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Rice, Emily S.
Emily S. Rice was elected Harper County ( Kansas) clerk in 1884 and served until 1888. Although Kansas was often progressive in matters of women's rights, since 1874 dissenters had challenged women's right to hold elective office. The question of whether Kansas women were legally entitled to run for, and hold, public office was not resolved until 1886 when the state attorney general issued a...
Sharon, Mrs. C. J. M.
Mrs. C. Sharon was elected Marion County (Kansas) Superintendent of Public Instruction in 1872. She was re-elected in 1874. The state legislature had voted Kansas women school election suffrage in 1861. Sharon was one of several women who held this position in the early 1870s, making them among the first female officeholders in the United States.
Salter, Susanna Madora
In 1887 Susanna Salter, a 27-year old temperance activist, became the first woman in the United States to be elected to the position of mayor. The town was Argonia, Kansas, a small Quaker village with a population of less than five hundred that had only incorporated in 1885. She was nominated, without notification, by men intent upon embarrassing and defeating temperance. Local Republicans u...
Sullivan, Lucy M.
In 1889 Lucy M. Sullivan was elected mayor of Baldwin, Kansas.
Morse, Hannah B.
Hannah P. Morse was elected in 1888 to the Oskaloosa, Kansas town council. This was an historic election as the mayor and all of the town council members were women. By one account, after the success of Susanna Salter's term as mayor of Argonia, Kansas (including positive news reports about Salter), Dr. J.W. Balsley of Oskaloosa came up with the idea of "petticoat government" in his town. He...
McGill, Alice
Alice McGill was elected as register of deeds (circa 1900) for Graham County, Kansas. She was one of several women to hold this position in Kansas in this period. Elected by all-male voters, these women often proved themselves in lower, appointed positions in the deeds office and subsequently ran for the elected position as individuals known and respected by the eligible male voters.
Wade, May Burbank
In 1896 Mary Burbank Wade was elected mayor of Ellis, Kansas. Coming nine years after Susanna Salter's election in Argonia, Kansas, Wade, like the other now-numerous women holding city and county office, found that the national press scarcely paid attention. Ella Wilson's experience as mayor in Hunnewell, Kansas, however, suggests that when gender controversy occurred the press, local and na...
Webster, Ellen
Kansas ' first legislature, in 1861, gave women the right to vote in school elections. In 1872 Ellen Webster became superintendent of public instruction in Harvey County, Kansas. She took the oath of office in June, an event noted only in a news filler by the Kansas Daily Commonwealth on June 18. Two other Kansas women also held this position in other counties in 1872. Lorraine Gehring repor...
Wright, Mary Page
In 1874 Miss Mary Page Wright was elected Coffey County, Kansas superintendent of schools. Her election as superintendent furnished the Kansas Supreme Court the test case, Wright v. Noell, in the decision that sex is no disqualification for that office. Wright was born to missionary parents. She attended Adrian College in Michigan and Rockford College from which she graduated in 1871. She wa...
