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In the heyday of the Populist Party, 1890–96, Mary Lease was one of the most prominent women in America, celebrated as the "Kansas Joan of Arc." She was born on September 11, 1853, in Ridgway, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Irish immigrants. Her father died as a Union prisoner of war, a calamity that plunged the family into poverty. In 1870 his widow sent twenty-year-old Mary to teach at Osage Mission, Kansas, where she married local pharmacist Charles Lease in 1873. The couple lost everything in the Panic of 1873 and moved to Denison, Texas. While her husband shifted from job to job, Lease took in washing and bore six children, two of whom died in infancy. She also joined the temperance movement and discovered her talent as an orator.
In the 1880s the family moved to Wichita, where Lease became a Knights of Labor organizer and women's suffrage advocate, as well as one of the first women to pass the Kansas bar. When the Populist Party formed in 1890, it seemed poised to address a broad range of Lease's concerns, and she plunged into the campaign. Her speeches were famously fiery, though she did not–as myth has it–urge farmers to "raise less corn and more hell."
Lease's agenda did not match those of many other Populist leaders. Denouncing those who cooperated with Democrats, she also offended anti-imperialists with her 1895 book,
Though Lease repudiated the Populists, she left an enduring legacy from her years in the Plains. According to reports from an 1890 convention, it was she who gave the People's Party its name. She inspired novelist Hamlin Garland to fictionalize her in
See also POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT: Populists (People's Party).