Gutsy gals: A glimpse into the contributions of area women during Women’s History Month
Pioneers in their own right, these women from Southwestern Pennsylvania displayed vision and perseverance as they labored to advance social reform and break barriers in business, medicine, equality, education and women’s rights.
In honor of Women’s History Month, we are featuring a few of the noteworthy females from Washington, Greene and Fayette counties who carved out a path for future generations to follow.
Dr. Phoebe Teagarden
Dr. Phoebe Jane “Jennie” Teagarden has the distinction of being Greene County’s first female physician.
Born March 25, 1841, she was the daughter of Isaac and Sarah Parker Teagarden.
“I’ve always thought that she was a pioneer of sorts,” said Beth Day of Washington, a distant relative of Teagarden, who, along with her mother and cousin, have remained actively interested in the woman.
Educated in the public schools and Waynesburg College, Teagarden taught school in Iowa before entering the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia in 1878, graduating in 1881. Day said It is believed that Teagarden had a sweetheart who died on the battlefield because there was no one to attend to him. For that reason, Teagarden was led to become a doctor.
During her time in medical school in Philadelphia, she befriended Susan B. Anthony, and invited the prominent leader of the suffrage movement to give a lecture at Waynesburg College in 1880. Teagarden later recalled the visit in a column for the “Woman Citizen” publication in 1920: “We came in to my home where she was to be a guest while in town …. we had a new rag carpet in the dining room which pleased her so much that with a strip of paper and a pencil the author of the Anthony Amendment, seated on a foot stool, marked the color and number of threads in each strip, and said her sister would have one made just like it, for their home in Rochester, N.Y.”
Teagarden established her medical practice in Waynesburg, and was known to her patients as “Dr. Jennie.” She was highly regarded as a diagnostician and served in various positions with the Greene County Medical Society, according to information compiled by Day’s family member Helen Elizabeth Vogt, “Descendents of Abraham Tegarden,” in 1967 (there were various spellings of the family name).
Committed to the welfare of children, Teagarden helped to establish the Greene County Children’s Aid Society and served for many years as the organization’s president. Teagarden died on January 11, 1922, but had the pleasure of seeing women receive the right to vote. Noted in her obituary in the Waynesburg Republican dated Jan, 19, 1922, “Although so frail physically that she had to be taken to the polling place yet it was a source of great pleasure to her that she was the first woman to vote in Waynesburg.”
Susan B. Cochran
A Fayette County woman who stepped into a man’s world in the 19th century by default used her position and influence to help others while supporting the effort of women to secure the right to vote.
The surprising life of Sarah B. Cochran has been explored by author and distant relative Kimberly Hess in her book, “A Lesser Mortal: The Unexpected Life of Sarah B. Cochran,” published in 2021.
“I didn’t realize the scope of what she accomplished when I was growing up,” said Hess.
Sarah Boyd Moore was born April 22, 1857, into a poor farming family in Fayette County. Hess said there is a local story that Moore and her sister shared a dress so they could attend school on alternating days.
As a young woman, she went to work as a maid in the home of industrialist James Cochran, a Western Pennsylvania coal and coke magnate. While there, she met the oldest son, Phillip, and they fell in love. The two were married nearly 20 years before his unexpected death in 1899. With the sudden death of their only son two years later, she was left to take over the family businesses and assume her husband’s role on various boards at a time when women were not permitted to work in coal mines. As a widow in her 40s who never attended college, she became an industry leader and was once referred to as “America’s Coal Queen.”
“She became active in philanthropy as one of the ways to get through her grieving process,” Hess said. Cochran financed dormitories at Otterbein (Ohio) College, where her husband attended, as well as Allegheny College, where she became the first female trustee.
Cochran built Linden Hall, a Tudor style mansion, in Dawson, which today is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Cochran, who never remarried, focused on supporting causes in education, religion and women’s rights.
“I’m impressed by how resilient she was and how she was able to succeed in so many different environments where no one even expected her to have a place,” Hess said.
The right to vote was very important to Cochran. She hosted a suffrage meeting in 1915 at Linden Hall with women’s suffrage movement leader Anna Howard Shaw as the keynote speaker, drawing between 500 and 600 guests.
“She seemed to seize the opportunities presented to her,” Hess said.
Cochran died in 1936, living to see women receive the right to vote in 1920.
Charlotte LeMoyne Wills
Charlotte LeMoyne Wills was born July 21, 1824, in Washington, to Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne and Madeleine Romaine Bureau. A Washington County Historical Society video from 2020 for the sixth annual Hall of Fame Awards recounts LeMoyne Wills’ life, revealing she was raised in a family that believed in social justice. Her father, an abolitionist, assisted those seeking freedom through the Underground Railroad. LeMoyne Wills attended abolitionist gatherings with her father in various cities.
A forward thinker, LeMoyne Wills attended Washington Female Seminary and wrote in an 1839 essay, “Women will not long be content to have a voice only through their husbands, but rather their own voices will soon carry the weight that reflects their equality in God’s eyes,” according to the video. She graduated from Washington Female Seminary in 1841, and after marrying Pittsburgh attorney John Alexander Wills, the two attended an abolitionist rally in Rochester, N.Y., where she would meet two of the leading suffragists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
LeMoyne Wills and Anthony began corresponding. In 1866, LeMoyne Wills was invited to join the newly formed American Equal Rights Association, and she would later assist in the formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association.
As part of comments LeMoyne Wills gave in a speech to the graduating class of the Washington Female Seminary, she asserted “… the time will come when girls shall receive as liberal education as boys; when great and noble careers shall be open to all who are fitted to follow them.”
The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, but unfortunately, LeMoyne Wills died in 1908, and did not live to see women receive the right to vote. Her work was not in vain, but helped to give women equal footing with men to cast their vote.
Pearl Harris
The concern for education motivated Pearl Harris, an educator from Washington, who was deeply concerned with the education of young children.
According to a 2011 Observer-Reporter article, Harris graduated from California Normal School, now PennWest University, and began her teaching career in Maryland. She was later denied work in this area as a schoolteacher during the 1930s. Instead, she began teaching preschool-age children, and in the 1940s, taught children at the LeMoyne Center, preparing underprivileged youngsters for success in school.
According to the newspaper account, Harris told school officials, impressed with the progress of her students, that she just wanted “to give them a head start.” In 2011, Pristine Harris, a staff member at the LeMoyne Center whose children were taught by Harris, told the newspaper that she was someone who “saw no wrong” in children, and that “she wanted to teach children what she thought they were missing from public school.”
While what she was doing was ahead of her time, it’s unlikely her efforts led to the naming of the Head Start program, the federal program initiated by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. However, her efforts, as noted on the LeMoyne Center’s website, would help “set the foundation for the center’s commitment to educate and support the children of the community and their families.”