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1869 – 1953
Alice Mannering (born Alice Mae Mandeville, 1869; died 1953): a trained nurse and, by 1917, president of the St. Joseph County Branch of Equal Suffrage. On 15 July 1917 the Socialist Party of South Bend nominated her, unanimously, for mayor of the city: the first woman candidate for the office of mayor in the state of Indiana, in the News-Times’s own contemporary description and in the scholarly record since. The front page that announced her asked the question her candidacy posed the city — “South Bend bossed by a woman?” — and then printed her platform entire: a free city dispensary where the poor could obtain medicine without charge; municipal ownership of all public utilities; a municipal milk dairy; a municipal coal yard and a municipally owned coal mine; medical inspection of schools; a housing ordinance to provide every family sunlight and fresh air; and school books sold at cost in every school building. She declared herself “the people’s servant — not their boss or dictator.” The campaign ran three and a half months under the era’s sanctioned argument of “municipal housekeeping.” Her full record — the campaign’s course and end, and the suffrage organization she led — stands in this history’s Women’s History record.
Sources:
- The Women’s History record of this history — the nomination of 15 July 1917, the platform as the News-Times printed it, and the campaign’s course
- South Bend News-Times, 1917 — the candidacy as the state’s first woman candidate for mayor, in the paper’s contemporary description