The activists

Elizabeth Pitcairn, wife of Pennsylvania Railroad superintendent Robert Pitcairn, lost her husband in 1909 but she soon found her calling. She embraced the suffrage movement and began throwing parties to raise money for it

With 12 other Pittsburgh women who owned automobiles, she drove around the city displaying placards that advocated women’s right to vote.

In June 1915, more than 3,000 people turned out for a “fete” and dance on the lawn of her home. A newspaper story about the two-day party carried this headline: “Gay Festival is Held For Suffrage.”

To Mary Flinn Lawrence, party meant politics, not petit fours. Best known as the onetime owner of Hartwood Acres, now a county park, she developed her political conscience while volunteering at the Industrial Home for Crippled Children.

She organized a suffrage group called the Allegheny County Equal Franchise Federation in 1904, when she was 17, and became its president in 1912. (Her father, political boss William Flinn, proved a powerful ally.) When women won the right to vote in 1920, the group Mary Flinn Lawrence founded became the Allegheny County League of Women Voters.

Two years later, during Pinchot’s successful run for governor, she backed him even though he was an underdog.

Pinchot’s wife, Cornelia, thanked her for her ardent support, writing: “I don’t know how we ever did it, do you — or at least you do, because you did it or most of it. Is your father very proud of you!”

The innkeeper