Judith Peabody

Who was Judith Peabody?

Judith Dunnington Peabody was an American socialite and philanthropist who was best known for her involvement as a volunteer with causes ranging from the legal defense of Lenny Bruce to assisting families with AIDS.

Judith Anne Walker was born on May 6, 1930 in Richmond, Virginia. After her parents were divorced, her mother, Elizabeth Taylor Walker, married attorney Walter Grey Dunnington at a January 1937 ceremony conducted in the bride's apartment at the Carlyle Hotel, where the couple would continue to live. She attended Miss Hewitt's Classes in Manhattan and the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Connecticut and was introduced to society in September 1947 at the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York. She was a member of the Colony Club and the New York Junior League. She met her future husband at a dinner party and they were engaged a week later. After her future husband picked her up for a date at a youth center for juvenile delinquents where she had been working, she pleaded with him not to tell her mother where she had been, saying "she thinks I'm having French lessons".

After two years at Bryn Mawr College, she married Samuel Parkman Peabody at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in Manhattan in a ceremony officiated by the groom's father, Malcolm Endicott Peabody, a Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York.