Mary Walton

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

For most of my professional life I have been a newspaper reporter, turning out news features, profiles and breaking news, while also writing non-fiction books that had their genesis in news stories. Four years ago, at the suggestion of an editor, I turned to a historical epic, the final, dramatic push for woman suffrage. A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot, will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in August 2010, coinciding with the ninetieth anniversary of the Nineteen Amendment giving women the vote.

Alice, the leader of the suffrage militants, was a young, brilliant, iron-willed Quaker committed to nonviolence, with a talent for organizing and publicity. When four years of lobbying, parades, rallies and electioneering failed to budge Congress, she and her followers picketed the White House, were arrested, force fed and brutalized. After the amendment passed in 1920, the battle was little remembered and little taught. In 2004 Alice received a measure of recognition with the HBO movie Iron Jawed Angels [Hillary Swank played Alice.].

Writing history when there are no survivors to offer first hand accounts is not as different from journalism as one might think. It’s much like being an investigative reporter when no one tells you anything and you have to dig into letters, documents and memoirs to ferret out the story.

I was introduced to journalism many years ago by Brenda Starr, the glamorous red-headed comic strip adventuress whose life as a reporter was characterized by love, danger and a colorful, sexy wardrobe. Decades later, when I met the creator of the Brenda Starr comic strip, artist Dale Messick, I learned I was not the only girl-child to find inspiration in Brenda during a period when real-life role models were rare.

I was born in Honolulu on November 19, 1941, three weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor, where my father, a Navy diver, was stationed. After the war my parents and I moved frequently until my father retired and we settled in Miami. I attended Harvard University on a scholarship and after graduation explored advertising, social work and community action before settling into a career as a journalist. During the 1970s and ‘80s, I was a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer. When the newspaper industry began a period of retrenchment in the early 1990’s, I left to write books and magazine articles.

Three of my first four books plunged me into the world of business. The Deming Management Method, written while I was still a newspaper reporter, outlined the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming, a statistician revered in post-war Japan for his guidance on how to manufacture quality products, a strategy that rescued that country’s devastated economy. In the same vein, I wrote a book of case studies titled Deming Management at Work. In between I wrote For Love of Money, a true crime tale about a wealthy tobacco family, two members of which died at the hands of a greedy would-be heir. My fourth book, Car: A Drama of the American Workplace, took me back into the world of manufacturing with an account of the creation of a new car.

I am married to another newspaper veteran, Charles Layton. We live in Ocean Grove, New Jersey.