Adele Goodman Clark

Who was Adele Goodman Clark?

Adele Goodman Clark was an American artist and suffragist.

Clark was born on September 27, 1882, in Montgomery, Alabama to Robert Clark, a railroad worker originally from Belfast, and Estelle Goodman Clark, a Jewish music teacher originally from New Orleans. The family lived in New Orleans, Louisiana and Pass Christian, Mississippi before moving to Richmond, Virginia in 1894. Clark attended the Virginia Randolph Ellett School, and in 1906 went to the New York School of Art on a scholarship, studying under artists including Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase. She met fellow artist Nora Houston at the Art School of Richmond, where she had previously taken classes and where she taught after returning to Virginia. Houston became Clark's "very intimate friend" until her death in 1942.

Clark's activist career began in 1909, when she and 18 other women, including Nora Houston, Ellen Glasgow, Lila Meade Valentine, Kate Waller Barrett, and Mary Johnston, founded the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia; she served as its secretary for one year, and also as a committee chair and head of the group's lobby in the Virginia General Assembly. In 1910, she was a delegate to the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in Washington, D.C. Clark and her partner Houston also set up their easels on a street corner in downtown Richmond, speaking about women's suffrage and handing out leaflets to people who approached.