The overall history of Idaho women is certainly a diverse and triumphant one. However, not every turn has been graced with a favorable outcome. This page attempts to give a brief yet fair account of some of the unique characters who have helped shape our great state. It is also posted in celebration of the variety of roles Idaho women have assumed and the things that Idaho women seem to have most in common: an innovative and colorful history, the fact that they think for themselves and the likelihood that they always will.
I extend my sincerest gratitude to Betty Penson-Ward, author of Who's Who of Idaho Women of the Past and Idaho Women in History which were used extensively in the creation of this page. Ms. Ward served on the Idaho Women's Commission and was followed by her daughter, Mali Krivor, and her grand-daughter, Deidre Chadderdon, who serves on the Commission today. Betty Penson-Ward's material was used here by permission.
A great many women came to the Idaho Territory as teachers in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Young women who had not yet started families of their own were hired in the hope that they would marry men from the area and cultivate a permanent society. Their education, combined with their emotional strength, earned these women respect as nurturing members of their households and helped them become leaders in their communities. It was a busy time and they were needed to fill as many roles as possible.
As towns emerged from trading posts, women did not relinquish the positions of authority that their education and the labor shortage during the settlement period had allowed them. Idaho adopted the state seal designed by Emma Edwards Green in 1891. Idaho is currently the only state to have a state seal designed by a woman. The right for women to vote in the state legislature was granted to Idaho women in 1896, twenty-four years before the full suffrage amendment was enacted. Laura Starcher of Parma became the first woman mayor in the United States in 1918. In 1933 Gooding's Myrtle Enking was the first woman state treasurer in Idaho and the second in the nation.
Idaho women are also the descendants of several groups of people who came to the land in search of broader skies and a better quality of life and stayed when they found just that. Many of you likely have grandmothers or great-grandmothers of English, Irish, Scottish or French descent. Some of the first people were the Nez Perce, Shoshone-Bannock, Kootenai and Coeur d'Alene who lived in Idaho long before the wagon trains carrying optimistic newcomers trundled to a halt.
Sacajawea, the Shoshoni member of the Lewis and Clark exploring party, is credited with valuable unpaid services as an occasional guide, interpreter, sometime cook, horse trader and, because she carried her baby on her back, as a symbol of the party's peaceful intent in hostile Indian country.
Born in Lemhi Valley (later called Idaho Valley), she was a member of the Snake branch of the Shoshoni tribe and at about age 11 was stolen by the Minataree tribe of North Dakota. At age 15 she was sold to the French-Canadian trapper, Toussaint Charboneau, and had a two-month old son, Baptiste, when her husband was hired as a guide-interpreter for the Lewis and Clark party.
Journals of the exploring party and research by numerous historians indicate Sacajawea worked alongside the men as needed. When in 1805 the party reached Shoshoni country, she enlisted the aid of her brother, Chief Camehwait, in providing assistance and horses. Many memorials carry her name, including a lake in Washington state, mountain peaks in Wyoming and Montana, an Idaho forest preserve, many statues, monuments, schools, paintings and numerous books.
Historians differ on her later life. Most of them claim she died on the upper Missouri in 1812. Others believe she died in 1884 in Wyoming.
Tolo's (or Too-la) real name is Aleblemot or Aleh-Der-Not. Because of her penchant for gambling, she was called Tolo by white settlers who said that word was Chinook jargon for gambler.
During the war of 1877 she volunteered to carry a letter to Florence to help warn settlers in a Slate Creek stockade of an attack. To make the trip she had to ride into the night over twenty-six miles of rough mountain trail on a borrowed pony. Tolo arrived in time to pass the letter to twenty-five miners who hiked all night, arriving at Slate Creek at sunrise. Approximately forty people were saved from an ambush.
Unfortunately for many years after her heroic night, Tolo was in danger from Nez Perce leaders who felt she had betrayed them. Afraid to leave Slate Creek, she became the only Nez Perce to obtain a land allotment off the reservation. Under the name of Tolo-Tsomy, she cultivated a little piece of ground at the junction of Slippery Creek and the Salmon River, two miles below Slate Creek. She made her living by raising and drying fruit, babysitting white children and taking in laundry. At one time, she drove a pack train of six Indian ponies from Grangeville to Freedom. Tolo Lake, near Grangeville, is named in her memory.
May Arkwright Hutton became a rags-to-riches silver millionaire, a suffrage leader and was called by newspaper reporters, "the best-known woman in the northwest."
At age 23 she talked 40 young Ohio coal miners into accompanying her to the gold mines in north Idaho where she became a cook. In 1887 she married Levi W. (Al) Hutton, a railroad engineer. The couple bought and helped work one-sixteenth of a little mine which became the famed Hercules Mine and eventually netted them over two million dollars.
In 1900, before she acquired her fortune, she self-published The Coeur D'Alenes or a Tale of the Modern Inquisition in Idaho. After she became a silver millionaire overnight her lawyers discovered that her book was full of libel and she spent a great deal of time trying to buy it back.
Hutton campaigned for equal suffrage by giving speeches throughout the United States. She gave as many as four speeches in one day, in four different places, often in her size 50 zebra skin coat. Her oft-repeated phrases included "Man is not woman's keeper. . . the ballot in the hands of women will do more to raise the standard of citizenship than all other reforms together."
In 1900 she ran for State Legislature and was defeated by 80 votes. She went to Baltimore in 1912 and became the first woman in history to be elected a delegate to a Democratic national convention.
