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Published in The Seattle Times online on March 5, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on March 8, 2026
Seattle chose its first woman as mayor 100 years ago
By Clay Eals
In 1981, as newspapers struggled to employ non-sexist terms and I was in Oregon covering education for the Corvallis daily, the woman heading the school board pulled me aside.
“Please don’t write that I’m the chairperson,” she said. ”It sounds like I’m the one who sets up the chairs!”
In that vignette’s spirit of gender equality, this week we celebrate a centennial. Monday, March 9, marks the 100th anniversary of the 1926 election of the first woman as Seattle mayor — and the first woman to helm any major U.S. city.
She was Bertha Knight Landes, serving just one term, when mayoral terms were only two years, unlike today’s four.
With her husband, Henry Landes, whom she later labeled her “tower of strength,” she moved in 1896 from Massachusetts to Seattle, where he became science dean at the University of Washington. Gradually she attained leadership in local women’s clubs whose influence swelled with passage of statewide women’s suffrage in 1910. She won election to the City Council in 1922 and 1925, serving two years as its president.
As acting mayor in 1924 while Mayor Edwin Brown attended the Democratic National Convention, Landes fired the police chief, whom she said was lax about bootlegging and gambling.
Two years later, seeking the city’s top job, she invoked domestic wordplay — “municipal housecleaning” — while promoting a pushback on vice.
Landes, just over 5-feet tall, was reserved and plain-spoken, choosing to neither accentuate nor duck her gender. “If the men will not show enough interest in their city government to get the right kind of candidates in the field, the women must,” the 57-year-old said the night before defeating the incumbent by 48,700 to 42,802 votes.
Ironically, her novelty in 1926 became a liability in 1928. “Her sex is against her,” read a New York Times subhead in capital letters. An elusive, wealthy businessman, Frank Edwards, whom Landes labeled “a name, a photograph and a rumor,” ran against her with the slogan “the man you would be proud to call mayor.” Though endorsed by newspapers and labor, Landes lost re-election, 39,819 to 58,873.
Landes died in 1943. After her mayoral term, it took 91 years for Seattle to elect a second woman to the post. Jenny Durkan served from November 2017 through 2021.
In our “Now” photo, we place new Mayor Katie Wilson, the third woman voted into the office, next to a Landes reception chair gifted to the city in 2006. It stands behind glass in a vast, first-floor City Hall meeting room named for Landes. In its honorary promontory, this chair is unlikely to be set up or taken down again.
WEB EXTRAS
Big thanks to Thuch Mam and Sage Wilson for their invaluable help with this installment!
To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos while hearing this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.
Below, you will find 3 additional photos, a 1928 Annual Report and 11 historical clips from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources that were helpful in the preparation of this column.
