Mabel Hyde Kittredge

Overview

Mabel Hyde Kittredge born Boston, MA September 19, 1867 (d. 1955). Pacifist expert on homemaking; started school lunches NYC 1901; headed World War I child feeding program in France and Belgium for Hoover; Ford Peace ship 1915; co-founder of WILPF; mission to USSR 1920.

Quotations

"It is not goodwill which distinguishes this Commission. . . It is the fact that scientific organisation has been made the servant of goodwill. The significance of that is like a kindly light on the battlefields of Europe. We have admired the organisation of war, its supreme technical efficiency. Here is an organisation created out of nothing over night by democrats, and its efficiency yields no point to the best disciplined institutions of the world. The larger message of the Belgian Relief Commission is that democracies have within them resources of ability which in our despondency we have attributed to autocracies alone. There is hope for freedom when such capacity is at its disposal." (The New Republic, July 31, 1915; 1918 photo flickr.com)