Frances Lillian Willard was born in Franklin, California, to a family of ranchers. Her parents were abolitionists, woman suffrage supporters, and temperance advocates. At 15, after insisting on receiving a formal education, she was sent to a boarding school in Pittsfield, Maine.
After graduation, she joined her family that by then moved to Verde Valley in the Arizona Territory. There, she worked as a teacher in several rural communities. At the age of 24, she married John Lee Munds, and a few years later, the couple moved to Prescott, where her husband became the county sheriff.
Munds rejected the notion of a “women’s sphere” – a belief that women need to focus on domestic life, and she continued working after having children. She joined the Arizona Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Arizona Equal Suffrage Association on her arrival to Prescott. In 1898, at the age of 32, she was elected secretary of the organization. This position allowed her to reach out to Mormon women to increase supporters for the territorial legislature to pass a suffrage bill. Devoted to the cause, she was among the few women who attended legislative sessions, lobbying for women’s issues. In 1903, the suffrage bill passed in the Arizona Congress but got vetoed by the territorial Governor.
In 1909, at 43, Munds was elected president of the Arizona Equal Suffrage Association. In the following year, at Arizona constitutional convention, she introduced a proposal to grant women’s suffrage, but it did not pass and left out the state’s constitution. In 1912, after Arizona joined the Union and became a state, Munds once again pushed for women’s right to vote and managed to gather enough men to support her ballot initiative for women’s suffrage. This time, her efforts finally paid off, and on November 5, 1912, Arizona became the 8th state to grant women the right to vote.
In 1914, at the age of 48, Munds was elected to the Arizona state senate, representing Yavapai County, becoming the first woman senator in Arizona and the second state senator in the US alongside fellow senator Rachel Berry. During her two-year term in office, Munds served on the Land Committee and chaired the Committee on Education and Public Institutions. She also introduced and passed two bills – increasing the widow tax exemption and raising the minimum marriage age to 16 for women and 18 for men. In 1918, Munds ran for Secretary of State but was defeated in the primaries. Afterward, she retired from public life but remained active in local politics and women’s issues for the rest of her life. Munds died at the age of 82.
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