Bain News Service

There are three candid photographs taken of Belle Greene by the Bain News Service, founded by the American photographer George Grantham Bain (1865–1944) in 1898. This is one of two such photos that document Belle Greene's political involvement in the 1910s. Greene served as treasurer for the Women’s Roosevelt League, a group organized in 1916 to support Charles Evans Hughes’s presidential campaign. In the September leading up to the election, she traveled with the league to Washington, DC, for a conference on the role of women in politics. The women photographed alongside Greene came from similar social circles. Maude Wetmore cofounded a camp for young women and was a friend of Anne Morgan—J. Pierpont Morgan’s youngest daughter and a prominent philanthropist in her own right. Katherine Davis was an advocate for women in New York reformatories. Alice Carpenter was an active leader in the suffrage movement and managed the women’s department at a Wall Street brokerage firm.