Birdie Harwood

Marble Falls elected a woman mayor in April 1917, eleven months before white women could vote in a Texas primary and three years before the Nineteenth Amendment, which means Ophelia Geraldine Crosby Harwood was put into office entirely by men. She campaigned on the argument that running a town was like running a household, and that rich men did not want the job while poor men could not afford it. She promised to make two nickels grow where one grew before, and to grade and light the streets. In two years she published the city budget, approved new roads and wrote traffic laws for them, had warning signs put up along dangerous stretches of the river, painted the park pavilion and leased another nineteen acres of parkland.

Her platform had also included penning loose cattle and dealing with public drunkenness. She became the town's first woman municipal court judge in 1936 and led the local Red Cross. She was born in 1872, married the physician George Hill Harwood, remarried at seventy nine, and died in 1954.

The Handbook of Texas entry for the town calls her the first woman mayor in the United States, and that is almost certainly wrong: Susanna Salter was elected mayor of Argonia, Kansas in 1887, thirty years earlier. The defensible version is narrower and stranger. She was the first woman to be made mayor in Texas, and she was seated by an electorate that did not include a single woman. No source reached so far records her margin, or the name of whoever she beat.