Bertha Knight Landes

Bertha Ethel Knight Landes (October 19, 1868 – November 29, 1943) was the first female mayor of a major American city, serving as mayor of Seattle, Washington from 1926 to 1928. After years of civic activism, primarily with women's organizations, she was elected to the Seattle City Council in 1922 and became council president in 1924. Early years Landes was born in Ware, Massachusetts to Charles Sanford Knight and Cordelia Cutter. Her father, a veteran of the Union Army, moved the family to Worcester in 1873. She attended Worcester's Dix Street School and Classical High School, from which she received her diploma. At the age of 19 she moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to live with her older sister Jessie Knight, whose husband David Starr Jordan had become the president of Indiana University. Bertha enrolled as a student at the University in the fall of 1888. She received a degree in history and political science in 1891, after which she returned to Worcester. After three years of teaching at her alma mater, the Classical High School in Worcester, Massachusetts, she married geologist Henry Landes on January 2, 1894. Knight and Landes had met as students at Indiana University. The couple had three children, one of whom was adopted. Landes moved to Seattle in 1895 when her husband Henry became a geology professor at the fledgling University of Washington, with the help of a favorable recommendation from Jordan. Henry would go on to become Dean of the College of Sciences in 1912, the University's first. Civic activism In Seattle, Landes was active in women's organizations, including the Women's University Club, the Rainier Club, and the Women's Auxiliary of University Congregational Church. She was a member of the influential Women's Century Club, for which she served as the head of social services (1916-17) and then president (1918-1920). She was president of the Washington State chapter of the League of Women Voters.