Landes, Bertha Knight, 1868-1943

<p><b>RACES</b>
<ul>
<li>03/13/1928 Seattle Mayor Lost 40.35% (-19.31%)</li>
<li>03/10/1926 Seattle Mayor Won 53.22% (+6.45%)</li>
</ul>
</p>

<p>Bertha Ethel Knight Landes (October 19, 1868, – November 29, 1943) was the first female mayor of a major American city, serving as mayor of Seattle, Washington from 1926 to 1928. After years of civic activism, primarily with women's organizations, she was elected to the Seattle City Council in 1922 and became council president in 1924.</p>

<p>Landes was born in Ware, Massachusetts to Charles Sanford Knight and Cordelia Cutter. Her father, a veteran of the Union Army, moved the family to Worcester in 1873. She attended Worcester's Dix Street School and Classical High School, from which she received her diploma. At the age of 19 she moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to live with her older sister Jessie Knight, whose husband David Starr Jordan had become the president of Indiana University. Bertha enrolled as a student at the University in the fall of 1888. She received a degree in history and political science in 1891, after which she returned to Worcester.</p>

<p>After three years of teaching at her alma mater, the Classical High School in Worcester, Massachusetts, she married geologist Henry Landes on January 2, 1894. Knight and Landes had met as students at Indiana University. The couple had three children, one of whom was adopted. Landes moved to Seattle in 1895 when her husband Henry became a geology professor at the fledgling University of Washington, with the help of a favorable recommendation from Jordan. Henry would go on to become Dean of the College of Sciences in 1912, the University's first.</p>

<p>When Progressive Bertha Knight Landes took the reins as the first woman mayor of a major U.S. city in 1926, she tightened the budget, raised standards, and pushed to clean up the town. It was bold reform in a time of widespread corruption in Seattle and a male-dominated workforce.</p>

<p>Born October 19, 1868, in Ware, Massachusetts, Bertha Ethel Knight grew up with strong, influential parents. With dark hair, black eyes and olive skin, Landes was the youngest of nine children. Eventually, she enrolled at Indiana University and upon graduation, taught school.</p>

<p>Just after the New Year in 1894, Bertha E. Knight married Henry M. Landes, who had earned a master’s degree at Harvard University. One year later, the couple moved to Washington State; Henry Landes had accepted a teaching position at the University of Washington. (He was later promoted to Dean of the College of Sciences.)</p>

<b>Bertha Ethel Knight Landes</b><br>
<b>BIRTH</b> 19 Oct 1868<br>
Ware, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, USA<br>
<b>DEATH</b> 29 Nov 1943 (aged 75)<br>
Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County, Michigan, USA<br>
<b>BURIAL</b><br>
Evergreen-Washelli Memorial Park<br>
Seattle, King County, Washington, USA

<p>Bertha Knight Landes, elected mayor of Seattle in 1926, became the first woman to lead a major American city. She ran on a platform of "municipal housekeeping," vowing to clean up city government. She advocated municipal ownership of utilities such as City Light and street railways. Her single term ended in 1928, but she remained a civic leader and role model for women.</p>

<p>Bertha Knight was born in Ware, Massachusetts, on October 19, 1868. She met her future husband, Henry Landes (d. 1936), during their student years at the University of Indiana. In 1895, they moved to Seattle, where he worked as professor of geology and later Dean of the College of Sciences at the University of Washington. A devoted wife and mother of three children, she saw the community as an extension of the home. She played leadership roles in several women's organizations, including the Women's University Club, the Woman's Century Club, the League of Women Voters, and the Women's Auxiliary of University Congregational Church.</p>

<p>In 1921, as president of the Seattle Federation of Women's Clubs, Landes orchestrated a weeklong Women's Educational Exhibit for Washington Manufacturers. Staffed by more than 1,000 clubwomen, it bolstered the spirits of the business community during a period of severe recession. The president of the Chamber of Commerce praised her for her leadership, and the mayor subsequently appointed her as the lone woman on a five-member commission to study unemployment in the city. When she made her decision to run for city council in 1922, her husband said, "It's simply the natural enlargement of her sphere. Keeping house and raising a family are woman's logical tasks, and in principle, there's no difference between running one home and a hundred thousand." According to historian Doris Pieroth, "Both Landeses saw her career as duty and service rather than an opportunity for fulfillment of her own ambition, and they both justified her political activities within the context of woman's proper place".</p>