In 1914, a Chicago reporter named Alice Wadsworth was working on a freelance assignment for a local paper in Paterson, NJ. Her job was to interview men operating in the sphere of public service, and one of these men was Frederic Beggs, a Passaic County Surrogate. Ms. Wadsworth, writing under the name of Verily Worth, went back to Chicago after a mere ten weeks donning an engagement ring that would soon bring her back to live in New Jersey. Originally living in Paterson after the wedding, the couple eventually settled down in Wyckoff, N.J. where Mrs. Vera Wadsworth Beggs entered into the journals of national and local history.
Assuming a variation of her pen name, and incorporating her maiden name, Vera Wadsworth Beggs was a suffragist, civic leader, and a scholar of international relations. She is most well known for her work on the local level looking for solutions to the global problems that inevitably lead to war. But her early years in New Jersey were spent fighting for the rights of women, a fight she carried across the globe as she got older.
New Jersey actually allowed women to vote in local elections from 1776 to 1807. The tide turned against them at that point as election fraud gave politicians a reason to exclude both blacks and women from the election process, and they cemented this into the New Jersey Constitution in 1844. The fact that New Jersey once allowed female voters must have given strong encouragement to women like Vera Beggs. The passage of the 19th Amendment, through the work of Vera Beggs and other New Jersey leaders like Mount Laurel’s Alice Paul, women won the vote in 1920.
Achieving this fundamental right took enormous political organization and coordination; and, after their success, leaders of the movement sought out new areas in the public arena where women could influence policy. Vera Beggs worked with the famous suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt on the formation of the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War (NCCCW). The first conference took place in 1925 and was described in Time magazine :
“Care was exercised in excluding professional peace societies and organizations of “pink” tendencies. This was to be a conference of “normal” women to undertake a common-sense study of the problem of preventing war, with a view of arriving at some common plank on which all could stand, which the delegates could take back to 5,000,000 women whom they represented to start a great wave of public opinion against war.”
The member organizations of the NCCCW were: the American Association of University Women, Council of Women for Home Missions, Federation of Woman’s Boards for Foreign Missions of North America, General Federation of Women’s Clubs, National Board of the Young Women’s Christian Associations, National Council of Jewish Women, National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, National League of Women Voters, National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, National Women’s Trade Union League, and the National Women’s Conference of American Ethical Union. In a country of 120 million people, five million voters could not be ignored.
Vera Beggs was chairperson of the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs International Relations Committee from 1929-1934. In July of 1932 she gained membership in The Institute of Politics based out of Williams College. This organization was at the time holding their annual summer conference to discuss the impact of WWI reparation payments on the German economy; and, the American response to the rise of militarism in Japan. The NCCCW also was involved in the impending crisis and was part of the The American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, organized in New York to influence legislation preventing the sale of war supplies to Japan.
She traveled in 1935 to Istanbul to attend an international congress on women’s suffrage. She was also co-chair of the “Marathon Round Tables” of the NCCCW; these were local study groups around the nation discussing U.S. Foreign policy and creating appropriate literature and pamphlets. Vera Wadsworth Beggs eventually became head of the NCCCW in the beginning of WWII, but the country had other priorities at this time. In 1943 it resurfaced as the Women’s Action Committee for Victory and Lasting Peace and later became the Committee on Education for Lasting Peace, but it never regained the stature it enjoyed prior to WWII.
Vera was also chairperson for the General Federation of Women’s Clubs for two terms, from 1938-1941, and conducted a Good Neighbor Tour of South America in 1940. She held the same post from 1950-1952. It is believed she eventually moved back to the Paterson area where continued to write articles till she died in 1968.
