Wisconsin

Wisconsin voters elected three women to the legislature in 1924 – all of them unmarried schoolteachers.  More significantly, the three included the nation’s first legislative father/daughter team.

Mildred Barber (1902-1976)

    Born to Dr. Joseph and Ella Barber in Greenwood, a town in central Wisconsin, young Mildred grew up around politics because her father was a state senator.  After teaching two years in rural Marathon County, she became her father’s housekeeper at the state capital of Madison.  A progressive Republican, she was elected secretary of the state platform committee, and friends soon persuaded her to run for the Wisconsin Assembly.  After a vigorous campaign, she won her race by appealing to the party’s liberal wing.  Mildred Barber and Joseph Barber thus became the nation’s first father/daughter legislative team.

    Her legislative interests initially tracked those of her physician father, including the distribution of iodine to children who lived in areas where that was naturally deficient.  As she grew into her own person, though, focus broadened to other issues, including especially prison reform.  

    Representative Barber made the mistake of not campaigning hard enough in 1926 and lost her reelection.  She returned to teaching prior to marrying Otto Abel in 1928.  They had one son, and she did not return to public office.   Mildred Barber Abel died on September 29, 1976, and was buried in Wausau’s Pine Grove Cemetery.

Hellen M. Brooks (1862-?)

    Born just fourteen years after statehood, Hellen Brooks was the oldest of the three Wisconsin women elected to the legislature in 1924.  She was born in Fulton and attended school in Milton, a country town southwest of Wisconsin’s capital of Madison.  She graduated from Milwaukee Normal School, as teacher-training institutions then were called, and worked as a teacher for the next twenty years.  Finally rising to principal at the elementary-school level, she also chaired the local chapter of the Red Cross and served on the area’s Liberty Loan Committee during World War I.  

    Her teaching career had taken her north to Waushara County by 1924, when voters there elected Brooks, a Republican, to the State Assembly.  Her constituency was near Ripon, where Wisconsin Republicans built a national movement that attempted to liberalize their party.  They were responding to the success of the Progressive Party’s Robert LaFollette, who was a popular governor and US senator; his wife, Belle Case LaFollette, was the most active political wife in the movement for women’s right to vote. She lobbied in both Washington and Madison, and it was largely because of her leadership that Wisconsin was the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment.

Helen F. Thompson (1870-?)

    Helen Thompson was born in Manawa.  After a career as a teacher, she ran a hotel and was elected to the Park Falls School Board for more than a dozen years. Her civic involvement included a position as president of the Red Cross during World War I.

    In 1924, Thompson was one of the first three women elected to the Wisconsin State Legislature in 1924 and was reelected in 1926. . A Republican like most Wisconsinites, she represented Price County, a forested area south of Lake Superior.