Susanna “Dora” Salter was doing her laundry when she got
the news: She had just been elected mayor of Argonia, Kansas. Just like that,
the 29-year-old became the first woman mayor in the United States — without
even mounting a campaign.
Salter’s name had appeared on the ballot as a cruel joke
designed to humiliate her and her cohort for daring to speak out in public
about politics. Now the joke was on the men of the tiny town when she ended up
in charge.
It was 1887, and when it came to suffrage, Kansas was one
of the country’s most forward-thinking states. Twenty years earlier, it had
become the first state to hold a referendum on whether women should vote. The
issue was decided alongside another referendum on whether black men should
vote.
Suffrage activists all over the United States descended
on Kansas to convince its residents to extend the franchise to women. The
state’s Republicans, however, sought to undermine the potential alliance
between women’s suffrage leaders and former abolitionists by pitting them
against each other, prompting a lasting rift. And echoes of the
anti-suffrage campaign, which characterized suffragists as bitter spinsters disrupting
the natural order — resounded through Kansas long after both groups lost the
campaign.
The fight for suffrage continued until 1887, when the
Kansas legislature granted women the ability to vote and run-in local
elections. Though women had achieved suffrage in other states, none had ever
won a mayoral election — until Salter.
Salter was the daughter of the first mayor of Argonia,
Kansas, a city with a population of less than 500 in south-central Kansas, and
her husband was city clerk. She was a member of the Women’s Christian
Temperance Union, a religious group that lobbied for the curbing and
prohibition of alcohol use nationwide. The temperance movement was one of the
few socially acceptable places for women to engage in public life. The WCTU’s
message that women needed to be protected from men’s outsized appetites jibed
with the perception that women were the arbiters of morality. The organization
simultaneously reinforced gender norms and gave women real power. But many men,
especially in Kansas, where liquor was outlawed in 1880, hated the
organization and what they saw as the presumptuousness of its members.
When women finally got the right to vote in local
elections, the WCTU sprang into action. At last it had a political platform,
and the Kansas group decided to endorse a group of temperance-minded male
candidates. As historian Doris Weatherford explained, “Susanna Salter
presided at this caucus, and some male attendees, offended by female
presumption to endorse candidates, devised a convoluted plan to embarrass these
assertive women.”
The scheme went like this: A group of Argonia men met in
secret and compiled a list of candidates that was identical to the one the WCTU
had drawn up — with a noteworthy exception. Instead of including the name of
the male candidate for mayor endorsed by the WCTU, they put Salter’s name on
the ballot instead. The men assumed that no man would vote for a woman mayor
and that Salter’s loss would teach her and her fellow WCTU members a lesson.
Unbeknownst to Salter, ballots were printed up with her name on them.
It didn’t exactly go as planned. When the WCTU women saw
Salter’s name on the ballot, they voted for her instead of the man they had
nominated. A group of men who were unamused by the secret caucus and the joke
ballot decided to vote for Salter, too. Salter’s husband heard about the scheme
and scrambled to try to get the town’s men not to vote for his wife; which some
found humorous and voted for her to spite him. As a result, many men voted for
her out of amusement.
In the end, Salter received two-thirds of the vote.
Though she had been nominated without her consent or knowledge, she decided to
take office.
She was the first woman mayor in the United States, which
made her a national celebrity. Newspapers followed her, often writing ironic
asides about her ability to do her job, and letters poured into Argonia
praising Salter for her temerity and mocking her hubris.
True to her position as a WCTU woman, Mayor Salter
shuttered Argonia’s gambling halls and saloons, and worked to improve its
infrastructure and public safety. “This indisposition on the part of Mayor
Salter to ‘let up on the boys’ seriously mars her chances of ever being a
candidate for the office again,” remarked the Ontario Globe, “as it
isn’t likely that next election day will find the male voters in a joking
mood.”
Newspapers remarked with wonder that Salter seemed
perfectly capable of presiding over city council meetings, and made sure to
tell readers about her looks and even her weight. In turn, Salter made sure her
femininity was on full display for reporters. It was widely reported that she
made her own clothes and had been informed of her candidacy while bending over
her washtub.
When asked by a reporter from the Boston Daily
Globe whether she planned on a political career, Salter demurred. “No,
indeed,” she replied. “I shall be very glad when my term of office expires, and
shall be only too happy to thereafter devote myself entirely, as I have always
done heretofore, to the care of my family.”
She gave birth to her fifth child while mayor — the baby
died soon after — and, true to her word, she retired from office after a single
term and never ran for public office again.
Salter may not have chosen her position as mayor, but her
term in office inspired other women to run. In 1888, Mary D. Lowman ran
for office in Oskaloosa, Kansas, and served with the nation’s first all-woman
city council. Altogether, seven of the nine U.S. women elected as mayor within
the next decade were in Kansas.
Author: Erin Blakemore
Website: https://timeline.com/americas-first-woman-mayor-4a88e410cea1
