The Chronicles Of Grant County
Isabella Selmes Greenway
Isabella Selmes Greenway. (The photograph was provided courtesy of the United States House of Representatives, 1933.)
Isabella Selmes Greenway. (The photograph was provided courtesy of the United States House of Representatives, 1933.)
Isabella Dinsmore Selmes was the first woman elected to the United States Congress from Arizona. She was one of two women who had connections to Grant County and became the first women to represent their states in the U S Congress.
Born in Boone County, Kentucky, in 1886, she lived in several locales – North Dakota, Minnesota, and New York – before moving to New Mexico. Miss Selmes eventually had three different surnames due to being widowed twice and her marriages to three different men – Mr. Ferguson, Mr. Greenway, and Mr. King.
According to her official biography provided by the U S House of Representatives, Miss Selmes married Robert Munro Ferguson in 1905; they raised two children. Mr. Ferguson "...developed tuberculosis and the family moved in 1909 to a ranch home in the dry climate of the Burro Mountains near Silver City, New Mexico." (Please note another source indicated that the family moved to Grant County in 1910.) The Santa Fe New Mexican reported on March 13, 1911, that the family was living at the New Mexico Cottage Sanitarium; this sanitarium was located near Silver City.
The official biography noted that "Isabella Greenway's political career began during the First World War. In 1918 she chaired the Women's Land Army of New Mexico, which tended to agricultural tasks traditionally performed by men then serving in the military."
In the Camp Cody edition of Trench and Camp, a publication of the YMCA and printed by the El Paso Herald on August 1, 1918, noted the first actions of the Women's Land Army of New Mexico. A news article in that publication in Deming noted some of the activities at the Bell Ranch in that area: "...[T]he first squad of the 'women's land army' of New Mexico, under the leadership of Mrs. R. M. Ferguson of Tyrone, swooped down on that ranch to get in the alfalfa crop...The alfalfa crop on the Bell Ranch was never handled in better shape than the 'land army' handled it, and those who saw them at work have withdrawn any previously-held opinions about women's inability to do man's work."
A few weeks later, on August 21, 1918, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported on activities of the Women's Land Army in the Silver City area: "They are orchardettes – not farmerettes – here in Grant County, but just the same got there with their intent which was to harvest the fruit crop and permit none of it to go to waste for the lack of pickers and packers. For the past week under the leadership of Mrs. Robert M. Ferguson, chairman for the county, scores of women have been at work in the orchards and fields."
The news article went on to detail that the ladies picked "...pears, peaches, plums, and apples..." on the L C Ranch and "...assisted in putting corn from 90 acres..." into silos at the farm of Fred McAuley "...for cattle feed this winter."
Mr. Ferguson died in 1922. A year later, according to her official biography, she married John Campbell Greenway. As Mrs. Greenway, she gave birth to a third child. She and her husband raised all three children in their new home in Arizona. Mr. Greenway died in 1927. After that death, Mrs. Greenway eventually moved with her children to Tucson.
She was the first woman elected to the U S Congress from the State of Arizona and served two terms in the House of Representatives from 1933 through 1937. At the time, Arizona only had one Congressional representative given its modest population. While she served as a Democrat, news reports indicated that she had disagreements with certain policies of the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
"…[Mrs.] Greenway was a persuasive and quickly successful advocate for New Deal programs to help her 450,000 constituents who suffered from an unemployment rate in excess of 25 percent," her official biography continued. "[Mrs.] Greenway was concerned mostly with improving the lives of workers and industrial laborers. Her chief priorities were veterans' relief, training and jobs for unemployed copper miners, and the development of the several flood-control projects."
She retired from Congress and engaged in a variety of business pursuits in Arizona and California. Mrs. Greenway died in 1953.
New Mexico did not elect a woman to the U S Congress until the election of Georgia Lee Lusk. The next edition of The Chronicles Of Grant County will include information about this individual who was educated in Silver City and served as the state's sole Congressional representative from 1947 to 1949.
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