Ella J. Knowles Haskell
Ella J. Knowles Haskell (1860-1911) was the first female lawyer in Montana and the first female candidate for state attorney general in the United States.
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[edit] Biography
Ella Knowles was born in Northwood, New Hampshire. In 1884 she graduated with honors from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, one of the few co-educational colleges in the Northeast at that time. She began to read the law in New Hampshire, but then moved to the Montana Territory to improve her health.
In Montana, Knowles successfully lobbied the legislature to permit women to be allowed to practice law, and she was admitted to the bar in 1888 after reading law in the Helena office of Joseph Kinsley. In 1889 Knowles was the first woman allowed to practice law in Montana and then she became a partner with Kinsley. She also became the state's first woman notary public. In 1892, 22 years before Montana women received the right to vote, Knowles ran for state Attorney General after being nominated by the Populist Party, becoming the first woman in the nation to run for that office. Although she narrowly lost the election, she was nominated to be Assistant Attorney General by the victor, Henri Haskell, a Republican. Haskell and Knowles later married.
In 1896 Haskell became the first Montana woman to be elected to a political convention (Populist). Throughout her time in Montana, Haskell remained active in the women's suffrage movement. In 1902, Haskell divorced her husband, and she then moved to Butte, Montana where she became a very successful attorney for various mining interests. She went on to argue and win cases before the United States Circuit Court and the United States Supreme Court. Haskell died in Butte in 1911.
[edit] Legacy
Knowles Hall at the University of Montana at Missoula is named after this pioneer of equal rights for women in Montana
[edit] See also
[edit] References and external links
- Montana Capitol Display
- Shirley, Gayle C., More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Montana Women, (Helena, Montana: Falcon Publishing Inc., 1995).
- New Hampshire site
