Stow, Marietta (1837-1902)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Marietta L. B. Stow was born around 1830 in Cleveland, Ohio, and died in California in 1902. Best known as the first woman to run as a candidate for the vice-presidency (in 1884 and again in 1892), having run for Governor of California in 1882, Stow was a suffragist, women's rights activist especially in relation to probate law reform, an advocate for better working conditions (especially for children), and an advocate for the "Edenic diet" an aspect of which she identified as dress reform and physical culture.

Stow was the editor of the Women's Herald of Industry and Social Science Cooperator, which expressed support for a raw vegan or "Edenic diet." In Probate Confiscation, she relates woman’s hardships to animal suffering by equating male abuse with human mistreatment of animals (the underlying argument is that both have a responsibility to protect those they deem weaker or inferior). In The Woman’s Herald of Industry, her primary concern is the preservation and elevation of the race (the journal evolved from a Temperance magazine, to diet reform advocacy, to a political party journal). She publicly adopted Isaac Rumford’s Edenic diet; in Joyful News Co-Operator Rumford describes her as: “a live woman working up her line with commendable energy, and is deserving of great credit for what she has done in the diet reform work, and if she has fallen back to ‘cold diet’ it is not likely she as a porgressive woman, can stay there long so we expect to soon see her leaving all such half-way measure behind and marching to the front with an Edenic flag flung to the breeze, for as we grow into a knowledge of spiritual truth and build up our physical body to match it with pure and simple food free from the curse of wasted womanly energy, we feel a testimony will be established that no one can doubt the truth of” (Joyful News Co-Operator  Oct. 1884. 1 ).

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