The Original Girl-Mayor
Before Americans knew Hillary Clinton or even Eleanor Roosevelt, they knew Amy Kaukonen, the so-called “Girl-Mayor,” pride of Fairport, Ohio and minor media phenomenon.
Fairport citizens elected Kaukonen mayor in 1922, just two years after women received the right to vote. Reports of Kaukoken's age varied widely, with many exaggerating her youth, but she was likely in her late 20s when she became mayor.
The election of one of the United States’ first female mayors—and such a young woman, no less—triggered a flood of national media attention. Newspapers around the country praised her appearance, calling out her “slim figure,” “stylish haircut,” and “feminine clothing” and contrasting her against the “Amazonian” feminists “the popular imagination conjures up.” President Warren G. Harding sent her a note of congratulations along with two dogs for protection. But the media also praised her tenacity in pursuing the goal of a “dry” town; the Atlanta Constitution proclaimed her the “blonde terror of the bootleggers.”
Kaukonen was a remarkably accomplished woman even before her tenure as mayor, graduating with one of the first classes of female physicians from the Women’s Medical College at Philadelphia. She had extensive training in chemistry, and reportedly took all the alcohol she seized in raids back to her own laboratories for analysis. However, the media remained obsessed with one central question—how could someone so young, so beautiful, so female, govern a town? As one reporter mused:
“(a) woman mayor in any place is a novelty. But a woman mayor who has never been a suffragette, who has never read law, who has never fought for any pet bill, never made a single soap-box or street-corner speech of any kind, but has danced, played her phonograph, romped about with her dog, shopped for alluring feminine clothes, combed her honey-colored hair according to the latest mode…makes the novelty deepen until everybody within a thousand-mile radius simply has to say, ‘How come?’ and ‘What’s up?’”
Mayor Amy was just one of a wave of women elected mayor in towns across the United States in the three years following the passage of the 19th Amendment. While it’s difficult to say for certain exactly how many women became mayor—especially considering that many women were running very small, remote towns—newspapers point to at least 21 white female leaders serving in 1921-1923. (The U.S. wouldn’t see an African-American woman mayor until the 1970s.) While these women were not the first female mayors to be elected, an honor that belongs to Susanna Mador Salter, elected in 1887 as part of a sexist prank, they marked the first time women candidates would be elected in significant numbers. In many cases, these were the first female political leaders elected into office with the help of women voters.