Mary Birdsall

Mary Birdsall
Born	Mary B. Thistlewaite 1828 Cincinnati, OH
Died	February 1st, 1896 (aged 65-66) Philadelphia, PA
Resting place	Earlham Cemetery
Residence	Mary Birdsall House
Known for	Suffragist
Home town	Richmond, IN
Spouse(s)	Thomas Birdsall (married 1848-1896)
Children	William Wilfred Birdsall
Parent(s)	William Thistlewaite Elizabeth Wetherall

William Thistlewaite

Mary Birdsall or Mary Thistlewaite (1828–1894) was a journalist, a suffragist, and a temperance worker. She helped organize the first women's rights convention in the nation and was among the first women to address the Indiana legislature. She was also the owner of The Lily, a newspaper for women.

Mary B. Thistlethwaite was born in 1828 in Cincinnati, Ohio to a Quaker family. Her father Thomas Thistlewaite, a butcher, was born in Leeds and he had married Elizabeth Wetherall. They already had a son who had been born in Wilmington, Delaware where her father had been a farmer for several years. In 1829 the family moved to Richmond, Indiana, in Wayne County, where her father amassed a considerable amount of agricultural land around the then new town. At age 19 she married Thomas Birdsall at a Whitewater Monthly Meeting, they both worked together to forward their radical views on emancipation, temperance and women's rights. Thomas was known to her family as he had worked in her family's mills.

As Quakers, Birdsall and her husband, Thomas, were active in a number of social reforms including temperance, suffrage, and abolition. In 1851 the couple attended anti-slavery meetings at Congregational Friends Church of Greensboro and a subsequent meeting at United Brethren Church in Dublin, Indiana. It was at these meetings that the idea to hold the first Women's Rights Convention was generated and organized. The couple regularly attended Whitewater Monthly Meetings in Richmond, Indiana the same place where they were married. These business meetings were meetings of The Society of Friends, or Quakers.

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