Wilhelmine Wissman Yoakum (July 16, 1891 - February 24, 1983) was the first woman elected to Oakland City Council. [1]
Wilhelmine Wissman Yoakum (July 16, 1891 - February 24, 1983) was the first woman elected to Oakland City Council. [1]
Wilhelmine Wissman was born on July 16, 1891, in New Jersey, the daughter of Herman Wissman and Katherine Kohler. [2]
She attended Cornell University, where she met her future husband and fellow student, Finis E. Yoakum, Jr., later a consulting engineer. Wilhelmine Yoakum obtained a master's degree in language studies from University of California, Berkeley. [2] [1]
Wilhelmine Wissman Yoakum was the treasurer of the State League of Women Voters. She was the secretary of the League of Women Voters's predecessor, the Oakland Forum. She held offices also in other organizations. [2] [1]
She was a member of the American Association of University Women, Kappa Kappa Gamma, Cornell University Club of Northern California. [2]
On May 12, 1931, she was elected for the position of Councilman at Large, No. 1, with a total of 20,888 votes. She defeated William Baccus, who had previously been elected to City Council many times as a member of the Republican party. When she ran as an incumbent in 1933, she was the only woman amongst 45 candidates. Mrs. Yoakum was defeated by Walter F. Jacobsen in that election, receiving 22,584 votes to Mr. Jacobsen's 24,101 votes. [1]
She served for 22 years as the Executive Director of the International Institute of Oakland. She retired from the International Institute in 1962. [1]
Wilhelmine Wissman Yoakum lived in New York and moved to California in 1913. She married Finis Ewing Yoakum (1891-1958) and had three children: Fanita Ewing Yoakum Druehl (1916-1987), Katherine Ann Yoakum Heringer (1920-1988), Franklin L. Yoakum (1922-1974). They lived at 472 Vernon Street, Oakland, California. [2]
Her husband died in a small plane crash in Brazil in 1958 and was buried near the site of the crash. [1]
She died on February 24, 1983.
The League of Women Voters (LWV) is a nonprofit organization in the United States that was formed to help women take a larger role in public affairs after they won the right to vote. It was founded in 1920 to support the new women suffrage rights and was a merger of National Council of Women Voters, founded by Emma Smith DeVoe, and National American Woman Suffrage Association, led by Carrie Chapman Catt, approximately six months before the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution gave women the right to vote. The League of Women Voters began as a "mighty political experiment" aimed to help newly enfranchised women exercise their responsibilities as voters. Originally, only women could join the league; but in 1973 the charter was modified to include men. LWV operates at the local, state, and national level, with over 1,000 local and 50 state leagues, and one territory league in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The league states that it has over 500,000 members and supporters.
Katherine Esau was a German-American botanist who received the National Medal of Science for her work on plant anatomy.
Sara Cone Bryant was an American lecturer, teacher, and writer. She wrote children's books in the early 20th century. She also supported and took a leadership role in women's suffrage.
Emma Pike Ewing was an American author and educator on housekeeping and cooking. Ewing hailed from New York. After the American Civil War, she served as dean, Chautauqua Assembly Cooking School; professor domestic economy, Iowa Agricultural College; director Model School of Household Economics; and affiliated with Marietta College, Ohio, Model Home School of Household Economics. Her contemporaries included, Mary Johnson Bailey Lincoln, Marion Harland, Fannie Merritt Farmer, Sarah Tyson Rorer, Maria Parloa, Gesine Lemcke, Ella Morris Kretschmar, and Linda Hull Larned. Ewing was the author of several cookbooks such as Cooking and Castle-building (1880), Soup and Soup Making (1882), Bread and Bread Making (1883), Salad and Salad Making (1884), A Text-book of Cookery, for Use in Schools (1899), Cookery Manuals (1890), and The Art of Cookery: A Manual for Homes and Schools (1896). She died in 1917.
Mary G. Charlton Edholm was an American reformer and journalist. She worked as a journalist for twenty years. Edholm was appointed World's Superintendent of Press work, at the Boston Convention of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in 1891. Much of her work was along Christian, temperance and philanthropic lines. For many years, her work averaged 250 columns of original matter, in which every phase of the labors of the WCTU was depicted in thousands of papers in the English-speaking world.
F. Josephine Stevenson was an early 20th century female attorney and State Chairman of Uniform Laws of the National League of Women Voters (1920–21)
Nann "Nancy" Barr Mavity was an American crime mystery author.
Edith Christensen Wilson was a prominent assistant district attorney of San Francisco, prosecuting cases in the Women's Court.
Harriet T. Averill Haas was an American attorney and member of Piedmont Board of Education in the city of Piedmont, California. She was one of the most highly regarded members of the Alameda County, California bar.
Edith Monica Jordan Gardner was an American educator, specialized in history and an activist, including woman's suffrage and in the Sierra Club. She was president of the Southern California Social Science Association, Town and Gown Club, Cornell Women's Club of Northern California, Stanford Woman's Club, and the University of California branch of the Equal Suffrage League, among others. She was the head of the History Department at the John H. Francis Polytechnic High School, chairman of the Department of Legislation Oakland Forum, and one of the earliest members of the Sierra Club.
Inez Mee Boren was the director of the Woman's City Club of Oakland.
The Con-Con Eleven were a group of eleven women delegates to the 1961-1962 Michigan Constitutional Convention. The group of eleven women were the first and only women to attend a Michigan Constitutional Convention. The eleven women were Vera Andrus (1896-1976), Ruth Gibson Butler (1891-1981), Anne M. Conklin (1925-1975), Katherine Moore Cushman (1916-1991), Ann Elizabeth Donnelly (1924-1984), Daisy Elizabeth Elliott (1919-2015), Adelaide Julia Hart (1900-1995), Lillian Hatcher (1915-1998), Dorothy Leonard Judd (1898-1989), Ella Demmink Koeze (1905-1986), and Marjorie Frances McGowan (1930-1980).
Henrica Iliohan was a Dutch-born American woman suffragist and translator.
Frances Arcadia Willoughby St. John Chappelle was an Assistant in Psychology at the University of Nevada.
Mary Gage Day was an American physician and medical writer. Day published several papers on Locoweed, including two articles in the New York Medical Journal, from which the definition of "Loco Disease" was created in Frank Pierce Foster's New Medical Dictionary. She died in 1935.
Katharine Lent Stevenson was an American temperance reformer, missionary, and editor. She was a successful platform speaker, writer and officer of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) on whose behalf she also visited Japan, China, India, Australia and other countries as a missionary.
Emily Pitts Stevens was an American educator, temperance activist, and early San Francisco suffragist. She was the editor and publisher of The Pioneer, the first women’s suffrage journal in the West Coast of the United States, and was a co-founder of the California Woman Suffrage Association. In addition, she was a businesswoman, teacher, administrator, lecturer, and a founder of women's organizations. In San Francisco, Stevens started an evening school for working girls, and instituted the Seaman's League. After the organization of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in California, she labored on its behalf. She also contributed to the columns of various newspapers, and lectured. Stevens died in 1906.
Myra Knox was a Canadian-born American physician. Having been a teacher before her career in medicine, she became the first woman in California to be appointed to a board of education.
Katherine Louise Tanner Fisk was an American contralto. Thanks to her singing and acting qualities, she received considerable acclaim for her performances in London, Illinois, New York and California.
Trina Lynn Thompson is an American state court judge of the Alameda County Superior Court who is a designate to serve as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.
This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain .This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain .