A fighter for women’s rights and founder of New York Legislative Service.
Elisabeth Scott Harms (1897-1976)
In a 1926 issue of Vogue magazine, Elisabeth McKibbon Scott wrote about her travels in Estonia, focusing on a chance meeting with some progressive women. “Estonian women are all radicals,” said one of the 11 women elected to the first Estonian Assembly. “Women have equal rights with men, according to the new [Estonian] constitution, which declares that there can be no public privileges or prejudices derived from birth, religion, sex, etc.,” the assemblywoman told Elizabeth, who had stopped by a café where the newly elected women gathered for lunch.
Elisabeth took the Estonian women’s message to heart: When she returned to New York, she became an activist for women’s rights. She joined the Zonta Club, which advocated for equality, education, and an end to child marriage and gender-based violence.
In an even bolder step, she founded the New York Legislative Service so she could keep a watchful eye on New York politics and power, focusing on what bills were introduced, how they were passed, and who stood to benefit.
Elisabeth was born on June 27, 1897, in East Windsor Hill, Connecticut, to Walter and Katherine Emma Campbell Scott. Her father, a Baptist minister, was reassigned to a congregation in Middlesex, Massachusetts, when Elisabeth was 2. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1918.
To support herself after her travels through Europe, she took a position with the National Municipal League, organized in 1894 to reform corrupt local governments—including New York in 1894, Baltimore in 1895, and Chicago in 1896-97.
She was working for the Foreign Policy Association in 1929 when she met Subhi Mustaf Sadi, a Syrian who had been admitted to the United States on a student visa and graduated from Columbia University with a master’s degree. They were married July 19, 1930, in Pittsfield, N.H. Unfortunately, Subhi’s petition to become a naturalized citizen was denied, and he was deported. Their marriage ended in divorce.
In 1932, Elisabeth turned her attention to the male-dominated politics of New York. Using her own money, she founded the Legislative Service and guided it for the next 44 years. She is remembered as a charismatic woman who wanted New Yorkers to pay closer attention to who made their laws and what motivated them. When she started, New York had 201 state legislators—51 senators and 150 assemblymen—and only one woman among them.
In the beginning, she relied on the support of friends and volunteers to run the nonprofit group. It now has dozens of researchers and a library of more than one million documents dating back to 1777 in its NY Library of Legislative Intent.
In a 1943 article published in National Municipal Review, Elisabeth raised a red flag about the growing influence of administrative agencies and lobbyists in state and federal lawmaking: “The departments in our state governments have gradually, one by one, adopted the procedure not only of making recommendations…but of drafting those recommendations as bills and sending them, with a request for their passage, to the chairmen of the committees of each house to which they would be referred,” she wrote. “The legislator or lobbyist with experience in modern methods of lawmaking asks before reading a bill: ‘Who is behind it? What support does it have?’ ”
In 1948, Elisabeth married Ernst Harms, an author, editor, and psychologist, in Richmond City, Virginia. Ernst was born in Germany in 1895 and received his PhD in psychology from the University of Würzburg. After immigrating to New York, he worked as a clinical psychologist at Grand Central Hospital, the Brooklyn Clinic, and the Youth Institute in Ossining. He also was executive director of the Foundation for Child Care and Nervous Child Help in New York City.
Considered a pioneer in art therapy, Ernst founded the quarterly journal Art Psychotherapy in the 1960s. Later, it was renamed The Arts in Psychotherapy. He also edited Handbook of Child Guidance (1947) and Drug Addiction in Youth (1965). He wrote several books, including Essentials of Abnormal Child Psychology (1953), and Modern Psychiatry—150 Years Ago (1957).
Ernst died July 2, 1974, and Elisabeth died April 21, 1976. They were both 78.
Elisabeth created an unrestricted fund in The New York Community Trust that has made grants to improve health, justice, and the environment. She also left about 144 acres in New Hampshire, known as Harms Farm, to the Boy Scouts to support a summer camp for low-income children.