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Finding America’s First Female Politician
How an Iowa woman (accidentally) made history
In January 1862, a group of men in Oskaloosa, Iowa, made history by voting for the first female candidate for public office in United States history.
According to the Oskaloosa Times, the men of the town didn’t want Republican candidate B.F. Ingles to run unopposed, so they had formed a “City Ticket” and “nominated Mrs. Nancy Smith” as their candidate of choice late on the very day of the election.
To their surprise, they elected her “by a 21 [vote] majority. Oskaloosa has elected a woman ‘Mayor of the Town!’”
Editors nationwide quickly picked up on this amazing story of “petticoat governance” on the Iowa prairie. The report from the Oskaloosa Times ran in dozens of newspapers in every Northern state and eventually made it across the Atlantic to the British papers.
Nobody bothered to verify the story; fact-checking as an important facet of journalism was at least fifty years away. So nobody seemed to notice the bucket of ice water the Burlington (Iowa) Weekly Hawk-Eye poured on the tale a few weeks later.
