Knowles, Ella L.

Ella L. Knowles, the first woman attorney to be permitted to practice law in Montana, ran for the office of state Attorney General in 1892 on the Populist and Alliance Party ticket. She did not win but  polled 11,405 votes. The male Democratic candidate received 15,377 votes. The Republican, Henri Haskell, won with 16,606 votes. After the election Haskell hired Knowles as his assistant attorney general. They married but divorced after two years. She was thirty-two years of age at the time of the election. The governor later appointed Knowles as a justice of the peace. She was the first woman in the state to hold this office. Knowles was a suffrage activist who  became the president of the Montana Woman Suffrage Association in 1896.
Knowles was raised in New Hampshire and educated at Maine's Bates College. She moved to the West for her health. She settled in Helena, Montana in her late twenties where she read law in the office of Joseph W. Kinsley. She subsequently practiced law with him in the firm of Kinsley & Knowles. She specialized in mining, corporate, and real estate law. Knowles remained politically active and in 1900 campaigned for William Jennings Bryan. Through her activism and campaigning Knowles  helped to pave the way for the election of Jeannette Rankin to the United States House of Representatives in 1916.