As the year comes to its end, thoughts often take an introspective turn. For me, for reasons both personal and public, that turn has me reflecting on the matriarchal nature of our state.

Of course, given Kansas’ strong conservative streak and often rather traditional Christian culture, it’s easy for outsiders to assume that Kansas history reflects an antiquated “Father Knows Best” politics. And it’s true that men still dominate the Kansas Republican party, which has nearly twice the number of supporters across the state as the Democrats.

But last week, while attending the burial of a powerful and beloved local woman and friend in Sedgwick County, I couldn’t help thinking about the women who have built, and continue to shape, this state.

Some were crusaders with national reputations, whose time in Kansas was only part of their full story. Clarina Howard Nichols was an abolitionist who relocated to Kansas in the years before the Civil War, and spent her time in the state fighting not only the evil of slavery but for temperance and women’s rights as well. It is due to women like her that Kansas granted women the right to vote in school board elections as early as 1861. The activist and lawyer Mary Elizabeth Lease is another example; an orator and organizer who helped shape the Kansas People’s Party, and thereby the national Populist movement, the arguments she developed in Kanas became foundational to American reform movements throughout the early 20th century.

But many of the women that came to my mind were people whose influence was inseparable from their deep roots in our state, and the families and communities they were entwined with.

Mary Skubitz was a Slovenian immigrant to Kansas as a child in 1890; as a wife and mother in Crawford County, she helped organize the “Amazon Army” in 1921, a mass protest of women demanding improvements of the terrible conditions their husbands and sons suffered in the coal mines. Minnie Wish-Ken-O was a Potawatomie woman and farmer in Jackson County who took up leadership in her tribe during the 1930s, and led the fight against the national government’s efforts at tribal reorganization and termination over the subsequent two decades.

Even more humbly, a filmmaker colleague of mine has resurrected the story of Rosa Ise, a new bride who settled with her husband, Henry, and raised a family in Osborne County in the 1870s; the frontier challenges she overcame made her a determined believer in education and led to her children graduating from some of the most prestigious schools in America.

Education is a constant in so many of these stories, leading up to the present day. Eldora Dugan Love settled with her husband Charles in Butler County in the 1870s; from her homestead, she published a women’s journal that made educational and religious improvement its central message. Three generations on her great-granddaughter, Becky Love Elder, became a devout believer in home schooling, and spent her life organizing and raising money for independent schools that defined not only the lives of her children and grandchildren, but of hundreds of others who were touched by her indefatigable commitment to learning, reading, and community.

Attending Becky’s graveside service, I was struck by the pastor’s invocation of “place,” and of Becky’s commitment to putting down roots, to growing and blessing others, from where she made her home. The same can be said, I think, of hundreds of matriarchs across Kansas history, whose strength was, and is, inseparable from the soil which all us Kansans — both native-born and new arrivals — share. Bless them, each and every one.

— Russell Arben Fox teaches politics at Friends University in Wichita.