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Lease, Mary Elizabeth

Entry updated 30 December 2024. Tagged: Author.

(1850-1933) US editor, political activist of Feminist interest for her advocacy of women's suffrage; and author. Her activities on behalf of farmers, from her first public appearances around 1885, led to her close involvement in the founding of the anti-business Populist Party; she was a charismatic orator, unacceptable therefore by many of her male colleagues; her eventual departure from the Party signalled its imminent dissolution. It has been suggested by Brian Attebery, in his The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature (1980), that L Frank Baum, who was associated with the Party, used Lease as a model for the forthright Dorothy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) [for Oz see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below].

Lease's only work of sf interest, The Problem of Civilization Solved (1895), a lightly fictionalized Utopia which makes vague reference to her earlier Prediction, in the context of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, that Food Pills will soon feed the growing population of the world. The text, which detailedly advocates a busy interactive world free of big business (see Economics), controversially advocates a vigorous application of the exceptionalist American doctrine of Manifest Destiny, by virtue of which Latin America (once properly colonized by a Yankee Napoleon) will be transformed into a bread basket for the North; the text is also damaged to later eyes by routine anti-Semitism (see Race in SF), though its iterations here seem detached from her main populist drift. [JC]

Mary Elizabeth Lease

born Ridgway, Pennsylvania: 11 September 1850

died Callicoon, New York: 29 October 1933

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