Long before she became Washington’s first woman state senator, Reba Hurn stepped off a train in Spokane in 1905 as a young woman still searching for her place in the world. Nothing about her arrival suggested she would one day reshape the state’s political landscape. She was simply the daughter of a respected Iowa lawyer, newly transplanted to the growing city on the Spokane River. Yet within two decades, she would walk into the Washington State Senate as the lone woman among 46 men, armed not with political pedigree, but with a life shaped by scholarship, international experience, and an unexpected apprenticeship under one of America’s most influential philanthropists.
What followed was a career defined by discipline, independence, and a refusal to be dismissed as a novelty. Reba Hurn’s story is not just one of firsts; it is the story of a woman who forged her own path, then walked it with unflinching purpose.
Early Life: A Lawyer’s Daughter with Academic Ambition
Rebecca Jane “Reba” Hurn was born on August 21, 1881, in Clear Lake, Iowa, the elder of two daughters born to David William Hurn and Grace Harriett Butts. Her father was the sort of civic polymath common in frontier towns: lawyer, judge, banker, newspaperman, and mayor, whose reputation set a high bar for his children. Reba inherited his intellect and drive, graduating from Cornell College in Iowa before earning her A.B. from Northwestern University in 1905, where she was awarded a Phi Beta Kappa key.
That same year, the Hurn family relocated to Spokane, where David resumed his legal career and eventually became a judge. Reba, meanwhile, attempted the profession that stood as the most socially acceptable and available option for an educated woman of her time: teaching. She spent two unhappy years in classrooms across Spokane and Ritzville, grappling with the dispiriting realization that her daily work did not match her ambition. Yet, believing her career path was structurally limited to education, she reasoned that a specialization might at least make the labor more bearable. To enhance her credentials and secure a position teaching German, she made a bold decision that would inadvertently alter the course of her life. In the summer of 1907, she sailed for Germany to pursue graduate study at Heidelberg University.
Finding a Mentor: Nathan Straus and a New Sense of Purpose
Heidelberg offered Reba more than language study. It introduced her to Nathan Straus, the New York philanthropist and co-owner of Macy’s, who was in Germany promoting his pasteurized milk program. His mission was simple but revolutionary: provide safe milk to poor families to combat the rampant infant mortality caused by bovine tuberculosis and other milk-borne diseases.
Fascinated by the science and the social impact, Reba traded her textbooks for pasteurization equipment and volunteered at Straus’s milk depots, where she learned to pasteurize milk herself. Eventually, her work ethic caught Straus’s eye as she recorded in her diary that Straus had told his wife she was “made of the right stuff.” She wasn’t sure what future that “stuff” pointed toward, but she was determined to find out. When Straus invited her to abandon her studies and join his work in New York, she eagerly accepted, seizing a rare opportunity for a young woman in 1907.
In New York, she supervised milk distribution depots, witnessed the crushing poverty of recent immigrants, and gained national attention for her work at the 1908 International Congress on Tuberculosis in Washington, D.C. There, she mingled with leading scientists and public health officials, earning press recognition for her competence and poise. In both Heidelberg and New York, Nathan and Lina Straus treated her as family, drawing her into their social and political circles and giving her a sense of confidence and possibility that had been absent from her early teaching years.
Political Beginnings: From New York Rallies to the Washington Bar
Straus’s influence soon pulled Reba beyond public-health work and into the world of national politics. In 1908, when he became New York chairman for William Jennings Bryan’s presidential campaign, he diverted her from milk depots to campaign headquarters, where she handled correspondence, coordinated events, and found herself dealing directly with Bryan and other prominent figures. At one rally, she stood as the only woman on a platform crowded with dignitaries, a moment that revealed just how unusual her presence was, and how naturally she carried it.
Reba remained with the Strauses until 1910, when the pull of home and a clearer sense of her own professional potential drew her back to Washington. Coincidentally, 1910 was also the year Washington women finally won the vote. Reba had not participated in the suffrage fight, as she was still in New York when the ballots were cast, but she returned to a political landscape that suddenly included her.
Determined to pursue a career that matched her ambition, she began studying law through a combination of coursework at the University of Washington and the private tutelage of her father. In 1913, she became one of the first women admitted to the Washington State Bar Association and opened her practice in Spokane. The young woman who had once struggled to find her footing in a classroom now returned as a lawyer shaped by international experience, political exposure, and the mentorship of one of America’s most influential philanthropists. Friends were urging her to run for the legislature as early as 1914, but Reba chose patience, instead spending the next eight years building her legal reputation, establishing herself at the bar, and shedding any lingering doubts about her capabilities.
Running for Office: The 1922 Senate Campaign
In 1922, Reba Hurn ran for the state senate and won. The victory made her the first woman in Washington’s upper house, but she had no interest in being a symbol. She wanted to be effective. That was why she had chosen the Senate over the House in the first place: a two-session term, she reasoned, gave her the strategic window to shed the novelty. She calculated that the men around her would need the first session to stop gawking, leaving the second for the actual work and getting things done.
She would serve two terms, four sessions, and while she commanded respect on the floor, the press remained fixated on her appearance and her gender. Reporters who should have paid more attention to the content of her speeches often wrote about her dress, her demeanor, her very presence in the chamber. But despite the superficial headlines, Reba proved her resilience by becoming one of the most disciplined and formidable lawmakers of her time.
Senator Hurn: Seven Years of Serious Work
Reba served from 1923 to 1930, a period dominated by Republican control of both the legislature and the governor’s office. Her first term overlapped with the final session of Governor Louis F. Hart’s administration, and she backed his efforts to streamline state government and reduce expenditures. Under his successor, the hard-line conservative Roland Hartley, she proved both aligned and independent, by supporting his fiscal restraint while breaking with him on issues she considered essential. She opposed unnecessary appropriations, including requests from the University of Washington, yet championed a constitutional amendment against child labor, introduced zoning legislation, pressed for tighter lobbyist oversight, fought for relief for Eastern Washington farmers, and emerged as an early supporter of a state income tax.
But the issue that most defined her was Prohibition. Throughout her seven years in the Senate, she defended Washington’s “bone dry law” with unwavering consistency. Her final major cause of eliminating the wasteful township system of county government proved more costly. Rural constituents in Spokane County cherished their townships, inefficiency and all. When Hurn pushed for reform, they pushed back. She lost her bid for a third term in 1930, but not before establishing herself as a legislator who took stands, not just a woman who took a seat.
The Lawyer and Traveler: Life After Politics
Though she may have lost her senate seat in 1930, it was a far cry from an early retirement. Reba returned to her Spokane law practice, where she remained active in public affairs and continued to be quoted frequently in newspapers for her sharp, informed opinions on current issues. But the law was never her only calling. She had caught the travel bug early, and in the decades after her political defeat, she indulged it fully. Oftentimes, she set off on extended journeys across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, traveling alone, staying in private homes rather than hotels, and immersing herself in the daily lives of the people and places she visited.
She continued traveling until she died in 1967 at age 86 as a woman who never stopped seeking to understand the world. Having lived a life that spanned from the horse-and-buggy era to the dawn of the space age, she was a woman who refused to accept the narrow roles assigned to her. She was a scholar, a public health worker, a political apprentice, a lawyer, a senator, a fiscal conservative, a prohibitionist, and a fearless traveler. Her achievements as the first woman elected to the Washington State Senate opened doors for those who came after her, yet her legacy extends far beyond that single accomplishment. Reba Hurn embodied the principle that women’s capabilities are not limited by tradition or convention—they are limited only by the opportunities society is willing to grant them.
