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Nellie Tayloe Ross
Getting in the shuffle and suddenly being the drawn card will make a game pretty personal. That appears to be what happened to Nellie Tayloe Ross when a turn of events had her basically mandated to take over the Governorship of Wyoming, when her husband, former Governor William Bradford Ross, died two years into the term in 1924.
Perhaps it’s Nellie Ross’ humble upbringing, when it comes to leadership, that is most remarkable. Not sent for official schooling by her well-to-do Southern family, she earned a certificate to teach kindergarten, and was more or less raised to be married off as a wife and mother. She’s reported to have described her role this way: “like the usual loyal wife, I found my absorbing interest in my husband’s career… we stood shoulder to shoulder every step of the way.”
Shaped by circumstance and time as much as by her sense of independence, she found herself walking and bridging the lines of a still gender-polarized society. It’s fascinating to ponder the questions, the dilemmas that must have gone through her mind as she took on a role as a model to women while working in a realm dominated almost exclusively by men. To petticoat or not to petticoat should seem like a trite questions, but it was at the yolk of the trails she blazed, the policy she came to be known for.
Ross refused to campaign, and when a successor was needed for governor, the government took her “silence for acquiesce,” according to Discovering U.S. History. The question as to whether it was the rigor of the process that she had experienced when her husband had been on the road, or the fact that she didn’t technically endorse her own candidacy, is left up to analysis. And she was also elected by popular opinion by a margin of some 8,000 votes. In her “Address to Women Voters” in NTR Papers, she’s recorded as saying: “in view of these facts, it would scarcely become us as women to present my candidacy as a demand for recognition which had heretofore been resisted.”
Her network of support included the men who powerfully endorsed her candidacy as well as Wyoming woman, one who supposedly corresponded with Ross in these words: “Personally, I am an ardent feminist, and most earnestly believe that women can perform, as well as men, any task that comes to their hands, so do not let any obsolete traditions or doubts disturb your confidence.”
Newspapers of the time report that some of her other responsibilities included remaining feminine, and upholding womanly virtues while being strong, brave, decisive, and courageous. She avoided the labels and trappings of feminism while staunchly promoting motherhood (she herself birthed four children). She came to be known as saying that sex is irrelevant in politics, that it is the process and the outcomes that count.
And with that we look at Ross’ initiatives. She stood up to federal government on issues of land and water allocation, she “called for reductions in both state expenditures and taxes; for state assistance to the economically depressed agricultural industry; and for banking reform, noting the number of recently failed banks. She championed protective legislation for miners and for women and children, and she requested unsuccessfully that Wyoming ratify the federal amendment prohibiting child labor.” (Discovering US History: Gale; Cengage Learning). Then in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Ross as director of the United States Mint.
Without a doubt, Ross is a woman who acquired all of her learning from the experience of doing. That was her time, that was her place.
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