Olive Stott Gabriel (September 26, 1872May 6, 1944) was an American activist, clubwoman, and lawyer, active in Republican politics in New York City. She served as president of the National Association of Women Lawyers in the early 1930s and was a champion of many Progressive Era feminist causes, such as women's suffrage and the campaign against prostitution.
Early life and career
Gabriel was born in Portland, Oregon, to Fielding Denny Stott, a farmer and businessperson; and Mary Ellen Stott, née Perry, a businessperson, teacher and depot agent. Mary, a cousin of Oliver Hazard Perry, was "an earnest and enthusiastic worker for female suffrage, higher education and kindred reforms." The family lived in Yamhill County.
Gabriel graduated from New York University School of Law with an LL.B in 1902 and LL.M. in 1903. In 1906, she became inaugural second vice president of the Women's Association of the Bar (or the Women's Bar Association of New York), described by The New York Times at the time as the first women's bar association in the world.
She married Adolphe J. Gabriel in Milwaukee on January 13, 1896, following which the couple moved to New York.
Gabriel had settled in Greenwich Village by the early 1900s, with a residence at 77 Washington Place (). She later moved to 78 East 96th Street in the Upper East Side (), and then back downtown to 45 West 11th Street (). She maintained a general law practice, with offices at 220 Broadway () as of 1906.
Suffrage movement
In 1909, Gabriel was part of a group of suffrage activists that went to Albany to campaign for passage of state-level legislation for women's suffrage.
In 1913, Gabriel delivered a petition demanding suffrage for women to Washington, D.C, as part of a nationwide petition campaign that summer urging passage of a Senate resolution to extend the franchise.
Home front in World War I
During World War I, Gabriel was active in the War Camp Community Service, a program that provided assistance and entertainment for soldiers in training at military bases in the United States.
As of 1918, she chaired the Employment Department of the New York Mayor's Committee of Women on National Defense, in which capacity she "ma[de] a special attempt to place plain, middle-aged women in war work."
"White slavery"
As Ellen DuBois has explained, Progressive Era feminists and women's groups were opposed to prostitution and so-called "white slavery," which they regarded as the fate of "sexual innocents" who "fell" into unfortunate conditions. Gabriel was no exception.
As of 1917, Gabriel was involved in a campaign to provide legal counsel to women prosecuted in New York City's women-only night court. Following a campaign by the Committee of Fourteen and others, the court had been established on September 1, 1910, in an attempt to reduce the perceived perils of the city's night court system, which had originally placed women and men in the same holding cells. Women tried in the night court were typically charged with "vagrancy," a vague, catch-all charge that was typically used to arrest sex workers, so-called "degenerates," and other marginalized people.
In a 1918 book, Rose Falls Bres described Gabriel as having "an international reputation among those who labor to save and secure young girls who have drifted from the and narrow way or who have been the victims of the white slave traffic."
Republican politics
In 1918, Gabriel served as campaign manager to A. Parker Nevin, a Republican candidate for the New York Supreme Court. In July 1918, she was a delegate to the New York State Republican convention for Manhattan's 10th Assembly District, along with a number of other suffrage activists. In 1919, she helped to form the National Woman's Republican Association in New York.
In 1920, Gabriel supported James Wolcott Wadsworth Jr.'s campaign for the Republican Senate nomination. This was a somewhat curious endorsement, given Gabriel's suffrage activism, as Wadsworth opposed extending the franchise to women—and the fact that the 1920 election was the first in which women were able to vote. Nonetheless, as a number of other prominent Republican women including Henrietta Wells Livermore endorsed Wadsworth (despite a campaign against him by Mary Garrett Hay), it seems likely that Gabriel was convinced to side with the Livermore faction.