Kate Barnard

• Kate Barnard
• Born: May 23, 1875
• Died: February 23, 1930

Midwestern social reformer, was born the only child of John P. Barnard and Rachel (Shiell) Barnard of Geneva, Nebraska. When Kate Barnard was eighteen months old, her mother died and her father took her to Kansas to be cared for by relatives. When Indian Territory in Oklahoma was opened for white settlement in 1889, her father, a lawyer and surveyor of Irish descent, moved to this new frontier. Kate joined him, and was sent to St. Joseph’s parochial school in Oklahoma City. After graduation, she was a teacher for three years in rural public schools. After taking a short business course, she began to work as a stenographer in Oklahoma City. Later she was chosen as clerk to the Democratic minority of the territorial legislature, where she became absorbed with politics and made valuable political friendships.

While doing clerical and public relations work for the Oklahoma Commission at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, she observed the unsettling social effects of industrialization in St. Louis and returned home persuaded that Oklahoma must act to deal with urban poverty. She undertook to write a number of letters to The Daily Oklahoman, the local paper, depicting the problems of the city’s poor. The graphic letters were supported by Roy Stafford, the paper’s editor, who helped see that they received much attention. Subsequently, in December 1905, she was named matron of the Provident Association of Oklahoma City, a charitable organization. At about the same time she began a campaign to unionize the city’s jobless under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).

Stafford, her chief backer at this point, dispatched Barnard to eastern cities to interview leading social reformers and to obtain their endorsement of social reform legislation in Oklahoma. She believed at this time that higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions could help solve the poverty problem.

Barnard attracted additional attention at the so-called “Shawnee Convention”—a meeting attended by delegates from the Oklahoma Farmers Union, the Twin-Territorial Federation of Labor, and the four railway brotherhoods. Its purpose was to draft proposals for the upcoming state constitutional convention. Barnard was present as an AFL delegate. She suggested planks on compulsory education and the abolition of child labor, and these were accepted by the constitutional convention as well as a plan for an elective Commissioner of Charities and Corrections, referring to it as “his or her office.”

Although unable to vote, Barnard ran as a Democrat for that post in a vigorous campaign. A small, attractive person with a powerful and earnest voice, she could sway an audience. The combination of her style and her commitment to reform won her the office in the 1907 election. She served two terms, being reelected in 1910.

In this period Barnard wrote the implementing legislation for the ban on child labor in the Oklahoma constitution. She won passage of a law that required the state to support widows living on their children’s wages, in order to encourage compulsory education. Additionally, she backed bills banning unsafe working conditions and facilitating unionization by preventing blacklisting.

Her successes were traceable to her political skills. She prevailed on experts to draft bills that were then supported by the labor and farmer groups she had worked with at the constitutional convention and finally offered to the legislature. Simultaneously, she gave speeches, rallying public support for the proposed legislation.

As commissioner she also introduced regulations for improving the treatment of prisoners, separating first offenders from repeaters and ending the system of contracting Oklahoma prisoners to Kansas jails. Her exposure of abuses led Oklahoma to build its own prison system and brought reforms in Kansas prisons as well. She also changed the treatment of mental patients by establishing separate facilities for the mentally ill and the feebleminded.

But when she began investigating the defrauding of Indian minors by their white guardians, her political friends in the legislature deserted her. In 1912, a lawyer from her office recovered $949,390 for 1,361 children. The legislature pared her budget and staff, and, feeling a tide of opposition, she decided not to seek reelection in 1914. She was proud in her role as the first woman in the United States to win state elective office.

When Bernard left office, she was asked to work as a Washington, D.C., lobbyist for labor groups, but she chose instead to leave public service. She began to manage real estate left her by her father. However, she suffered from hay fever and an unspecified skin disease, and so spent much time in hospitals and clinics. She died of unrecorded causes at the age of fifty-four in her Oklahoma City hotel room. She is buried in the city’s Rosehill Cemetery. Though an elected official, Kate Barnard never supported woman suffrage, partly because her father opposed the idea and partly because she felt that male politicians and voters had often done as she wanted, whether she could vote or not. So long as her idealism meshed with the interests of politically important groups, she was an effective leader, bringing into Oklahoma progressive reform programs fashioned in the East. At the height of the progressive era she enjoyed a national reputation and contributed substantial reforms to her state.

The unpublished material about Kate Barnard is extensive. It is located in the Oklahoma state archives in Oklahoma City; in the personal collection of Col. Hobart Huson of Rufugio, Texas; at the University of Oklahoma in the collection of Edith Johnson; and in the personal collection of Mrs. Polly Jamerson of Columbus Ohio and Washington, D.C. Additional material can be found in the territorial and state records of Oklahoma: the published governors’ reports of the territory, the journal of the Constitutional Convention, the journals of the Oklahoma house and senate, and Kate Barnard’s reports as Commissioner of Charities and Corrections. Additional information is in the files of The Daily Oklahoman, The Oklahoma City Times, The Guthrie Daily Leader and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Kate Barnard wrote on social reform in The Independent, November 28, 1907; The Survey, October 2, 1909 and November 7, 1914; and Good Housekeeping, November 1912. Among biographical sources are Charities and the Commons, July 6, 1907; The Daily Oklahoman, February 24, 1930; J. Leavitt, “The Man in the Cage,” The American Magazine, March 1912; A. J. McKelway, “Kate,” The American Magazine, October 1908; J. B. Thoburn, A Standard History of Oklahoma, vol. 3 (1916). See also Notable American Women (1971); Who Was Who in America with World Notables (1976); and The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 15 (1916).