Adeline Morrison Swain Iowa Suffragette

Adeline Morrison Swain

Adeline Swain didn’t ask for permission. She didn’t even notice there was a line she wasn’t supposed to cross. The men of Fort Dodge were too busy puffing cigars and explaining morality to see her coming. Then one day, she walked into the middle of their meeting and rewrote the script.

 Greenback Party convention. 1883. A fine gathering of mustaches and waistcoats, men arguing about gold standards while the world burned outside. Then in walks Adeline Swain — a schoolteacher in a stiff collar — and delivers ten minutes of verbal dynamite about corruption and equality. You could’ve heard a silver dollar drop. By the time the smoke cleared, those same men had nominated her for Superintendent of Public Instruction. The first woman in Iowa ever to get the nod.

 

The local papers choked on their ink. The Fort Dodge Times called her “a curiosity,” which was the polite version of “What the hell was that?” Others said women belonged in the parlor. One reporter called it “petticoat politics.” Adeline used the clippings to light her stove. Nothing like a little hypocrisy to get the fire going.

She wasn’t a politician. She was a human spark plug. Before people invented “STEM for girls,” she was teaching botany out of her parlor. Before anyone dreamed of community colleges, her house was one. She gave lessons in French, art, astronomy, and how to ignore gossip. Neighbors said her home was too loud, too big, too full of ideas. She responded by opening another window and shouting, “Come on in!”

 

Adeline Swain speaking at Greenback convention

A few years earlier, when grasshoppers had eaten half the state, the U.S. Department of Agriculture brought her on board to study them — the only woman on the payroll. She dissected bugs, wrote about bugs, lectured about bugs, and then took her findings to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. First woman ever to do that. Picture it: a roomful of bearded naturalists and one woman explaining locust behavior like she owned the joint. That had to wrinkle a few mustaches.

 “Knowledge,” she told an audience, “is not the property of man alone. God has given women a mind — and she should use it.” That line alone probably sent three bishops home for an early drink.

 

Her critics were garden-variety cowards. Ministers who claimed suffrage was “an insult to nature.” Papers sneered that activists were “discontented housewives seeking attention.” She fired back saying, “We seek justice, not attention.” 

 

Senator Wilberforce Gaylord — a name straight from central casting — wrote a pamphlet called “Twenty-One Reasons Why Women Should Not Vote.” Among them: “If married women should vote with their husbands, nothing would be gained, and where they voted against their husbands, the family would be at war.” He warned that “there cannot… be two equal heads in the same family any more than two equal heads in the same hat.”

 

Swain enjoying tea in her parlor with Susan B. Anthony

When she ran for office, the curious came to gawk. They expected shrillness and got logic. They expected tears and got policy. She argued that women, being the teachers of children, understood citizenship better than anyone. The Woman’s Journal said, “Mrs. Swain was one of the first women in the nation to make political campaign speeches.” Translation: she showed up, spoke sense, and nobody died from it.

 She didn’t win — of course not — but twenty-seven thousand cracks appeared in the wall that year. You can build a revolution out of cracks if you’re patient enough.

 

Afterward, she kept going. Her home became a halfway house for reformers. Susan B. Anthony stayed there once. You can almost hear the teacups rattling while they plotted world domination. 

 

Fort Dodge eventually turned on her. Too public, they said. Too opinionated. Too everything. One man sniffed that she “wore her intellect like a badge.” And maybe she did.

 

In the evenings, she walked the dirt streets with her notebook, writing articles for The Woman’s Tribune about science and reform. “If ignorance is bliss,” she wrote, “then woman’s submission must be heaven itself.” Dry as dust, sharp as flint.

 

By the time she died in 1899, railroads had changed the landscape and brought everyone a bit closer. She didn’t live to see women get the vote, but the movement she’d helped ignite was picking up speed.

 

The marker on her house calls her a suffragette, teacher, and scientist. That’s tidy. The truth is a bit messier — Adeline Swain was a grenade disguised as a lady. She walked into rooms where she wasn’t invited, spoke truths nobody wanted o hear, and kept going long after the polite people had given up.