Theodora Winton Youmans

Career geography was Waukesha; childhood belonged to Prospect Hill—the crossroads New Berlin later annexed.

She was born in Ashippun, in Dodge County, and grew up at her father’s store and post office in Prospect Hill. Her mother had been a schoolteacher; Theodora and her brothers walked to District No. 3 Prospect School. At seventeen she was valedictorian of Carroll Academy—still remembered locally as the only New Berlinite known to have finished there in the nineteenth century—then joined the Waukesha Freeman as a reporter who traveled the Northwoods alone and invented a “Women’s World” column. She married the paper’s editor, Henry Mott Youmans, in 1889 and became assistant editor. In 1886 the Freeman had already run her series on traveling the Northwoods alone, a credential for a woman reporter of the era. She founded the Wisconsin Anti-Tuberculosis Association in 1908, years before taking the suffrage presidency in 1913.

As president of the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association she followed Carrie Chapman Catt’s advice and pressed a federal amendment after state referenda failed in 1912 and 1917. When Wisconsin’s ratification papers reached Washington first on June 10, 1919, she announced the “first honors” in her column. She later ran for the state senate as a Republican and lost, and died at home in Waukesha in 1932. The girlhood house sits on New Berlin Historical Society grounds; Youmans Park is in Waukesha. New Berlin keeps the store and the school story.