According to family lore, Great (Great Great) Aunt Josie was the first woman elected to office in Ottawa County, Ohio. But the story of Josie can’t be told without the story of my grandmother, Helen, because we don’t know much about Josie and what we do know centers on her role in Helen’s life.
Helen was anything but a cuddly grandmother. She was demanding, critical, industrious, whip-smart; our chosen euphemism is “force of nature”. Married to her high school sweetheart with a baby on the way by the end of college, she was never interested in staying home. She worked as a writer and educator then went on to earn a PhD in her 40s and travel the world extensively. Impressively, her travels took her to every continent over 70+ international trips! Along the way she fished for piranhas in the Galapagos, had her luggage lost behind the Iron Curtain, and was one of the first tourists to visit Bhutan when it opened to outsiders. It wasn’t all big adventure, she also spent time in lavender fields and on European riverboats. She once confided that she didn’t enjoy visiting the big cities I love because she was just a small-town girl at heart.
Throughout her marriage — which lasted more than 50 years until my wonderful (and somewhat more cuddly) grandfather’s death — she maintained her independence. When he wanted to retire and move up to the lake house and she didn’t, they lived long-distance for a few years. When he didn’t want to travel with her, she went without him, including the term she taught in Brazil. I appreciate how they let each other be; he was a man ahead of his time being so supportive of her ambitions.
How did this tiny slip of a woman, born in the early 1920s and raised in a small dot on the map, go on to get a PhD and hang out with penguins in Antarctica? Where did she get this sense of self and independence? Certainly that innate force of will and intelligence had much to do with it. She also credited the influence of her role model, her Great Aunt Josie.
Born Josephine Fall around 1869, Josie was one of many siblings and a spinster who had a large hand in raising Helen. The Fall family were followers of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and I got the impression Josie was also active in that. (Fun fact: Despite a childhood steeped in temperance, Grandma swiftly reversed course after becoming faculty at a Catholic university. Her Mai Tai recipe remains legendary.)
We know that Josie inspired an independent spitfire, but what tells us that she was an extraordinary woman is that she was elected County Treasurer in 1926. As far as we know, she was the first woman elected to office in Ottawa County and she served for one term, 1927-1931. She would have been just a little older than I am now; there’s a lesson there.
What drove her to seek office is lost to time. Had she previously been involved in local government? Was she proving a feminist point? Did this start with WCTU activism? Or was she just a smart, competent woman with limited options and time on her hands later in life? (That would have been about when my grandmother, an only child, started school.) We’ll never know. Any way around it, it’s an incredible accomplishment for a woman to have been elected to office at that time. Keep in mind, this was only 6 years after women gained the right to vote nationally.
After my grandmother died, I found Josie’s candidate postcard in a box of her scrapbooks. I’m going to have it framed and keep it where my lineage can inspire me — these women achieved extraordinary things late in life and I could use a hit of that energy.