Prominent Women in Appalachian History [View all]

[theHandpuppet]

Prominent Women in Appalachian History

I'll start off this thread with a link to the biography of Lenna Lowe Yost. Please feel free to contribute other stories of women prominent in Appalachian history.

Lenna Lowe Yost
Compiled by the West Virginia State Archives

Lenna Lowe Yost was one of the leaders of West Virginia's suffrage movement and became the first woman to preside over a Republican state party convention when she presided over that party's convention in West Virginia in 1920. She was born in Basnettville, Marion County, in 1878, the daughter of Jonathan S. and Columbia Basnett Lowe. Her father died when Lenna was eight and the family of four children was raised by her mother, who ran a store at Fairview...

...By 1908, Lenna Yost had become president of the state WCTU and turned women's suffrage into one of the organization's leading causes. As a member of the West Virginia Equal Suffrage Association, she led the unsuccessful campaign for the state's 1916 public referendum on women's suffrage. From 1917 to 1919, Yost served as the organization's president. In 1918, she resigned as state president of the WCTU to serve as the national WCTU's legislative representative and as the Washington, D.C. correspondent for the group's Union Signal.

In 1920, Lenna Yost returned to West Virginia to lead the drive to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the vote. In March, West Virginia became the thirty-fourth of the thirty-six states needed to ratify the amendment. That summer, after the adoption of the amendment, Yost chaired the Republican National Convention which nominated Warren G. Harding for President. In 1921 and 1923, Harding appointed Yost to represent the United States at an international conference on alcoholism.

During the 1920s, she became more involved in Republican party activities, serving as the West Virginia Women's Activities Director. Yost campaigned actively for the election of governors Ephraim Morgan, Howard Gore, and William Conley, who in turn appointed her to the state Board of Education, the first woman to serve on the board. Yost served on the West Virginia Wesleyan Board of Trustees and was the driving force behind the construction of Elizabeth Moore Hall, a women's physicial education building at West Virginia University. She also used her national influence to place the first federal penitentiary for women at Alderson, Greenbrier County....

Read Lenna's full biography at: http://www.wvculture.org/history/yost.html
For more information on Lenna Lowe Yost, see https://wvrhc.lib.wvu.edu/news/newsletter/1995-2004/v19n1.pdf
"Lenna Lowe Yost Archives Chronicle the Woman Suffrage Movement in State and Nation". This is a thoroughly engaging article.