Jill Norgren, They Made Good Trouble: U.S. Women Who Ran for Office 1853-1920

How could they run? At the time the U.S. Constitution gave the power to define political rights such as voting and holding office to the states. After early women’s rights conventions (1840s), activists began to submit petitions to state legislatures demanding the right to vote and the right to hold office. But unlike women’s few attempts at voting before the Civil War women like Olive Rose slowly began to seize the moment and run for office. These early female candidates faced an entirely male electorate.

Somewhat more than half of these women candidates sought education-related offices: school board positions, county superintendent’s offices and, by the end of the 19th century, the powerful position of state superintendent of schools.

Critically, however, nearly half of these women candidates ran for non-education related offices. They won election as mayor and town council members. By the late 1880s they had set the bar higher and announced as candidates for state offices such as Lt. Governor, state judges, and state legislators. From the 1890s to 1920, as state suffrage for women expanded, more than 300 women ran for state legislative positions. Many won.

Make no mistake, however, although thousands ran for office there were challenges. Opponents of women’s rights (and defeated male candidates) sued and petitioned to stop women candidates. Some of these challenges succeeded but, obviously, thousands did not.

Let me personalize the numbers with the biographies of three such candidates, each a lawyer:

In 1875 Lavinia Goodell, daughter of nationally prominent abolitionists, campaigned for the position of city attorney in Janesville, Wisconsin. She was in her 30s, single, and both a temperance and suffrage activist. She lost.

Ten years later, attorney Belva Lockwood ran for the presidency. She was 54 and twice a widow. She campaigned across the United States using lecture fees to pay her travel expenses. She published a 12 point policy platform and was written up by the leading newspapers and magazines of her day.

And, in 1888, Catharine Waugh, also a temperance and suffrage activist, ran for Illinois state attorney as did Goodell on the Temperance Party ticket. She, too, was defeated but is particularly interesting to us because in 1907, now Catharine McCulloch and the married mother of four, she ran for justice of the peace in a highly contested race against a man. She won, and was later re-elected. In later years, U.S. Judge Florence Allen cited McCulloch’s example as having convinced her, Allen, to run for the local judicial position that ultimately led Allen to become the first women on the federal appeals court.

I have galloped through this history. I want to end by suggesting how women running for elective office relates to the woman suffrage we celebrate this year. Suffrage is an important, but partial, expression of women’s political and legal citizenship. We must see the suffrage movement as part of something larger, as intertwined with the temperance movement, the decades-long demands for married women’s property rights, the Populist and Socialist movements and, of course, the right to run for elective office, an act the late Congressman John Lewis would have called “making good trouble.”

Jill Norgren is emeriti professor of political science and women’s studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She and Wendy Chmielewski are currently writing a book drawing upon the data from the HerHatWasintheRing project.

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Jill Norgren, They Made Good Trouble: U.S. Women Who Ran for Office 1853-1920

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