Edith Elmer Wood was an American advocate for public health and housing reform. Wood was a proponent of the construction of public housing, arguing that overcrowded slums and their associated communicable diseases were not the fault of immoral tenants or landlords, but a systemic economic problem needing solutions at the governmental level. She served in leadership roles for several housing organizations and was an advisor to the United States Housing Authority; her advocacy significantly impacted on the housing reforms implemented in the 1930s and 1940s through the New Deal and the Fair Deal.
Edith Ogden Harrison was a writer of children's books and fairy tales in the early decades of the 20th century. She was the wife of Carter Harrison, Jr., five-term mayor of Chicago.
Edith Rickert (1871–1938) was a medieval scholar at the University of Chicago. Her work includes the Chaucer Life-Records and the eight-volume Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940).
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell was a British poet and critic and the eldest of the three literary Sitwells. She reacted badly to her eccentric, unloving parents and lived much of her life with her governess. She never married but became passionately attached to Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, and her home was always open to London's poetic circle, to whom she was generous and helpful.
Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
