Kansas: An Accidental Election with Sharon McMahon

The Preamble

Sharon McMahon

Education, History

4.9 • 15.3K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2021

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this solo episode, Sharon tells the story of Susanna Madora Salter, who accidentally became the first female mayor ever elected. What started as a ploy to throw off the mayoral election by a group of men in her small Kansas town quickly turned into a historical moment. At this time, candidates could create their own ballots and campaign for votes, so Susanna had no idea that she was even on the ballot during the election. In this episode, Sharon shares facts about voting during the latter half of the 1800s and how the first female mayor came to be, even though it was meant to be a joke.

For more information on this episode including all resources and links discussed go to https://www.sharonmcmahon.com/podcast

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey friends, welcome. Always so happy to have you here. Today we are
0:07.2	chatting about a story from the state of Kansas that I just find amusing and
0:12.0	inspiring and I really think you're going to as well. This is one of those
0:16.4	stories where you're like, what? How did that happen? Well I'm going to tell you. So let's dive in to the story of the first female
0:27.9	mayor ever elected and she was elected by accident.
0:34.0	This is the story of Susanna Salter.
0:37.0	I'm Sharon McMahon.
0:39.0	And welcome to the Sharon Says So Podcast
0:42.0	Susanna Madora. Sharon Says So, so, Podcast.
0:46.0	Susanna Madora Salter, she kind of went by the nickname Dora,
0:49.0	was born in the 1860s,
0:51.0	and when she was around 12 her family moved to Kansas near the Silver Lake area.
0:58.8	Her family owned a large farm there and Dora was extremely bright. She went to high school, she took college
1:09.6	classes in high school so that by the time she was done with high school she was admitted
1:15.0	to college as a sophomore. This is in the 1870s. So very very very bright woman. Sadly, six weeks before she was to graduate from college, she got
1:28.9	very sick and had to leave college and was not able to graduate.
1:33.8	But the good news is, while she was there,
1:37.5	she did obtain an MRS degree,
1:48.3	which she used to be sort of a joke of, you know, why would a woman go to college to get an MRS degree to become a Mrs. to meet a husband. And she did meet a husband. She met
1:57.1	somebody named Louis Salter and they got married and had a baby. And in the early 1880s they moved to Argonia Kansas which was sort of a
2:09.6	little bit more of an up-and-coming area and had not been incorporated as a city
2:13.7	yet but her husband Lewis got a job managing a hardware store while he was
	...

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