Jessie Hooper was born November 8, 1865 in Winneshick
County, Iowa. She was a very frail and
sickly child and was educated at home by a governess but in her late teens she
traveled to Des Moins and Chicago to study art.
She met and fell in love and soon married Ben Hooper, an
attorney, while visiting her sister in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Ben pursued a successful legal career and
Jessie took up various civic projects, established the first kindergarten, the
first visiting nurse program and a sanatorium for Tuberculosis patients.
She joined the Wisconsin Woman’s Suffrage Association and
went on to become a renowned leader in the American Woman’s Suffrage
Association frequently traveling to Washington to lobby for a federal suffrage
amendment. When Congress passed the
Nineteenth Amendment, her efforts helped to make Wisconsin the first state to
ratify it.
In 1922 Jessie ran as a democrat for the U.S. Senate and
while she realized that there was little hope of unsettling the incumbent, she
felt it was her duty as a newly enfranchised woman, to make her voice heard and
run for office.
Following WW I, Jessie devoted much of her energy to the
peace movement making hundreds of speeches on behalf of world disarmament. Three years before her death she joined women
from around the world in presenting peace petitions with over eight million
signatures to the League of Nations disarmament conference in Geneva.
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