Marion Elizabeth Moncure Duncan (19 December 1913–15 April 1978), president general of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, was born in Alexandria and was the daughter of Ida Virginia Grigg Moncure and Robinson Moncure, a lawyer and later a judge of the city's corporation court. Her grandfather Thomas Jefferson Moncure represented King George and Stafford Counties in the Convention of 1901–1902. Moncure attended the College of William and Mary for the 1931–1932 academic year (when her physical education class performed interpretive dance at the Yorktown Sesquicentennial Celebration). Disappointed in the cultural and social life in Williamsburg, she transferred to George Washington University. After completing studies of shorthand and typewriting at a secretarial school in Washington, D.C., in 1935, she volunteered with the American Red Cross.

On 26 October 1939, in a double wedding with her younger sister at Christ Episcopal Church, in Alexandria, Moncure married Robert Vernon Harris Duncan. They had four sons, the youngest of whom died at age five. Her husband, who had a real estate and property management business, shared her interest in patriotic heritage associations. He was the founding president of the George Washington Chapter of the Virginia Society Sons of the American Revolution (1954–1955) and also served as president of the state society (1960–1961).

Businesswoman
Duncan worked as a secretary for the president of American Telephone and Telegraph in 1941 and for a director of the American Red Cross from 1945 to 1947 and afterward as a court reporter. An accredited insurance broker, she opened and from 1953 until 1976 operated Bob Duncan Real Estate–Insurance, an independent insurance agency that supported her husband's business. Duncan served for a time as vice president of the Northern Virginia Association of Insurance Agents, which gave her its Outstanding Achievement Award. She was a founding member of Senior Services of Alexandria, established in 1968 to combat age discrimination in hiring and employment.

Daughters of the American Revolution
Conscious of the Moncure family's role in state and national history, she became an organizing member of the John Alexander Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution in 1932 and served as chapter regent, or presiding officer, from 1937 to 1940. Duncan successively held office in the Virginia Daughters of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution as recording secretary (1944–1947), vice regent (1947–1950), and regent (1950–1953). She served as the organizing secretary general of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution for the 1953–1956 term.

By the spring of 1961 Duncan had taken the then-unusual step of announcing her candidacy for the office of president general of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution and of attending state DAR meetings from New England to Florida to campaign. Winning election without opposition in April 1962, she became the first Virginian and the youngest woman to date to preside over the NSDAR. During Duncan's three-year term (1962–1965), the organization continued its opposition, largely on financial grounds, to the United Nations and called for the United States to withdraw and also continued to decry the income tax as a deterrent of initiative and free enterprise. Representing the NSDAR, Duncan condemned the Supreme Court's decisions in 1962 and 1963 prohibiting school prayer, Bible readings, and other religious activities and opposed United States foreign policy in Latin America as encouraging state socialism. In August 1964, as one of numerous organizational leaders who testified before a congressional committee regarding proposed changes to the country's immigration law, she described the NSDAR's support for existing immigration quotas based on national origin that gave preference to migrants from western Europe.

Publicizing the NSDAR's wide-ranging educational and preservation activities became the primary focus of Duncan's presidency, and she oversaw the reorganization of its national public relations office. Through an initiative called Know-Do-Tell DAR, she emphasized the organization's distribution of $200,000 in scholarships each year and its support for four schools in southern and western states, as well as highlighting the group's erection in 1928 and 1929 of the Madonna of the Trail monuments in the twelve states along the National Old Trails Road. Duncan acted as supervising editor of In Washington: The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, Diamond Anniversary, 1890–1965 (1965). For the NSDAR's headquarters in Washington she proposed and oversaw completion of the renovations in the library. By the time she stepped down in 1965, the NSDAR had approximately 185,000 members in 2,868 local chapters.

Heritage Organizations
Beginning in 1953, Duncan sat on the board of trustees and directors of the Jamestown Corporation, which annually staged in Williamsburg the outdoor symphonic drama The Common Glory. Her preservation activities included serving as fourth vice president of the Kenmore Association (1950–1953) and as president of the Aquia Church Association (1959–1961). She was first vice president of the Order of First Families of Virginia, 1607–1620 (later 1607–1624/5), from 1960 to 1970 and as president from 1975 to 1978.

The Alexandria Soroptimist Club selected Duncan as the Outstanding Woman of 1963. That year Holiday Magazine named her one of the twelve leading women in the United States. In 1964 she received the George Washington Honor Medal from the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge.

College of William and Mary Board
Beginning in 1966, Duncan served two successive four-year terms on the board of visitors of the College of William and Mary. She considered issues of security and student safety, coeducational dormitories, and increasing drug use among the most serious issues that the board tackled during her tenure. Duncan supported expanding board membership beyond eastern Virginia and increasing the number of women appointees. She showed special interest in the business and law schools and pushed for air conditioning in all new construction so that buildings did not immediately become obsolete. During Duncan's tenure Christopher Newport College, a two-year branch of William and Mary, expanded to become a four-year college (later Christopher Newport University). She received the alumni medallion in 1977.

Later Years
"The American woman is an amazing critter," Duncan noted in a 1963 interview. When asked in 1977 about her frenetic pace of service in heritage, patriotic, and preservation organizations, she responded, "I'd rather wear out than rust out." Duncan helped compile a family history, House of Moncure Genealogy: A Supplement to Hayden's Virginia Genealogies Including European and Colonial Ancestral Background (1967), and two supplements, published in 1968 and 1973. She and her husband owned a townhouse on Fairfax Street and also a summer house, an eighteenth-century tavern near Lorton where, she joked, George Washington had most certainly eaten, even if he might not have slept.

Marion Elizabeth Moncure Duncan died of cancer in an Alexandria hospital on 15 April 1978. After a service at Christ Church, in Alexandria, she was buried in the cemetery of Pohick Episcopal Church, in Fairfax County.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies in National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1891–1984), 62:97, Who's Who of American Women (1968/1969), 337, and Marion Moncure Duncan, Adrian Cather Miller Duncan, and Peyton Sagendorf Moncure, comps., House of Moncure Genealogy: A Supplement to Hayden's Virginia Genealogies Including European and Colonial Ancestral Background (1967), 59, 61; Duncan oral history interview with Emily Williams, 9 Mar. 1976 (transcription with corrections and emendations by Duncan), University Archives Oral History Collection, Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va.; Washington Post, 22 Oct. 1939, 21 Apr. 1962; Alexandria Gazette, 27 Oct. 1939, 7 Nov. 1977 (second quotation and erroneous age of eighty-three); Richmond News Leader, 24 Apr., 16 Dec. 1961, 10 Aug. 1963 (first quotation); Richmond Times-Dispatch, 19 Mar. 1962; New York Times, 20 Apr. 1962; Time, 27 Apr. 1962; Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine 96 (June/July 1962): 523, 99 (May 1965): 507, and 99 (Oct. 1965): 744, 804; 1964 testimony in Immigration, 88th Cong., 2d sess., Committee on the Judiciary Serial No. 13, pt. 3, pp. 732–740; obituaries in Alexandria Gazette and Richmond Times-Dispatch, both 17 Apr. 1978, and Washington Post, 18, 22 Apr. 1978; editorial tribute and memorials in Alexandria Gazette, 19 Apr. 1978, Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine 112 (June/July 1978): 588–589, and Virginia Daughters of the American Revolution Yearbook and Proceedings (1979), iii (frontispiece portrait).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Sara B. Bearss.

How to cite this page:
Sara B. Bearss,"Marion Elizabeth Moncure Duncan (1913–1978)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2018 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Duncan_Marion_Elizabeth_Moncure, accessed [today's date]).

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