Mary Newman

Mary B. Newman (February 15, 1909 – December 6, 1995) was an American politician and state government official who was elected to her first term in the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1953. A moderate Republican, she represented the 2nd Middlesex District from 1953 to 1954 and, again, from 1957 to 1970. Appointed to the Massachusetts Parole Board in 1955 after her initial legislative term ended, she held that parole board post until 1957 when she returned to the Massachusetts House. During the early part of that second term, she served on the House's Labor and Industries and Water Supply committees. The first woman to serve in the cabinet of Massachusetts Governor Francis Sargent, Newman was an early champion of the women's liberation movement, and became known as "the fighting Quaker from Cambridge." Upon learning of her death in 1995, Massachusetts Governor William Weld recalled, "Mary Newman, for years the grande dame both of Cambridge and its Republican party, launched me in politics by serving as chair of my statewide campaign in 1978." In 1984, a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor referred to her as "one of the most highly respected forces on the Massachusetts civic scene for almost four decades." Formative years Born as Mary B. Temple in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on February 15, 1909, she was a graduate with honors of Swarthmore College, where she earned a bachelor's degree in Government and Economics. She married Edwin B. Newman in 1935. A practicing Quaker, she and her husband managed a conscientious objector camp for Quakers in California during World War II. Post-war, she returned to the East Coast and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, following her husband's appointment as a professor at Harvard University in 1946. It was during this phase of her life that she became an active member of the League of Women Voters at the city and state levels.