Just One Year After Women Could Vote, History Was Made in Kentucky

On August 18th, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving women the right to vote after decades of lobbying and protests. I knew nothing of any of this until 1976, when I saw this one Saturday morning...

Most of those invaluable Schoolhouse Rock clips were about three minutes long, so there wasn't much room for details outside of the basic history lesson. Still, it would have been fun to hear mention of any subsequent groundbreakers following the historic ratification. The thing is, there were so many that there never would have been room to give everyone their "screen time."

No matter. History is history, and in Kentucky, history was made just one year later, in 1921, when the Commonwealth elected its first female candidate to public office.

First Female Elected to Kentucky Public Office

Born in 1867 in Carter County, Mary Elliott Flanery was educated at what is now the University of Charleston and the University of Kentucky, where her photographic collection is archived. She married in 1893, after which she and her husband, William Harvey Flanery, raised five kids, briefly lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then returned to the Commonwealth and settled in Pikeville. A longtime critic of the nation's marriage and divorce laws, Flanery wrote for the Ashland Daily Independent beginning in 1904 and, through her work as a suffragist, began to champion education reform.

In 1921, Mary Elliott Flanery became the first woman to be elected to Kentucky public office when she won a seat in the State House of Representatives. It also made her the first woman elected to a legislature in the South. Three years later, in 1924, she would serve as a delegate at the Democratic National Convention in New York City.

Mary Elliott Flanery passed away in 1933 and was laid to rest in Ashland Cemetery.