Biography
Lilian Herrick Marble was the twelfth and youngest child of Elizabeth Woodard and Liberty Bates Marble, a successful mill owner in Woodstock. Lilian graduated from Woodstock High School, studied music in Boston, and became an accomplished pianist. She taught music before her marriage to clothing manufacturer Louis Herman Olzendam, a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the turn of the century, the couple moved to New York City, where Louis worked in the textile business, and the couple raised two children, Roderic M. and Therese E. Olzendam.
In the mid-1910s Lilian and her daughter Therese became involved in the woman suffrage movement. Therese, who had learned typesetting and press operation in Woodstock, became circulation manager at The Suffragist, the newspaper of the National Woman’s Party in Washington, D.C. Returning to Woodstock in mid-1917, Lilian became an officer of the Vermont Equal Suffrage Association (VESA) and president of the Woodstock Suffrage Club in 1918. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) hired her as an organizer for Vermont, and she attended the association’s conference in St. Louis in 1919 to report on the state’s progress.
The same year VESA leaders appointed Olzendam to lead the campaign to ratify the 19th Amendment. She successfully gathered petitions from women and enough pledges from Vermont legislators to support suffrage and a special legislative session to ratify the amendment, which would make Vermont the “Perfect 36” or final state needed for ratification. In the process, she took a historic auto tour with Marion Stone Pelley to visit every newspaper editor and as many politicians as she could locate to sign a petition urging Governor Percival W. Clement to call legislators into session. When he continued to resist, Olzendam organized a mass protest of suffragists at the State House to speak with him. Traveling through snow and sleet, women in the “March of 400,” otherwise known as the “Green Mountain Girls,” participated in the state’s largest political protest to date. Despite this effort and the intervention of national Republican leaders, Clement refused, claiming that ratification required a statewide referendum as per the Vermont Constitution. After Tennessee became the final ratifying state and women had voted in the 1920 election, Vermont legislators finally approved the amendment in 1921.
In September 1920, Olzendam helped organize the League of Women Voters of Vermont and was elected its first chair. That fall she also campaigned for the Republican Party, attended the state convention, and was elected a Presidential elector. In the 1921 legislative session, she advanced women’s reforms and wrote a special report for newly elected Governor James Hartness on conditions for women at Windsor Prison, urging their removal from the institution. Noted for her prominence as a woman in Vermont politics, Olzendam retreated from public life in the summer of 1921.
During this period, Olzendam was separated from her husband and lived in Woodstock and Burlington. In 1924, she wrote a musical score for “Song of Vermont,” published in Boston with lyrics originally written as a poem by Justice Wendell Phillips Stafford. During the 1930s, Olzendam spent winters in New York City, where she boarded at the American Woman’s Club. She returned to Woodstock regularly to visit her large family and purchased her own residence in the 1940s. Her daughter, Therese, worked for the advertising firm, J. Walter Thompson Co., in New York City until 1951, and her son, Roderic, a writer in his
youth, settled in Tacoma, Washington, where Lilian died at the age of 89 in 1958.Occupation
Musician, Suffragist