Mary Elizabeth Garrett

Mary Elizabeth Garrett (March 5, 1854 – April 3, 1915) was an American suffragist and philanthropist. She was the youngest child and only daughter of John W. Garrett, a philanthropist and president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B. & O.). Well known for her "coercive philanthropy", Mary Garrett donated money to start the Johns Hopkins University Medical School in 1893 on the condition that the school would accept female students "on the same terms as men". She founded Bryn Mawr School, a private college-preparatory school for girls in Baltimore, and generously donated to Bryn Mawr College of Pennsylvania with the requirement that her intimate friend Martha Carey Thomas be the president. Like many other suffragists of the nineteenth century, Garrett chose not to marry; instead, she kept a lifelong working and emotional relationship with Thomas. In her later years, she collaborated with her longtime friends Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw to try to secure the right for women to vote in the United States. Biography