Life
Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms was the daughter of Mark Hanna and the wife of Sen. Joseph Medill McCormick and later of Congressman Albert Gallatin Simms, hence her maiden name, Ruth Hanna, and name upon death, Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms, are also seen in the literature. McCormick took an active role in the women's suffrage movement.
McCormick was born in Cleveland, Ohio where she attended Hathaway Brown School. Later, she attended the The Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York and the Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut. She owned and operated a dairy and breeding farm near Byron, Illinois and was the publisher and president of the Rockford Consolidated Newspapers in Rockford, Illinois.
McCormick was the chairman of the first woman’s executive committee of the Republican National Committee, and an associate member of the national committee 1919-1924, in the latter year becoming the first elected national committeewoman from Illinois and served until 1928. She was an active worker for the suffrage amendment from 1913 until the United States Constitution was amended. From 1913 to 1914, she served as head of the Congressional Committee for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). She took over leadership from Alice Paul, who went on to form the Congressional Union as a separate national suffrage organization. During her time as leader of the Congressional Committee, she produced an eight-reel melodrama Your Girl and Mine, which was intended to help gain support for the suffrage movement. The film never circulated broadly, despite critical praise from contemporary film reviewers, because the distribution agreement between NAWSA and the World Film Company fell apart shortly after the premiere in 1914 and the film was confined to private screenings.
McCormick was elected as a Republican to the Seventy-first Congress and served from March 4, 1929 to March 3, 1931 for the House of Representatives, at-large from Illinois. She was not a candidate for renomination in 1930 since she received the Republican nomination for United States Senator in which election she was unsuccessful. She resumed her newspaper interests. She married Albert Gallatin Simms, of New Mexico, who was also a Member of the Seventy-first Congress and resided in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1932 she founded Sandia Preparatory School and in 1938 she founded Manzano Day School. She died in Chicago, Illinois in 1944 and was buried in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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