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A Prank Led to America’s First Nominated Female to Office, and Other Lesser Known American History Facts

Khalid Elhassan December 13, 2019 33 min

39. The Genesis of a Prank

Nineteenth-century suffragettes. Marie Claire

It was not until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 that America’s women were guaranteed the right to vote. However, in the preceding decades, numerous states had given women the franchise, in whole or in part. One such was Kansas, where the protracted struggle for women’s voting rights won its earliest partial victory in 1887, when women won the right to vote in municipal elections.

For many opponents of women’s suffrage, that heralded the world going to hell in a hand basket. Some such specimens in the town of Argonia set out to demonstrate their contempt for the concept of women in politics with what they saw as relatively harmless prank. They would place a woman’s name on the mayoral ballot, she would of course lose, and everybody would get a laugh at the absurdity of females floundering about in the manly world of politics.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.