EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part of a weekly series on our region’s history coordinated by the Trumbull County Historical Society.

The women of Warren decided to put a woman on the school board in 1898. (Ohio granted school board suffrage in 1893.)

I looked forward with joy to helping in a real campaign, where I can use to advance the methods which we had developed in the suffrage work. We persuaded Mrs. Carrie Harrington to be a candidate.

She agreed, provided some woman would run with her. No woman could be found that was both available and acceptable, and finally I became the choice of the committee and I entered the race.

The men who were then president and treasurer of the school board were candidates for reelection and two men who had been appointed to fill vacancies were running for a short term. They

expected the woman to vote for two women and two of the four men, and this overlapping would result in the elections of all four men.

However, the puritan mothers had fought years before to have girls taught arithmetic, so the women of Warren at that time understood that such a procedure would defeat women. The primaries came on a rainy spring night, but it took more than rain to keep at home women who had been working for the ballot. They crowded the voting places, and stood long in line.

Some of them had gray hair and were feeble, but they held out. I heard a man ( much opposed to suffrage) say to his companion, “Why Ed, they are even voting wrecks.”

When the polls opened, a woman of 90 stood sixth in line. She had been a suffragist from her early years and was anxious to cast her first ballot. Someone in the crowd moved that she be allowed to vote first. When this privilege was granted to her, her son, who had stood near her, offered his arm and together they went to the head of the line.

The result of the election was most satisfactory to Mrs. Harrington and myself, for we got the two long terms. We made a clean campaign, had been successful, had demonstrated that women could cooperate, that they would vote and that they could be elected under difficulties.

My school board life was most pleasant. The board was divided into committees and Mrs. Harrington and I were always treated most fairly. I do not believe on any board of education in the state there was ever so little discrimination as to women. The man and woman vote was never divided on sex lines, save on appropriations for the public library. In the beginning, Mrs. Harrington and I always voted for the largest levy, the men voting the lower. Later, however, the men came over to our way of thinking.

Near the end of our regime, I was elected president of the board. Whether we were great successes or not I do not know, but certain it is that we did not disgrace women and we served five terms of three years each.