Catherine Ann “Kate” Barnard was born on May 23, 1875 in Geneva, Nebraska.
At the age of seventeen she became a school teacher, taught for three years and then became a stenographer. In 1901 she was appointed clerk and stenographer for the Democratic minority in the territorial legislature at Guthrie. In 1904 she was sent to work for the Oklahoma Commission at the St.Louis World’s Fair, where she noticed unemployment, urban poverty and horrible working conditions. She listened to discussions by social science experts who suggested solutions. She returned home determined to get legislation passed to protect Oklahoma from the same poor conditions she had witnessed in St. Louis.
“…I stood at the mouth of a burning coal mine. Fire leaped high through the only entrance. Fifteen men were hopelessly cut off below. The smell of their burning flesh came up to us on the crest of the flame. A woman, clothed in only one garment, with three children clinging to it, and a babe in her arms, peered into the pit. Her husband was below. She cried out, and going suddenly insane, tried to leap down to join him.
There was only one reason why that nine should have but one entrance; it would cost money to provide another. Then and there i determined to consecrate myself to the remedy.”
Her first success came in 1906 when she was at the Shawnee Convention which was a gathering of Oklahoma Farmers Union, the American Federation of Labor and four of the railroad brotherhoods. Barnard was a delegate of the AFL and urged the abolishment of child labor and initiation of compulsory education. Democratic party leaders adopted her reform proposals for their platform at the constitutional convention a year later. As a result she had a major role in writing the State’s constitution. At her suggestion they also created an elective office of Commissioner of Charities and Corrections for which Kate campaigned tirelessly and won. She was the first woman to win a statewide elective office in the United States.
She served two terms during which she created a lasting body of reform legislation which improved conditions for the mentally ill, convicts, child and adult laborers and widows. She launched an investigation into the Indian land scandals involving the defrauding of Indian minors of their timber, oil and gas rights and farmland. She also became administrator of the United Provident Association (later the United Way) in 1905.
Her1908 investigation of the treatment of Oklahoma prisoners held in a Kansas prison rated national headlines and enhanced her reputation as a reformer. Her efforts resulted in the repatriation of the convicts and the subsequent creation of a three-tier state prison system consisting of a penitentiary, a reformatory, and a boys' training school.
