Alice Mannering: three and a half months a candidate for mayor

1869 – 1953

Alice Mannering (born Alice Mae Mandeville, 1869; died 1953): a trained nurse — her party's account credited her experience "in a great many of the leading hospitals in the country" — 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, in her acceptance, "the people's servant — not their boss or dictator," and for "the broad principles of Socialism — the greatest good to the greatest number of people." Her party stated its ground plainly: "Believing in the equal right of [women] to hold office and of their ability to properly administer the duties of office, we have placed at the head of our ticket such a person."

The campaign's course and end: the candidacy ran under the era's sanctioned argument — "municipal housekeeping," the claim that a city was enlarged housekeeping and women its natural managers — and the press covered her in its terms: J. Frank McClave, the Socialist who would replace her, praised her as "refined, cultured, a mother, a home-lover, and above all, sincere in her desire to help her fellow beings," and "a most convincing argument that a woman may desire to vote and still live, eat, sleep, walk and talk like a human being." The newspapers of the campaign did not print what the public record holds: that she was in her second marriage, to James Mannering, married in St. Joseph County in 1915, with a daughter of her first marriage in the household. In late October 1917 the Indiana Supreme Court struck the partial-suffrage act; Mannering was disqualified, and the party announced her withdrawal on 28 October, in an advertisement that argued the nomination itself had "demonstrated in the most convincing way possible that women should have an active part in governmental management." McClave took her place and polled 519 votes — the highest vote any Socialist candidate had received in South Bend to that day — in an election the Republican, Dr. Franklin R. Carson, won by 52 votes. She died in 1953 and is buried in Highland Cemetery in South Bend. Her great-granddaughter Jeanne Watson, in an oral history taken in 2019, remembered the family's inheritance of the run rather than its ending: "I wouldn't not vote if they had to take me there on a gurney." Mannering stands in no People or Famous People entry of this build; the omission is flagged for assembly.

Sources:

1. Jamie Wagman, "'South Bend Bossed by a Woman?'" Indiana Magazine of History 118 (December 2022), from the South Bend News-Times of 15 July, 22 July, 7 October, 14 October, and 28 October 1917 and the Rushville Republican of 24 July 1917 — the unanimous nomination and the "first woman candidate for mayor in the state of Indiana," the platform entire, the party's equal-rights statement, McClave's praise, the withdrawal advertisement, McClave's 519 votes and Carson's 52-vote margin, the 1915 marriage record and the 1920 census household, the 1953 death and Highland Cemetery burial, and the Watson oral history (Civil Rights Heritage Center, 2019).