Sunday, March 16, you are invited to a birthday celebration for T.B. Ferguson at the fellowship hall at the Watonga Christian Church 12-1:30. A donation of $10/adult, $5/child is suggested. The fair is Mexican stack up (pile on).
As we explore Women’s History during March, I want to highlight some of the women who married Fergusons. Clearly ,they were full partners in raising successful families and in their husbands’ professions. But each woman had their own profession as well.
Elva Shartel Ferguson, 1869-1947 was raised in Sedan, Kansas where she married Thompson Benton Ferguson in 1885. Raised in a newspaper family, Elva was always a lady of letters. Following the opening of the Cheyenne-Arapaho area in April 1892, the Fergusons moved in wagons to Watonga in October of that year. Within days, they established the Watonga Republican.
Elva was first lady of the Territory of Oklahoma from Nov. 1901 while T.B. served as governor. She had a role in developing the 1903 Oklahoma Territory Exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair that opened the eyes of the nation to Oklahoma. Elva strove to educate women through the Mother’s Self Culture Club and the new Watonga Library. She served as vice chair of the Oklahoma Republican Party in the 1928-32 after her husband’s death in 1921 and led the Oklahoma delegation to the 1926 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. As the subject of the novel by Edna Ferber in her book, Cimarron, Ferguson was a consultant in the RKO studio 1931 movie that best picture.
Elva was active in the American Pen Women’s Organization. Today we are fortunate to have a highly qualified female editor of the Watonga Republican, but in 1921, this was most unusual. As editor of the newspaper 1921-1930, she had the credentials to be a member the American Pen Women’s Organization. According to the National League of American Pen Women “In June of 1897, after William McKinley had declared in his inaugural address that, “…equality of rights must prevail”., Seventeen women … were occupied with problems peculiar to “the writer’s craft”: libel and copyright laws, plagiarism and the inequality with which professionals of “the fair sex” were treated by their male counterparts.” From this meeting sprung this organization. The group demanded pay for their work. The organization has grown to have some 35 chapters in fulfilling a movement to promote women of the pen and the arts.