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By PAUL McFARLANE
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
Judge B. M. Miller probably had no idea what his brainstorm 35 years ago would do for Rappahannock County.
It is Judge Miller who is credited — or blamed, depending on your viewpoint — with assembling seven women to campaign for mayor and members of the Washington Town • Council.
That all seven women defeated their male opponents as write-in candidates in that June election in 1950 was one thing.
But when they were to be sworn into office in a special ceremony on the courthouse steps 35 years ago on Sept. 1, the seven women, including one who qualified for the election just two days before the vote was to be taken, became national news.
It was as if “the town became famous overnight,” Dorothy “Dotsy” Davis said at the time. She won the election for mayor by a 51-47 vote, even though Mrs. Davis was afforded just some 24 hours to campaign.
At the induction ceremony held on the steps of the county courthouse, members of the media dug out their road maps and explored their way to Rappahannock County.
The event — complete with large photographs of the town and its new council — filled the entire front page of the society section of the Sunday Washington Post on Sept. 3,1950.
Life magazine published photos and a story of the town’s new mayor in its Sept. 18 edition. Colliers magazine was here and published color photographs — a rarity in 1950 — and other heavyweights in the business on hand included the now-defunct Washington Evening Star. The story of the sweeping change in the temperament of Washington politics and news accounts of the ceremony also made the national news service wires.
The story that seven fiesty women unseated seven men on the town’s council was indeed big news in 1950. Only a handful of other American towns were known to be governed completely by women who won a write-in vote, and the fact that Washington, Va., was the first town to b^ named after the first president attracted the interest of some of the big guns in American journalism.
Then 28-year-old Mrs. Davis, intelligent, articulate mother of two and wife of an attorney, seemed the
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