Agnes Ryan


Agnes Edna Ryan, also known as Agnes Ryan Stevens was a pacifist, vegetarian, and managing editor of Woman's Journal, 1910-1917.

Biography

Agnes Edna Ryan was born in Stuart, Iowa to Edward and Mary A. Ryan. She had two siblings, John and Katherine Ryan.
Graduating from Boston University in 1903, Ryan went on to work for the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a staff member of the Congregationalist and National magazines, as well as the Boston American. In 1910, she became managing editor of the Woman's Journal. In 1915, Agnes E. Ryan married Henry Bailey Stevens, who also worked for the Woman's Journal. The couple adopted two children, Peter and Patricia.
In 1917, Ryan and Stevens resigned from the Woman's Journal in part because of their opposition to World War I. Later, Ryan would organize the New Hampshire Peace Union, write poetry, and become active in the MacDowell Colony of Peterborough, New Hampshire.
Ryan was among the feminist vegetarians who, during World War I, made a connection between meat eating and the killing of human beings in the Great War.
In Ryan's unpublished novel, "Who Can Fear Too Many Stars?," she depicts vegetarianism as a way of resisting male dominance.
Ryan's papers are archived at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and include unpublished novels, diaries, correspondences, an autobiography, and other writings.

Reception

argues that Ryan's "the Cancer Bogy" was perhaps the first modern vegetarian health guide.
Josephine Donovan mentions that Ryan is one of the many first-wave feminists who advocated for animal rights.

Selected publications