Statuesque Margaret Roberts was the belle of the formal-ball at the Boise Natatorium. Born in Lewiston, Illinois, she had studied voice in Philadelphia and inherited a little money and a lot of savvy from a grandfather who was a partner of the famous financier John Jacob Astor. Respected as a keen politician, she plunged into the suffrage movement and became known as the Susan B. Anthony of Idaho. Her first coup was the production of 20,000 leaflets entitled, "Greetings from the Enfranchisement."
Unfortunately, volatile relationships developed between the national suffrage factions, and led one national leader to write, "Suffrage has got into a rut." Idaho's Margaret Roberts often found herself in the middle of coast-to-coast disputes.
After a lively convention, Roberts emerged as a state chairman of the new League of Women Voters in Idaho in 1919. She was repeatedly bombarded by national suffrage leaders to pressure the Idaho Legislature to ratify the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution for national women's suffrage. Even after ratification, she felt frustration about the attitude of her own Republican party, especially since her compatriots failed to give her the plum she wanted, the office of Idaho Secretary of State in 1922. Margaret Roberts turned her attention to other matters. She established Idaho's first free kindergarten, owned a book shop, served as director of the Idaho Historical Museum, received citations from the Idaho Senate and the City of Boise, and mother-henned the Idaho Free Traveling Library, her baby which was raised from sickly infancy to a strong educational institution that became the Idaho State Library.
Dr. Minnie Howard begun her teaching career at 17 years of age, after skipping high school and studying at night to pass the Kansas state teacher exams. She eventually became a medical doctor and practiced medicine with her husband for eight years.
In 1902 she moved to Pocatello where she organized touring art exhibitions for roughly twenty-six small towns in the surrounding area and became a founder of the Pocatello Carnegie Library.
She helped the 1916 discovery of the original Fort Hall on the Portneuf River bottoms of the Native American reservation. She was appointed Bannock County Historian in 1931 and wrote about 72 articles on Pocatello history.
Designed by Emma Green
Idaho became a state on July 3, 1890 and that same summer a talented young woman came to the state capitol at Boise to visit relatives. Emma Sarah Etine Edwards (later she married mining man James G. Green) was the daughter of John C. Edwards, a former Governor of Missouri (1844 - 48) who had emigrated to Stockton, California where he acquired large land holdings, a beautiful French Creole wife, Emma Catherine Richards, and became Mayor of Stockton, in about that order.
Emma, eldest of a family of eight, was exceptionally well educated for a woman of that period and when she dropped into Boise, it was n her way home from a year spent at an art school in New York. However what was to be a very short visit turned into a lifelong stay, for she fell in love with the charming city and its people and opened art classes where the young pioneers of the community learned to paint.
Shortly after her classes started, she was invited to enter a design for the Great Seal of the State of Idaho. Acting on Concurrent Resolution No. 1, adopted by the First Legislature of the newest state in the union, a committee was appointed from that body and instructed to offer a prize of one hundred dollars for the best design submitted.
Artists from all over the country entered the competition, but the unanimous winner was young Emma Edwards, who became the first and only woman to design the Great Seal of a State.
She was handed the honorarium by Governor Norman B. Willey on March 5, 1891. The state flag also carries the seal centered on a deep blue background.
Emma Edwards Green had no children of her own, but assisted in rearing a nephew, Darell B. Edwards, a distinguished Oakland attorney. Ralph Edwards of "This is Your Life," also a nephew, shows a valid artistic strain flourished in the Edwards family.
Mrs. Green died n Boise January 6, 1942. She was buried beside her husband in Oakland, California.
From the Idaho Blue Book, Published by the State of Idaho
“ The star signifies a new light in the galaxy of states... ”
-from the Description of the Idaho State Seal,
By Emma Edwards Green, the Designer
Learn more about the
Great Seal of the State of Idaho.
The Betty Penson-Ward
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Bathing beauties in a pond at Boise's Pierce Park |
Eve Dillingham Nevers tees off at Idaho's first 18-hole course, now at the Hayden Lake club near Coueur d'Alene. |
In their 1920's school uniforms, young women of St. Teresa's Catholic Academy spend an outdoor day in the Boise foothills. |
A box factory crew of women in 1918 |
Hattie Harris, Old Boise socialite, taught 1890 classes in etiquette and dancing. |
The ten Emmett Peaches, comely Moulton sisters were fond of lining up in Flora Dora girl poses. they are Melinda, Amanda, Larcena, Estella, Corelia, Louisa, Victoria, Florence, Gladys, and Alice, with their mother Mrs. Sarah Moulton. |
Nell Shipman produced the first movie film in Idaho, and brought her professional and animal actors to Priest Lake in 1922 |
Maude Cosho of Boise served in the Women's Army Corps in World War II |
Idahoans of the Gay Nineties sometimes savored fairly simple pleasures such as a summer picnic at Robie's Creek in the foothills above Boise. |
Inez Callaway Robb of Caldwell started as a cub reporter on The Statesman and became a nationally syndicated columnist and World War II overseas correspondent. |
Laura Starcher of Parma, first woman mayor in the U.S., and her all-women council replaced their husbands in 1918 in Umatilla Oregon. |
Agnes Flannigan Kelly, a Dudley storekeeper, learned forestry management from her lumberjack customers and left a sizeable scholarship to the U of I forestry school. |
Jane Gay (chopping vegetables) served as unpaid cook and photographer for Alice Fletcher, Federal land-allotment officer for the Nez Perce Indians. |
Myrtle Enking of Gooding, first woman state treasurer in Idaho and second in the nation, wore tall hats because she stood only four feet eleven. |
A big event at Moscow's Fourth of July celebration in 1911 was the girls' race. |
Permeal French of Hailey, first woman elected to state office (schools superintendent), attained greatest fame as the dean of women at the U of I for 30 years. |
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