Ancestors & Family

Ella Louise Knowles

1869-1911 Lawyer, Suffragist, and Politician
black and white image of Ella Knowles
New Hampshire Women: A Collection of Portraits

In researching my Pillsbury ancestry, I came across the remarkable Ella Louise Knowles. New Hampshire born and bred, she lived a life of “firsts” in pursuit of a career in the law, and equal opportunity for women in work, politics, and choice of vocation.

Moving from her childhood home to a new life in Montana, Ella became the first woman to address a state legislature, to receive a nomination for statewide office, and to appear before a federal agency (the Department of Interior) as the legal representative of a sovereign state. Ella would also appear on the ballot in Montana for state office, even though women in Montana had yet to gain the right to vote.

Ella Louisa Knowles was born in 1860, in the small town of North Bridgewater, New Hampshire. She was the daughter of David and Louisa Knowles, and granddaughter of both Eliza Smart Pillsbury, of Northwood, and Sally Pillsbury, of Bridgewater.

Education

As a spirited young girl seeking knowledge and advancement, Ella was not satisfied with the education available to her, and enrolled in classes in a nearby seminary. This was enough to qualify her as a teacher and earn the means to put herself through college.

In 1884, Ella graduated magna cum laude from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, one of the earliest in New England to go coed. During her college days, she was noted for her strength as a public speaker and her dramatic roles in amateur theatrical organizations.

At Bates, Ella became the first woman to serve on its debating team, the first female editor of the school magazine, and first to win the prestigious Sophomore Championship Debate, arguing such topics as “was Hamilton’s theory of government superior to that of Jefferson.”

Upon graduation, she bypassed traditional jobs open to women to pursue her intent to become a lawyer.

Lacking the option of law school, like other aspiring lawyers, she instead apprenticed in a law office, in her case landing a position in Manchester, New Hampshire, with the esteemed judge and future U.S. Senator Henry Burnham.

West to Montana

After suffering a bout of tuberculosis, her doctor and friends encouraged her to go west for a better climate and a change of scenery.

Traveling on her own, Ella’s first stop was Iowa, where she taught for a year in the state’s teacher training school. From there she pushed further west, first teaching in Salt Lake City and then, enamored by the western plains and Rocky Mountains, north to the growing gold town of Helena, Montana.

There Ella accepted a job at a school where she taught for a year before another school recruited her to be their principal.

To the amazement of her friends and contrary to their advice, Ella gave up the security of this position to resume her pursuit to be a lawyer. At this point, she found a farther reaching apprenticeship with the office of attorney Joseph Kinsley, to extend her law studies researching and preparing cases for Kinsley to litigate.

Every step was a ladder. As she wrote in the Anaconda Standard, considered by historians and journalists alike as the icon of Montana newspapers, “No one believed that I would ever practice. They all thought my ambition was a joke, a thing to laugh at, and I was made all manner of fun of.”

Blazing the Trail for Women and the Law

As a lawyer, Ella faced a big legal problem of her own. Women were not permitted to practice in the Montana courts. Undeterred and with support from Kinsley, Ella took it upon herself to lobby the legislature for a bill to allow women to sit for the bar exam and become lawyers. In the process, she was given an opportunity to address the entire assembly. Her bill passed the same year Montana gained statehood, in l889.

Ella became the first woman to get admitted to the state bar and practice law in Montana. She then formed a law partnership with the attorney she had apprenticed with, joining him to create a successful business.

I wasn’t long after that Ella became the first woman in Montana to be admitted to practice before the U.S. District Court. She was also the first woman to plead a case before the Circuit Court and the first woman to argue a case before the Montana State Supreme Court.

Law and Politics

In the practice of law, Ella became a major political figure in Montana. She eventually joined the Populist Party, a coalition of agrarian reformers in the Midwest that advocated a wide range of economic and political legislation in the face of the economic disparities of the late 19th century.

The Populist Party championed policies such as the graduated income tax, government ownership of the railroads, the direct election of U.S. senators, and other measures designed to strengthen political democracy and better represent the interests of farmers and laborers.

Running for Statewide Office

In 1892, Knowles won the nomination of the Populist Party as its candidate for State Attorney General. Knowles entered the campaign at a clear disadvantage. Not only did she face a well-known incumbent, but Montana had yet to allow women the right to vote.

Nonetheless, at 32 with her rhetorical skills and a grassroots campaign covering every county, Ella ended up losing by a few votes to the incumbent Henri Haskell. She won more votes than any other Populist candidate for statewide office.

Haskell, like Ella, was a graduate of Bates College. Impressed by her campaign and feeling akin to another New Englander, Haskell recruited her to be his Assistant Attorney General. In a matter of months, they married, though it didn’t last long. Within two years, they divorced as he moved away from the capitol, and Ella stayed to rebuild her legal practice under her maiden name. Her success as a lawyer gave her time to lecture and advocate for the rights of women in Montana and neighboring Great Plains states.

Suffragette

In 1898, as part of her growing notoriety, Ella served as president of the Montana Women’s Suffrage Association. As president, she was invited to address the national convention of the American Woman Suffrage Association on the legal obstacles women faced and to highlight advances made in spite of their still second class status.

Woman of the Century

For more than five decades, Ella championed a multitude of causes for women's rights, civil rights, and social equity. For this, she earned a place in the 1983 edition of the Women of the Century. Ella’s was among the 1,400 biographical sketches and portraits of American women notable for their leadership in law, literature, the arts, science, and social and political reform.

Her accomplishments drew national note in the Atlanta Journal Constitution (December of 1895), which called her one of the most successful female lawyers in Montana. She was so influential that her contemporaries attributed the election of Jeannette Rankin—the first woman of any state to win a seat in Congress— to Ella’s persistent efforts to win women’s suffrage. Rankin was elected for two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. To this day, she remains the only woman ever elected to Congress from Montana.

Remembrances

black and white image of Ella Knowles Haskell
Montana Historical Society

Ella lived into the early 19th century. She died in 1911 at age 50.

A courtroom in the Battin Federal Courthouse in Billings is named in her memory.

Catherine Wright, who wrote a biography on Knowles, observed that “In the 1880s, it was not unusual for a young New England woman to move west in search of greater opportunities.” However, “what was unusual was when a young woman from New Hampshire decided that those opportunities should come in the form of the practice of law and pursuit of statewide office. But this is just what she did.”

Her alma mater, Bates College, remembered her in a 1993 documentary, Ella Knowles: A Dangerous Woman. metaphorically dangerous to anyone who stood in the way of equal rights for women and the chance for women to pursue a career in the law or any chosen profession.

Similarly, in their book Maverick: The Lives and Battles of Montana's Political Legends, John and Catherine Morrison memorialized Ella as one of nine political giants, whose lives and careers were “inextricably interwoven with Montana political history, defying centuries of gender prejudice in her campaigns to win for women the right to practice law, to vote, and to run for public office.” Ella Knowles possessed this potential and fulfilled it. In her brief life, she challenged tradition and redefined what it meant to be a western woman of the late nineteenth century.

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