38. America’s First Female Mayor
Susanna M. Salter was born in 1860 into an Ohio Quaker family, which moved to Kansas when she was twelve. At age twenty, she attended the predecessor of today’s Kansas State University, but was forced to quit mere weeks before graduation, due to ill health. While pursuing her higher education, she met her future husband, and after getting married in 1880, the couple moved to Argonia and started a family, with Susanna eventually giving birth to nine children.
In Argonia, Susanna became active in her local Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) – an anti-alcohol organization advocating Prohibition. When women got the right to vote in Kansas municipal elections in 1887, the WCTU made enforcement of the state’s Prohibition law its main issue, and backed a slate of like-minded (male) candidates. However, their efforts to get women to exercise their newly won voting rights displeased some men.