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The lady legislator Jackson County gave N.C. its first female senator BY HOLLY KAYS STAFF WRITER ow 75, Cashiers resident Ann Austin was just 3 years old when her grandmother died following a sudden cardiac episode. “I remember going to her funeral or memorial,” said Austin. “I remember being on the sidewalk outside the church and knowing that she was important.” As Austin grew up, she would come to learn just how important her grandmother — Gertrude Dills McKee — had been to her community, her county and her state. Hailing from the tiny town of Dillsboro and living out her adult life in Sylva, McKee became the first female member of the N.C. Senate after she was won the 1930 race to represent Jackson, Haywood and Transylvania counties. She proved popular enough to repeat the feat three more times, serving additional terms in 1937-39 and 1943-45. She was re-elected in 1948, too, but died a few days after Election Day.
Smoky Mountain News
August 26-September 1, 2020
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“It’s kind of remarkable,” said Austin. “In 1930 here’s this tiny little town of Dillsboro, and this woman ends up being the first woman senator of North Carolina. It just amazes me.” It’s hard to say why it was that way, said Austin. Maybe it had to do with that mountain work ethic, the idea that life is hard and that getting the job done is more important than the gender of the person responsible for doing it. “But she was not a pioneering woman,” Austin clarified. “You don’t see her out with a hoe digging out a hardscrabble existence on subsistence farming. She was part of a privileged family. Some people say that one reason she had so much time to do all of this (politics) was that she always had a lot of household help.” When McKee first won her seat, women had only had the right to vote for a decade, and McKee was ready to break the next glass ceiling. But despite the unorthodox nature of her life’s trajectory, said Austin, McKee wasn’t a “rabblerouser.” She relied instead on her personal charm and strong community relationships to get things done. “She went to Peace College in Raleigh and was extremely bright, but she was also extremely personable,” Austin said. “Everybody enjoyed being with her. She had the ability to inspire people, and she had strong contacts with her church and with her community and with all these clubs and families, so she was just pretty much a person in the right place in the right time, it seems like.”
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Petra Ann Austin, great-great-granddaughter of Gertrude Dills McKee, sports a suffragette sash in front a portrait of McKee displayed in the Cashiers Historical Society’s XIX Amendment Exhibit. Donated photo
