Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Petticoat Rulers

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

Petticoat rulers were women who ran the show long before anyone thought they could. We’re talking mayors and entire city councils comprised of women in the Old West. What happened since then? Listen to find out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is short stuff, and this is a good one.

I'm excited about this one, Chuck. Let's go, go, Chuck, go. Yeah, I mean, we're talking about petticoat rulers, and it might surprise people considering America today is ranked 81 out of 193 countries in women representation and government that we actually had women who were mayors and city council people way back in the 1800s.

Yeah, there were two towns in particular, Oskaloosa, Kansas, and Kanab, Utah, that had elected all female town councils in 1888 and 1912 respectively, which is pretty substantial, but then Jackson, Wyoming, home to the famous Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which I guess is a hamlet or a burg

or some sort of affiliated town, but it's basically the same place from what I understand. Oh, man, we're gonna get some email from the Jackson people. They said, you know what, hold our beer, or hold our sasperilla, because we're gonna one up both of those towns. And in 1920, the year that women were granted suffrage

by the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, I should say. That same year, Jackson, Wyoming elected not only an all-woman town council, Chuck, but also a mayor, a woman mayor for the first time ever. And that group, these Petticoat rulers, as they came to be known, appointed women to the highest positions in the town, clerk, health, treasurer, and marshal.

Isn't that amazing? It is amazing. And I was surprised to see that the first woman elected mayor in the United States was all the way back in 1887. Yeah, I had no idea. Yeah, it was in Agoria, Kansas. Her name was, well, this one was the one.

I believe we covered her before in something. Susanna Salter, who was placed on the ballot as a sort of a prank by men in the town who didn't think that women should hold office. They put her on the ballot, thinking that she would be humiliated, and it would set women back politically. And she didn't know she was on the ballot.

It was like a blind ballot until the day of the election. And she won. That's awesome. And went on to be mayor. The other ones, Oskaloosa, Mary D. Lohman, she was legitimately elected mayor, and the first woman elected as mayor in Kansas with an all city council full of women.

Nothing but ladies. That's amazing. But the thing is, yeah, we think about it today and we're like, that's just, that's unheard of. Like literally unheard of. I hadn't heard about that before. But the state of Wyoming is actually known as the equality state.

And one of the reasons why is because, you know, we associate 1920s the year that women were granted the right to vote. That is a national thing. They had the right to vote back in 1869 in Wyoming. So it kind of like gives it a little more texture or context for both to know that women already had the right to vote for more than 50 years

before Mayor Miller and the all female town council were elected in Jackson. Yeah, and that's how Mary Lohman won in Oskaloosa is they had, in Kansas, they had the right to vote in municipal elections. And they won by a two to one margin on the Oskaloosa improvement ticket. The one in Utah was interesting too.

And they both kind of had similar stories in that when they got an office, one of their big things was to kind of just clean up the town, collect back taxes. I think they had something like $200 in collected taxes just cause people just refused to pay. And they went around personally to the houses. And I think they left office with $2,000 in the city coffers.

And then Mary Woolley Chamberlain of Kenneb, Utah. She was mayor for two years and she had a female city council. And she was one of the, enacted one of the first leash laws for dogs. Oh, cool. And then wanted to protect local business. So she enacted a daily tax on traveling salesmen

coming through town because she was like, you can't just come through town, steal a bunch of business and then leave with your pockets full. So we're gonna tax you guys per day just to kind of drive business to protect local business. That's some smart government right there. Yeah.

Well, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about some more smart government that was instituted by women around the turn of the last century. Okay? Let's do it. It's super hard to stop, there's so much stuff. Look at all the stuff you shouldn't know.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so Chuck, you said Cannab's town council were elected by a two to one margin.

I saw the same thing too for Jackson's Petticoat rulers, which really kind of goes to underscore this. This was not like some fluke or a joke like the first female mayor in America, Salter. Is that what you said her name was? Yeah, Susanna Salter. She reminds me, her story reminds me of Elizabeth Blackwell getting into med school.

