Landmarks: Monument dedicated to Rebecca Hurn, Spokane’s first female lawyer, state’s first female senator
A new monument was dedicated last week at Greenwood Memorial Terrace honoring a woman who was breaking glass ceilings early in the 1900s – back way before there even was such a concept.
Rebecca “Reba” Jane Hurn was the first woman to serve in the Washington state Senate, the first woman member of the Washington State Bar Association, the person who helped Nathan Strauss (co-owner of Macy’s Department Store) with his work internationally in promoting pasteurization of milk, and chaired the New York committee for William Jennings Bryan’s 1908 run for the presidency.
This is a woman who defied convention, abandoning a teaching job to study German overseas, and later on traveled the world and lived in peoples’ homes (so she could better experience the lives and culture of each location). During her travels in the Middle East, where she not only witnessed much history in the making (she was in the region during the formation of the state of Israel, for example), she also translated the Koran into English. Her memoirs chronicle much of this, but they remain unpublished to this day.
Every year at least one monument is erected for a noted Spokane resident at one of the properties of the Fairmount Memorial Association. The monument for Hurn was the 25th since the practice began in 2006. Fairmount pays the cost for one each year, but a group of organizations which work to bring the monuments about – Spokane Historical Monuments Committee, Spokane Regional Law Enforcement Museum, the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution and the Spokane Corral of the Westerners – provide funding, often through grants, for any additional ones in any given calendar year, according to Duane Broyles, the retired president of Fairmount.
At the dedication ceremony of monument on Aug. 3, Sen. Andy Billig (3rd District) remarked that there is a wing off a corner of the Senate floor where he goes to call family in Spokane when sessions are running late. He often stands under a plaque on the wall there, which he said is dedicated to Hurn, for whom the opening greeting of Senate sessions were amended upon her arrival. “It was then said ‘gentlemen of the Senate and Miss Hurn’,” Billig noted. “For six years now she’s been standing over my shoulder when I call home.”
Hurn’s life story was featured in a “Landmarks” story June 11, 2015, when it was noted that it appeared she might follow one of the few paths open to women of her era who didn’t marry, that of a school teacher. The daughter of Spokane attorney and Superior Court Judge David W. Hurn and G. Harriet Hurn, she was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern University who set out to teach in Spokane and Ritzville, Washington. Teaching wasn’t for her, so she headed to Germany to advance her studies.
While at Heidelberg University in 1907 she met retail merchant Nathan Strauss, who was in Germany trying to perfect the process of pasteurization. Hurn gave up her studies and joined in the work, under the mentorship of Strauss and his wife, and followed them to New York City to continue advancing the benefits of pasteurization. She managed the Nathan Strauss Infant Milk Depots.
She got a taste for politics in her efforts for William Jennings Bryan’s campaign, and then returned to Spokane in 1910, where she became an attorney and was the first woman admitted to the bar in the state in 1913 and also the first woman to practice law in Spokane.
Women had already served in the state House of Representatives, but Hurn had an eye on the Senate. She ran in 1922 as a Republican, despite her earlier work for the Democrat Bryan, and beat her opponent by a 2-1 margin. She was re-elected in 1926 without even campaigning. She became known as a relentless cost-cutter, pushed tax relief for Eastern Washington farmers and supported a constitutional amendment against child labor. But in 1930, a year after the Great Depression began and when Democrats were enjoying big gains at the polls, she was defeated for a third term.
She also lost a bid for a Spokane County Superior Court judgeship in 1936. She continued her work as an attorney and traveling the world. During the Eisenhower administration she was twice asked to join a people-to-people mission to the Middle East to provide impressions of the progress being made toward the emancipation of women in the region.
She was 65 when she moved to the Middle East, and she continued traveling until near the end of her life at age 86 in Chula Vista, California, in 1967.
As was reported in the earlier story about her, she was buried at Greenwood Memorial Terrace right next to her parents, who have a tall grave stone giving their names and full dates of their births and deaths. Hers is a flat, small and plain marker which only states her name and years of birth and death, 1881-1967. It is an unremarkable marker for a most remarkable woman, it was noted at the dedication of the large memorial monument, which stands nearby and which now details many of the important achievements in Reba Hurn’s life.
The monument was created by Quiring Monuments of Seattle and Wilbert Precast of Spokane. The basalt which frames the monument comes from the hillside at Greenwood Memorial Terrace, Broyles said.
“We selected Reba for a monument this year for her contribution to education, medicine, law and politics,” said Rae Anna Victor, regent of the Jonas Babcock Chapter of the DAR. “Our precept is to select people who have made a difference in our community or region that have been forgotten or not properly recognized for their role in our history.
“I think we also chose Reba because she was a unique woman of her time. We hear so much about women shattering the glass ceiling today. She was doing this over a century ago. She is a true example for the young women of today.”