making animal protection an international concern, their efforts to promote a global citizenship that included animals anticipated such contemporary initiatives as the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights (1978); the Great Ape Project, which is seeking a United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Great Ape; the Earth Charter, for which HSUS affiliate serves as secretariat; and WSPA's Declaration on Animal Welfare, introduced in 2003.
Goode died in 1970, and Wright in 1975. Yet, more than three decades after their passing, animals all over the world are still benefiting from the generosity, compassion, and vision that bound the two animal advocates to one another and to the larger cause of building a humane society.
Bernard Unti received his doctorate in U.S. history in 2002 from American University. His book, Protecting All Animals: A Fifty-Year History of The Humane Society of the United States, is available from Humane Society Press.
