A Life on Fire: Oklahoma's Kate Barnard

“How can women wear diamonds when babies cry for bread?” Kate Barnard demanded in one of the incendiary stump speeches for which she was well known. In A Life on Fire, Connie Cronley tells the story of Catherine Ann “Kate” Barnard (1875–1930), a fiery political reformer and the first woman elected to state office in Oklahoma, as commissioner of charities and corrections in 1907—almost fifteen years before women won the right to vote in the United States. Born to hardscrabble settlers on the...