Biography

Mary Clemmer Ames Hudson was born in Utica, New York to Abraham and Margaret Clemmer. After an unhappy first marriage to Daniel Ames, a Methodist minister, in 1851, Hudson moved to New York City in 1859. During the American Civil War, she served as a nurse in Union hospitals in Washington, D.C. After the war, she divorced Ames and  began a career as a writer and journalist, wherein she became famous for her critique against Gilded Age excess. From 1866-1884, she was a correspondent for the New York Independent penning a column entitled “A Woman’s Letter from Washington.” She published her book, Ten Years in Washington, in 1874. Her accounts of people, agencies, and buildings of Washington, DC drew from information gathered from the Ladies gallery of the U.S. Capitol Building and her contacts with political figures. Hudson's success as a journalist took advantage of the social belief that women held higher moral values than men. She showed that a woman correspondent had a unique advantage to comment on public affairs if she did so in the name of morality. Her writing demonstrated her support for women’s suffrage and education for newly emancipated Blacks. Hudson married Edmund Hudson, a fellow Washington journalist, in 1883. Mary Clemmer Ames Hudson died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1884 at age 45.