By Mark Rhoads
Illinois was the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. The amendment guaranteed the right of women to vote in all elections. Mrs. Lottie Homan O'Neill, a Republican from Downers Grove, was the first woman elected to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1922. In 1923 Winnifred Sprague Mason Huck won a special election to fill the Congressional seat of her late father but served only briefly.
With the exception of one term, Lottie O'Neill served continuously in the House until 1950 when she became the first woman ever elected to the Illinois State Senate. The election of women candidates to state legislatures and Congress was a relatively rare event until the early 1970s. U.S. Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) was the first woman to mount a serious bid for a major party presidential nomination in 1964. But since 1971, the average number of women serving in state legislatures has increased four times so that today women account for about 23 percent of the members of state legislatures and women also hold about 15 percent of the seats in both houses of Congress.
Lottie was born Nov. 7, 1878 in the very small town of Barry, located in west central Illinois in Pike County not far from the Mississippi River. She persued a business education and moved to Chicago to find work. She married William O'Neill in 1904. He was an Irish immigrant by way of Australia. Lottie's 1920s-era district ran from Elgin to the Indiana line in Kane, DuPage and Will Counties. She had a bruising primary election to compete for the Republican nomination for the state senate in 1930 against State. Sen. Richard A. Barr of Joliet. That was the only election that Lottie lost and the famous fight was talked about in DuPage County for the next thirty years until Lottie retired after not running in the election of 1962. At that time, she was the longest continuously serving elected woman official in the country.
Reporters and colleagues in both parties were uniformly fond of Lottie and often praised her legislative skills and referred to her as "the conscience of the Senate." Over nearly forty years she adopted a variety of positions that might today be considered a mixture of liberal and conservative stands. Her inspiration to run for office in 1922 came from Montana Congressman Jeanette Rankin, the only Member of Congress to vote against the Declaration of War in both World Wars. Lottie was a strong advocate for public schools and for civil rights. But by the late 1950s she also was a strong critic of the UN, of excessive state and federal spending and regulations, and backed conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater for the 1964 presidential nomination instead of Sen. Smith of Maine. She bucked the party leaders to become a delegate to the 1956 Republican Naitonal Convention and made the leaders more uncomfortable when she demanded that President Eisenhower make a full disclosure on the details of his 1955 heart attack before he was re-nominated for a second term.
After her retirement from the Illinois State Senate in 1963, Lottie told friends she did not want the rumored tribute of a statue dedicated to her in the rotunda of the State Capitol Building in Springfield. When asked why not, she made a funny reference to the bitter primary campaign of 1930, "Because I don't want to face that scoundrel Dick Barr for all eternity across the rotuna." Lottie had other honors such as a school being named after her in Downers Grove and she died in 1967 at the age of 88. In 1976, the state did erect a statue to honor Lottie as the first woman lawmaker. You guessed it, the statue faces one of her political rival State Sen. Richard Barr across the rotunda. To find out more about the life of Lottie Holman O'Neill, look to her page on the web site of Illinois Periodicals Online.
