ONE WOMAN'S POLITICAL JOURNEY: Kate Barnard and Social Reform, 1875-1930

ONE WOMAN'S POLITICAL JOURNEY Kate Barnard and Social Reform, 1875-1930 Lynn Musslewhite and Suzanne Jones Crawford University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2003. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 231 pp. $34.95 cloth.

In the early twentieth century, when women across the nation broke new ground both personally and politically through work in numerous reform efforts, Oklahoma boasted one of the most path-breaking female reformers of them all-Kate Barnard, the first woman elected to statewide office. One Woman's Political Journey traces Barnard's seven-year career as director of the Oklahoma Department of Charities and Corrections.

Barnard was thirty-two when she ran for office in 1907 in the State of Oklahoma's first election. An energetic, diminutive Democrat, she embraced the Progressive ideology sweeping the country-a belief in moral solutions to social problems and the conviction that government could legislate morality.

Like many public figures, Barnard was more comfortable with general notions of "the people" than with actual relationships. The product of a lonely and rootless childhood, she seems always to have hungered for public recognition and apparently never considered marriage. As a young woman, she aimed at the two careers open to women, teaching and secretarial work, but realized that reform carried more tangible rewards. Using the determination and chutzpah that characterized her career, she made herself into a formidable force in Oklahoma, first as the head of a volunteer organization and then as a canny politician who understood the power of media to sway popular opinion.

In her first term as agency director, Barnard lobbied successfully for legislation to regulate child labor, require school attendance, and enact a three-tiered prison system that separated youthful and more hardened offenders. She also traveled widely, accepting lecture engagements from all corners of the country. By 1912, however, Oklahoma politicians were less reform-minded, and Barnard learned that getting legislation enacted was much easier than forcing bureaucrats to implement reforms.

Barnard's career foundered on such efforts. Her ultimate downfall came in her unrelenting, and unsuccessful, effort to rein in guardians who plundered the estates of "orphan" Indian children. Attacked on all sides, her health broken, she left public life in 1915. A solitary woman, estranged from her family, she spent the last years of her life in an Oklahoma City hotel where she died a recluse in 1930.

Barnard differed from other women activists of her time. She distanced herself from women's groups and issues, believing that such associations would stymie her efforts to compete with men on their turf. This approach may have opened doors, but it ultimately doomed her career, for when she experienced inevitable setbacks, she had no network of sympathetic allies. Instead, she stood alone, open to attack from powerful enemies eager to derail her agenda.Her life offers a window to a time when women had no road maps to show them how to create individual paths in life; she had to construct her own. If she failed to get all the way home, at least she had the courage to make the journey.

Kathleen Cairns

California State University, Sacramento

Copyright Montana Historical Society Summer 2004
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