Sara Bard Field (1882–1974)

Sara Bard Field was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up in Detroit, Michigan. Her strict Baptist father refused to pay for her to go to college after she graduated from high school in 1900. That same year, she married Albert Ehrgott, a Baptist minister twice her age, with whom she had two children. They did church work in India and Burma before returning to the USA. In 1910, they moved to Portland, Oregon, where she met C.E.S. (Charles Erskine Scott) Wood, a married lawyer and writer; they became friends and later lovers. She campaigned throughout the state for women's suffrage and worked as a reporter for the Oregon Daily Journal. She also wrote poetry. In 1914, she and her husband divorced and she reverted to her maiden name. She joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association and later the National Woman's Party. In 1918, she and Wood began living together and were patrons of the arts and supporters of liberal political causes. Their home in Los Gatos, near San Francisco, became a gathering place for writers, artists, and political activists such as Ansel Adams, Genevieve Taggard, William Rose Benet, and Lincoln Steffens. Her first collection of poetry, The Pale Woman, was published in 1927, and her second collection, Darkling Plain, appeared in 1936. She married Wood in 1938, after his wife died.