Gertrude Sumner Ely

Mary Noel Arrowsmith and Gertrude Sumner Ely at Field Hospital No. 3., Froissy, May 7, 1918.

During World War I Ely and her sister Henrietta worked with the YMCA and the American Red Cross in France,[5] with Gertrude Ely operating a canteen near the front. Her work was explained in Katherine Mayo's 1920 account of the YMCA's contributions in the war:

Gertrude Ely had a flivver, lucky woman. Into that flivver, on the word to move, she packed a lot of rations, a cook-stove, a boiler, chocolate, a fiddle, some maps, a Y red triangle sign, writing paper, pens, ink, candles, her own bedroll, a lot of useful odds and ends, and all the cigarettes that room remained for. Then she started out a little ahead of the column.[6]

She was believed to be the first American woman to cross the Rhine into Germany after the signing of the armistice.[7][8] She received the Croix de Guerre, twice,[3] for bravery under fire.[9][10] She shared a place of honor in a 1919 parade in New York, with fellow YMCA war workers Mary Noel Arrowsmith, Frances Gulick, Ethel Creighton Torrance, and Marjorie Skelding.[11]

Ely was active in many feminist and cultural organizations; her associates included President William H. Taft,[12][13] Jane Addams,[14] journalist Dorothy Thompson,[15] Albert Einstein,[16] and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.[17] She was president of the Junior League of Philadelphia from 1915 to 1917.[18] She was head of the Pennsylvania chapter of the League of Women Voters,[19] and served on the League's national board.[20] She was Pennsylvania director of women's projects for the Works Progress Administration.[21][22]

She spent a summer in Tesuque, New Mexico, living in an adobe house with her Bryn Mawr friend Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant,[23] who later described their adventure in a serial for Harper's Magazine, titled The Journal of a Mud House.[24][25]

Ely was a delegate to the 1928 Democratic National Convention. In 1934 she ran for the Pennsylvania state senate.[8] In the 1950s she took an interest in legal representation for Native American tribes;[26] she served a term on the board of the National Association of American Indian Affairs.[3] At the beginning of World War II, she served refreshments to the recruits at Camp Blanding in Florida,[9] and wrote to her friend Eleanor Roosevelt about the plight of German Jewish families.[27]

Ely served on the executive committee of UNICEF, and in 1967 hosted UNICEF's "Trick of Treat" at her home, Wyndham Barn, welcoming Halloween visitors collecting donations for the project.[4] She was a patron of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Bryn Mawr Hospital. She received the first annual Baldwin School Alumnae Award in 1967.[28][3] In 1968 she was named a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania.[29]