Esther Hobart Morris: The Unembellished Story of the Nation’s First Female Judge

Product Description

2019 Sarton Women’s Book Award Nonfiction Category Shortlist
All women today reap the benefit of that winter day in 1870 when Esther Hobart Morris gathered her courage and walked down the South Pass City street to the saloon where she applied to be justice of the peace.
She became the first woman judge in the nation and the face of the Woman Suffrage movement in the United States. She struck the first resounding crack into the glass ceiling that for centuries had been keeping women in their place by denying them the right to hold public office and to vote.
How did Esther go from being the wife of a speculator in a rowdy mining town in Wyoming Territory to being the honored guest at a white glove reception at the 1872 American Suffrage Association Convention in San Francisco? What inspired newspapers from Maine to the Territory of Hawaii to call her the mother of Woman Suffrage?
This book examines the life of Esther Morris and clarifies her contributions to women s rights. Author Cummings also counters the myths that have grown around Esther, her tea party, and her participation in the legislation which allowed women to vote in Wyoming fifty years before the Nineteenth Amendment gave other U.S. women suffrage.
Esther’s own words from archived family correspondence plus Cummings s years of research bring life to this notable and complex figure.

Review

Esther Morris has never had a good biography and deserves one. Kathryn Swim Cummings’s Esther Hobart Morris: The Unembellished Story of the Nation’s First Female Judge fills the bill, and more….. Cummings’s biography situates Morris s personal life amid the events of America s epic mid-nineteenth century national history: the Women s Rights Movement, the Civil War, and westward expansion, as well as the growth and politics of Wyoming Territory. –Will Bagley

Kathryn Swim Cummings has written the first comprehensive biography of Mrs. Morris, adding substantially to our understanding of this complex historic figure. Through the generous use of primary sources, she enables Esther and others to speak to us today. –Michael A. Massie