Esther Lape

Esther Lape taught English at Swarthmore College, the University of Arizona, Columbia University, and Barnard College.[4][1]

She was an activist of the Women's Trade Union League and one of the founders of the League of Women Voters.[4]

Lape was the director of the American Foundation for Studies in Government of which her partner, Elizabeth Fisher Read, was director of research.[1][5][6][7]

In the 1920s and 1930s, she led an unsuccessful battle for United States participation in the World Court.[1]

Lape edited a book on expert medical testimony, Medical Research: A Midcentury Survey (1955), sponsored by the American Foundation.[4][5][6][7] In 1923 she collaborated with Read and Gustav Frenssen to Klaus Hinrich Baas: The Story Of A Self-made Man....[8] Together with Read, Lape published the journal City, State and Nation.[4]

Esther Everett Lape was born on October 8, 1881, in Wilmington, Delaware.[9] She attended public school in Philadelphia, then Bryn Mawr College and Wellesley College.[1] Esther Lape lived with Elizabeth Fisher Read, Women's Suffrage activist and Eleanor Roosevelt's lawyer and friend, in Greenwich Village, at 20 East 11th Street, where today a plaque said Eleanor Roosevelt lived here when she was first lady.[7] The building was actually owned by Lape.[10] Roosevelt, who had met Lape through Read in 1920, rented an apartment for a time.[4][5][11] Nearby, at 171 West 12th Street, lived other lesbian couples involved in the Woman's Suffrage movement and of the close-knit circle of friends of Roosevelt: Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, Molly Dewson and Polly Porter, Grace Hutchins and Anna Rochester.[10] Lape, with her life partner, Read, and other Roosevelt's female friends, was part of Roosevelt's support network of female friends.[5]

Assistant Secretary of the Interior Nathanial Reed accepts the donation of Salt Meadow (now part of McKinney National Wildlife Refuge) from Esther Lape, 1972

Lape and Read also owned a country house, Salt Meadow, Westbrook, Connecticut, where Roosevelt was often a guest.[5][7] In 1972, after Read's death, Lape donated Salt Meadow to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The estate is currently the Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge.[6] Refuge staff are working on a submission for National Register of Historical Places recognition for the former Salt Meadow estate that will recognize the same-sex relationship of Lape and Read.[12]

Esther Everett Lape died on May 17, 1981, in New York City, at 99 years old.[4][1]