Remember, it was supposed to be a prank and kind of blew up in the face. That's probably what I was thinking of actually. Yeah, yeah, because I don't remember talking about Susanna Salter before either. But the fact that they won, that the Petticoat rulers and the Cannab Utah town council won by like a two to one margin really shows that this was not like a joke

or a fluke. I think one woman, one of the city council members beat her husband in the election in Jackson in 1920. Rose Crabtree. Yeah, which that had to taste pretty sweet. And then the fact is that a lot of them were reelected when they came up for reelection. So not only was it a good idea,

they proved themselves as worthy for reelection too. And some of the things they did, like you said, they beefed up the town coffers. I saw they didn't institute a leash law in Jackson, but they did criminalize littering for the first time. They cleaned up the town square, meaning that they didn't allow cattle grazing there anymore. That was another thing they did.

What else? They graded the streets. They said, how about some street lights and street lamps? Let's expand electrical service. Let's get a cemetery going in this town because everyone's always shooting each other. Right, or they used to when the men ran the place. That was another thing I saw too.

I mean, you were talking about the back taxes not being collected and them getting like an additional $1,800 into the treasury. One of the things that I saw, I think it was in a Jackson Hole newspaper. The reason for that was that this town had been run like really insouciantly by men up to that point. And that there was like this kind of pioneer spirit

where everyone was expected to take care of their neighbor and everyone did and stepped up when help was needed. But it wasn't like a organized structural civic pride. And that that's what the Petticoat rulers came in and instituted. They basically said, hey, you know that the whole take care of your neighbor thing? There's actually a lot of things we could be doing

through government and let's start doing that. And that actually kind of took off. Yeah, and Grace Miller, the mayor of, I think she was a Jackson, right? Yeah. She said in an interview, we simply tried to work together. We put into practice the same thrifty principles we exercise in our own homes.

We wanted a clean, well-kept progressive town in which to raise our families. What is good government but a breathing space for good citizenship? Nice. And it sort of reminds me of that quote. I don't know the exact quote, but it's sort of like if you want the job done on time and right,

like hire a working mom or something like that. I think you're talking about something to do with like lipstick and pimples. No. No? Is that a different one? I think so. Okay.

The one you're talking about makes a tremendous amount of sense though. So the Petticoat rulers came in and from what I understand there's a town historian, Morgan Albertson. I'm going to take a stab at this last name, Jaowen. What do you think? Sure. J-A-O-U-E-N.

It's a beautiful thing. Maybe it's just clean. Either way, it looks very, very nice spelled out. But historian, we're just going to call this person the historian, basically said that the Petticoat rulers shaped Jackson and Jackson Hole into the town that they know and love today. And that it may have just kind of become a town

that ended up deserted and misused and mistreated and misgoverned and lost to history. The historians willing to go so far as to say that. Either way, the rulers definitely deserve credit for shaping the place. But the weird thing is Chuck is like, despite how successful the all-female town council and mayor and appointed positions was for Jackson,

it's like the town was like, okay, well, we tried that. Let's wait another 80 or so years before we do it again. Yeah, we tried that and it worked out really great. So let's just wait till the 1980s. Yeah, 1980s was the first time that women city council people were elected again. And it wasn't until 2001 when they had another woman mayor, Jean Jackson was elected in 2001.

So it went from Mayor Miller, Grace Miller in 1920 to Jean Jackson in 2001. That was quite a drought. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else, we salute them. I do too, but I have one last thing. The women were all members originally

of what was called the Pure Foods Club, which was a social group that met a couple of times a month. And that's where the idea to run was hatched and nurtured. And that group is still around today, but they call themselves the birthday club. But in that adorable, this group's been around since the early 1900s and they still meet twice a month.

And now men are allowed. I love the birthday club, I wanna be in that group. They'll let you in, you're a man and likable. So I think those are the two qualifications. And I have birthdays. You do, you have a birthday. Well, yeah, hats off to the Petticoat rulers and all of the women who helped shape the United States,

then and now. And I guess that means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.