CLARDY, MARY M. (?-?). Mary M. Clardy, a late-nineteenth-century reformer, held positions in both the Prohibition party and the Texas state Farmers' Alliance. Her home was listed as Bexar when she attended the 1890 Prohibition party state convention in Fort Worth as a member of the Committee on Platform and Resolutions. She was the only woman at that convention to serve in an official capacity. She advocated world trade markets for farmers in an 1890 article in the Farmers' Alliance newspaper, the Southern Mercury. She also contributed articles on the Populist party (see PEOPLE'S PARTY) and reform to the National Economist, the national Farmers' Alliance newspaper in Washington, D.C. In 1892 she was elected assistant state lecturer of the Farmers' Alliance of Texas, one of only three women elected to a state office in the Southern Farmers' Alliance. In 1892 the Southern Mercury gave her home as Sulphur Spring.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Robert C. McMath, Jr., Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers' Alliance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). Melissa Gilbert Wiedenfeld, Women in the Texas Farmers' Alliance (M.A. thesis, Texas Tech University, 1983). E. W. Winkler, Platforms of Political Parties in Texas (Austin: University of Texas, 1916).
