In college she met and in 1900 married Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948).
The young couple spent two years in England, partly in Manchester, then the center of labor and feminist ferment, and both movements absorbed their energies. At Oxford, where her husband studied history and helped to found Ruskin Hall, a college designed for workingclass men, she discovered the militant women's movement and met and worked with leading English radical suffragists.
The Beards returned to the United States in 1902 and both began graduate study at Columbia University, but she soon left her academic studies in sociology. By then the mother of two children, she chose to devote her time to the struggles for women's suffrage and for trade union reform. For example, she helped the National Women's Trade Union League organize the New York shirt-waistmaker's strike in 1909 and protest the Triangle factory fire in which more than 100 young girls and women were killed.
She became an activist in the women's suffrage movement as organizer, publicist, and fundraiser. Her particular interest in workingclass women, a legacy from her years in England, led her to active participation in the Wage Earner's League, the Woman Suffrage Party's organization for working women.
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