{{Short description|American feminist, actress, sculptor and poet (1877–1970)}} {{Infobox person | name = Ida Rauh | image = Ida Rauh portrait.jpg | image_size = | caption = | birth_name = | birth_date = {{Birth date|mf=yes|1877|3|7}} | birth_place = New York City, US | death_date = {{Death date and age|mf=yes|1970|2|28|1877|3|7}} | death_place = New York City, US | other_names = | years_active = | occupation = Feminist, actress, sculptor, poet | spouse = Max Eastman }} [[File:Six Shirtwaist Strike women 1909.jpg|thumb|Six women including Mary Dreier, Ida Rauh, Helen Marot, Rena Borky, Yetta Raff, and Mary Effers link arms as they march to City Hall on December 3, 1909, during the New York shirtwaist strike to demand an end to abuse by police.]]
'''Ida Rauh''' (March 7, 1877 – February 28, 1970) was an American suffragist, actress, sculptor, and poet who helped found the Provincetown Players in 1915. The players, including Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, Eugene O'Neill, and others, first performed in a structure owned by Mary Heaton Vorse in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Later, the group moved to a theater on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. Rauh directed the first production of O'Neill's one-act play ''Where the Cross Is Made'' for the opening of the permanent Provincetown Playhouse at 133 Macdougal Street in November 1918, and in the Village she became known for her intensely emotional acting.<ref name="Times obit">{{cite news|title=Ida Rauh Helped Create Theater|work=The New York Times|date=March 12, 1970|page=41}}</ref>
==Biography== Rauh graduated from the New York University law school in 1902, but never practiced law.<ref name="Times obit" /> She became involved with the Women's Trade Union League, including efforts to assist in the shirtwaist-makers strike in New York in 1909.<ref name="Stansell"/> Soon after, she traveled to England to join other militant women in the fight for women's suffrage.<ref name="Stansell"/> Returning to New York, she helped Mabel Dodge organize her Village salon and became active in the feminist group Heterodoxy, formed in 1912.<ref>{{cite book|last=Golin|first=Steve|title=Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike 1913|url=https://archive.org/details/fragilebridgepat0000goli/page/121|url-access=registration|publisher=Temple University Press|year=1988|location=Philadelphia, Pennsylvania|pages=[https://archive.org/details/fragilebridgepat0000goli/page/121 121–23]|isbn=0-87722-534-6}}</ref>
After her marriage to the writer and editor Max Eastman in New York in 1911, Rauh made a point of keeping her maiden name.<ref name="Times obit"/> In some places, such as Eastman's home town of Elmira, this was considered scandalous, the "first step on a slippery slope that led to feckless wives of loose morals, easy divorce, and free love".<ref name="Stansell">{{cite book|last=Stansell|first=Christine|author-link=Christine Stansell|title=American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century|pages=[https://archive.org/details/americanmodernsb00stan/page/244 244–45; 264–65]|publisher=Metropolitan Books: Henry Holt and Company|location=New York|year=2000|isbn=0-8050-4847-2|url=https://archive.org/details/americanmodernsb00stan/page/244}}</ref> Eastman, who edited the left-wing journals ''The Masses'' and ''The Liberator'' with the help of his older sister Crystal in the second decade of the 20th century, credited Rauh with introducing him to socialism.<ref name="Eastman obit">{{cite news|title=Max Eastman Dies: Author and Radical|work=The New York Times|page=1|date=March 26, 1969}}</ref>
During her years in Greenwich Village, Rauh supported a variety of feminist causes, among them Margaret Sanger's campaigns. Arrested in 1916 for distributing birth-control information, Rauh was charged with obscenity and given a suspended sentence.<ref name="Times obit"/>
Meeting Rauh and Eastman for the first time at the Parker House, Boston, July 19, 1916, ''Boston Globe'' editorialist Lucien Price (1883–1964) describes Ida Rauh as "a smaller person than he [Eastman], also dark, with a quick, sensitive face, shimmering with the keenest intelligence—and a look of silent pity in her fine dark eyes. She wore a light, summery dress of some dust-colored stuff; her throat was sun-bronzed. Her hat was a wide straw brim with a green scarf caught loosely around it. How a woman could dress more simply or more becomingly it would have been hard to think. She had come from Provincetown with a sick baby to the Children’s Hospital, and he from New York to meet her there. The child was out of danger; they were in a state of wilted relief."<ref>''Lucien Price Notebooks and Correspondence'' (MS Am 2033); Houghton Library, Harvard University.</ref>
Rauh left the theater in 1920 to pursue sculpture, painting, and other interests.<ref name="Times obit"/> Among her works is a bust of writer D. H. Lawrence, who was one of her friends.<ref name="Times obit"/> A book of her poems, ''And This Little Life'', was published in 1959.<ref name="Times obit"/> Her collected papers, including poems, television scripts, stage plays, correspondence, and other materials are housed in the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming in Laramie.<ref>{{cite book | title=Papers, 1905–1960 | publisher=WorldCat | last=Rauh | first=Ida | oclc=29737760}}</ref>
==Family== Rauh was the daughter of Samuel and Rosa Rauh of New York. Her marriage to Eastman ended in divorce in 1922, long after the two had separated.<ref name="Times obit"/> The couple had one child, Dan,<ref name="Times obit"/> with whom Eastman had no connection for 23 years after the separation.<ref name="Stansell"/> By 1922, Rauh had moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with Dan and was living with painter Andrew Dasburg and his son, Alfred.<ref name="Gardner">{{cite book|last=Gardner|first=Virginia|title=Friend and Lover: The Life of Louise Bryant|publisher=Horizon Press|location=New York|year=1982|pages=[https://archive.org/details/friendloverlifeo0000gard/page/237 237, 352]|isbn=0-8180-0233-6|url=https://archive.org/details/friendloverlifeo0000gard/page/237}}</ref> Rauh, Dasburg, and the two boys lived together until 1927–28 in New Mexico and in Woodstock, New York.<ref name="Gardner"/> Dan, who became a psychologist, died of a heart attack in 1969 while talking to his mother on the telephone.<ref name="Gardner"/> Rauh died a few months later.<ref name="Gardner"/>
==Works== *{{cite book|title=And Our Little Life|publisher=Bookman Associates|year=1959|location=New York|oclc=3397734}} *{{cite book|title=Papers, 1905–1960|oclc=29737760}}
==References== {{reflist}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Rauh, Ida}} Category:1877 births Category:1970 deaths Category:American birth control activists Category:American feminists Category:American women's rights activists Category:People from Greenwich Village Category:20th-century American women sculptors Category:Actresses from New York City Category:20th-century American sculptors Category:Sculptors from New York City