The early years of the Twentieth Century were almost welcoming for Socialist candidates in Cincinnati elections.
Although Boss Cox’s Republican machine maintained an iron-fisted grip on electoral offices in Cincinnati, the growth of organized labor and the formation of progressive political parties offered a wide range of viewpoints in the years prior to World War I. Socialist candidates often placed third after Cox’s Republicans and the lackluster local Democrats when ballots included candidates from the Prohibition, Progressive, Single-Tax, Farm-Labor and Independent parties.
Women could not vote in national elections until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, but Ohio permitted women to cast their ballots in school board elections starting in 1894. That extension of the electoral franchise allowed women to become candidates for positions on the school board. By 1904, however, despite a handful of female candidates, not a single woman had been elected to a seat on the Cincinnati School Board. The Socialists hoped to change that…