Ella Knowles Haskell

• Ella Knowles Haskell
• Born: July 31, 1860
• Died: January 27, 1911

Populist and feminist, was born in Northwood Ridge, New Hampshire, to David Knowles and Louisa (Bigelow) Knowles. After graduating from the local seminary she attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, where she encountered considerable prejudice against women but nevertheless won honors in debate, oratory, and journalism. She was graduated in 1884 and read law in Manchester, New Hampshire, for a time before deciding to go west to improve her health. She taught school in Salt Lake City and in Helena, Montana, where she declined the post of principal to continue her study of law. Since Montana had no provision for admitting women to the bar she applied to the territorial legislature and was admitted to the bar in December 1889—the year in which Montana became a state—after the first session of the state legislature had passed a bill allowing women to practice law.

As an attorney in Butte, Ella Knowles not only built up a successful practice but also accepted a number of charity cases and gained a reputation as a staunch foe of injustice. Indeed, she became known beyond Montana as the “Portia of the West.” In 1892 she was the unanimously chosen nominee of the Populist state convention for the office of attorney general. In the campaign she addressed more than eighty audiences and organized branches of the Populist party in fourteen counties. In a total vote of only 50,000 she led the ticket with 5,000 votes; the race for attorney general was so close that it tcok three weeks to determine the result.

It was the outlying districts, in which she was not known, that carried the state for her Republican opponent, Henri J. Haskell. He appointed her assistant attorney general in charge of the state’s legal work relating to public lands, and in this capacity she made good Montana’s claim to school lands valued at $200,000. Ella Knowles and Henri Haskell were married in San Francisco on May 23, 1895.

In 1896 Ella Knowles Haskell was a delegate from Lewis and Clark County to the Populist state convention, at which she was instrumental in getting a woman suffrage plank adopted after a hard floor fight. She was also a delegate to the national convention in St. Louis; she was named national committeewoman from Montana. She served from 1896 to 1900, speaking frequently and vigorously for William Jennings Bryan. She also supported Bryan when he ran as a Democrat in 1900.

During the same period Haskell devoted much of her time to the fight for woman suffrage. She became the second president of the Montana branch of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1896, and a year later, as a member of the association’s state central committee, she directed a systematic attempt to get a woman suffrage amendment through the state legislature. A previous attempt had failed shortly after statehood was attained. With a corps of assistants from the suffrage association, she invaded the legislative halls, distributing pamphlets and a petition signed by 3,000 citizens. The attempt failed narrowly in the state house and no action was taken in the senate.

Haskell was much in demand as a speaker for the suffrage cause, and she addressed the convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association several times. She spoke on the topic “The Environment of Woman as Related to Her Progress” in 1896, reviewing the legal obstacles of previous ages and delineating the advances made by women after achieving only partial freedom. To the same body in 1898 she spoke on the topic “Women in the Legal Profession,” pointing to the comparatively large proportion of female lawyers in the Far West. She helped to organize suffrage groups in North Dakota and other western states, and, as an active clubwoman, participated in the Montana Women’s Relief Corps, which had been founded by a group of clubs affiliated with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. The Relief Corps performed an educational function in the cause of suffrage comparable to the contribution made to the temperance movement by the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Soon after the turn of the century Haskell divorced her husband. She invested in mineral properties, gained a reputation as a mining expert, and became a member of the executive committee of the International Mining Congress. She also served as secretary-treasurer of the Rocky Mountain Lumber Company, of Helena.

Like many other suffrage workers, Ella Haskell was far from the popular stereotype of the suffragist. She was fond of clothes and travel as well as of music and art, and she was an ardent theosophist. She died in Butte at the age of fifty.

Ella Haskell’s political career is detailed in Montana newspapers of the period. Biographical data appear in Progressive Men of Montana (n.d.) and the General Catalogue of Bates College Alumni (1915). S. B. Anthony and I. H. Harper, eds.. History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (1900; reprint 1967), has an account of her suffrage work. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1932).