Influential Women of Spokane

While known as the home of Father's Day, Spokane benefited from its share of trailblazing women. In 1886, Mother Joseph, a pioneering architect, constructed the first Sacred Heart Hospital. After fire destroyed thirty-six blocks in 1889, Anna Stratton Browne and her friends raised $10,000 to build a home for needy children that operated for six decades. And in early 1908, May Hutton became president of the Spokane Equal Suffrage League, persevering until 1910, when Washington voters gave women the vote. Historian Nancy Driscol Engle commemorates the unforgettable contributions of Spokane's women.

Nancy Driscol Engle lives and writes from her adopted hometown of Spokane, Washington. She was one of the scholars interviewed for Courage in Corsets, a video produced by KSPS television, studying the movement that culminated in giving women the right to vote in Washington in 1910. She won a grant that collaborated with Eastern Washington University, the Museum of Arts and Culture and the Spokane chapter of League of Women Voters to produce a study of the local campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, for the Washington Women's History Consortium. The results of the study are available online at washingtonhistory.org. She also worked on a National Endowment for the Humanities grant with TINCAN, Spokane. She published We Don't Intend to take Advice from Women, for Columbia Magazine, a study of the police matron controversy in Spokane.