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Adele Clark

Adele Goodman Clark (27 September 1882-4 June 1983) was an American artist and suffragette. Born in Montgomery, Alabama to an Irish railroad worker and Jewish music teacher, she was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana and Pass Christian, Mississippi before moving to Richmond, Virginia in 1894. She became a stenographer and later an artist, and she became involved in the suffragist movement in 1909. Clark co-founded the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, and she served as a delegate to the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Washington DC in 1910. She and Nora Houston opened an art studio together, and the couple supported Black suffrage. In 1920, the Equal Suffrage League became the Virginia League of Women Voters, of which Clark served as president from 1921 to 1925 and from 1929 to 1944. She also became politically involved as secretary of Governor E. Lee Trinkle's Commission on the Simplification of State and Local Government and of Governor Harry F. Byrd's Liberal Arts College for Women Commission, and as a field supervisor for the National Reemployment Service and director of the Virginia Arts Project during the New Deal. She converted to Catholicism from Episcopalianism in 1942 and chaired the Richmond Diocesan Council of Catholic Women's Legislative Committee from 1949 to 1959 before dying in 1983.