Judith Winsor Smith
| Judith Winsor Smith | |
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| Born |
Judith Winsor McLauthlin November 26, 1821 Marshfield, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | December 12, 1921 (aged 100) Boston, U.S. |
| Known for |
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| Spouse(s) | Silvanus Smith |
| Children | Sidney, Frances, Zilpha, Mary, Erasmus, Jennie |
Judith Winsor Smith (née McLauthlin; November 26, 1821 – December 12, 1921) was an American women's suffrage activist, social reformer, and abolitionist. She was involved in the suffrage movement until the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, when she voted for the first time at the age of 99. She was a founder and the first president of the Home Club of East Boston, one of the first women's clubs in Massachusetts.
Judith Winsor McLauthlin was born in Marshfield, Massachusetts, on November 26, 1821, to Lewis and Polly (née Hathaway) McLauthlin. Both of her parents were descendants of people who had arrived on the Mayflower. Her father was the groundskeeper for the shipbuilder Ezra Weston, and her maternal grandfather was the physician and painter Rufus Hathaway. She moved to Duxbury, Massachusetts as a young woman to take a teaching job. In 1841 (or 1842) she married an East Boston shipbuilder named Silvanus (or Sylvanus) Smith, and the couple had six children. Her daughter Zilpha Drew Smith became a prominent social worker in Boston.
The family lived for several years in Duxbury before moving to Boston. In 1871 they built a home at 76 White Street in East Boston, overlooking the Border Street shipyards. Towards the end of her life she went to live with her daughter at 11 Roanoke Avenue in Jamaica Plain. She died there on December 12, 1921, aged 100.
Smith was on the Standing Committee of the congregation led by abolitionist Theodore Parker, and was involved in the abolitionist movement.
In a 1920 Boston Globe interview, Smith claimed that her father had been an abolitionist and "had a station on the underground railway." Lewis McLauthlin was a vice president of the Old Colony Anti-Slavery Society, and served on its finance committee. In 1859 he unsuccessfully petitioned the Massachusetts legislature "to enact that no person, who has been held as a slave, shall be delivered up, by any officer or court, State or Federal, within this Commonwealth, to anyone claiming him on the ground that he owes 'service or labor' to such claimant, by the laws of one of the Slave States of this Union."
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