By Charles Pederson
Welcome to Part 1 of a three-part story about two remarkable county women, Cora McQuestion and Elizabeth Ries. They won high municipal office only a few short years after women could legally vote in the United States.
The story of two female Scott County politicians is in some ways unremarkable; many women take part in politics. But in other ways, Prior Lake mayor Cora McQuestion and Shakopee mayor Elizabeth Ries, both elected in the mid-1920s, were trailblazing outliers, given that they were among a handful of female U.S. mayors elected only a few years after women fought for and, in 1920, won the right to vote in national elections.
A Long Struggle
Some individual states had already introduced women’s suffrage, or the right to vote. For example, Wyoming had introduced female suffrage in 1869 and allowed women to vote for president in 1892.
Locally, the first steps toward female suffrage in Minnesota occurred in 1875. That year the Minnesota constitution was amended to allow women to vote in school board elections. In 1881 and the decades that followed, women’s suffrage groups tried but failed numerous times to amend the Minnesota constitution to allow women to vote in a presidential election.
As a federal matter, though, women began seriously to advocate for the vote long before the U.S. Civil War, as early as the 1840s. However, the first U.S. Constitutional amendment was not introduced in Congress until 1878. Another 40 years passed before Congress in August 1920 passed, and the states ratified, the 19th Amendment (women’s suffrage), making it part of the Constitution. About 26 million adult women became eligible to vote in the presidential election of November 1920.
The 19th Amendment emboldened women in Minnesota to enter political life themselves. Moreover, the 1920s were a good decade generally for female mayors in Minnesota. Lillian Cox Gault, of Saint Peter, became the state’s first female mayor, elected in 1921, the very next year after women’s suffrage was legal. She boldly stated, “I see no reason any woman should not enter politics.” Cora McQuestion and Elizabeth Ries soon followed Gault’s path.
Cora McQuestion
Among other things, the 1920s were known for bank robbers. (See the dramatic article, “35-Day Crime Spree,” Part 1 and Part 2, in the Scott County Historical Society blog.) On a summer night in 1922, Cora McQuestion, age 40, was thrust into the limelight. Bank robbers tried to break into a Prior Lake bank that night. Unfortunately for them, McQuestion lived across the street and happened to see the men. “She got the [family] shotgun and fired a volley with the result that the criminals fled,” stated the Jordan Independent. McQuestion was recognized with a citation and “substantial reward from the [Minnesota] Bankers Protective Association.”
McQuestion was born and raised in rural Prior Lake, where she “grew to charming womanhood in the community of her birth,” according to the Independent. She married and raised a daughter. She apparently had few ambitions beyond that. Yet the political bug bit McQuestion, just in time for the 1926 election.
Cora McQuestion and daughter, Cecelia. Courtesy of Scott County Historical Society.
In her first taste of politics, McQuestion ran against local man Ed Muelkam. The Independent reported that “the vote was very large, probably the heaviest the village ever had.” She soundly defeated her male opponent, in this case by 29 votes. The Minneapolis Journal reported that “her victory was quite as decisive as the affray with the bandits.”
Despite the gains women had made with the vote, as proven by McQuestion’s election, change was not universal. An article in the Jordan Independent from March 11, 1926, for example, omitted McQuestion’s first name, Cora, in favor of her husband’s, James, as was the custom: “The vote on mayor . . . Tuesday was, Mrs. James McQueseion [sic] 82, Ed Muelken [sic] 53.”
Unsurprisingly, given her penchant to use weaponry, McQuestion’s political platform endorsed stronger law enforcement. And having run on law and order, McQuestion oversaw the hiring of Prior Lake’s first police officer.
McQuestion’s life after she left office is full of mystery. Obviously, however, she continued in her community’s respect. The Jordan Independent ran an obituary in mid-December 1942. It extolled McQuestion as “a woman of strong mind and forthrightness” who took a “deep interest in public affairs, was for a term some years ago elected as Mayor of Prior Lake Village, one of the few women-mayors in the history of the state.”
This concludes Part 1 of our three-part article, focusing on Cora McQuestion and her political trajectory. Next week, Part 2 picks up the thread by following the rise of Elizabeth Ries, a Shakopee resident who broke the glass ceiling at about the same time as McQuestion.
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