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 Isabelle Ahearn O'Neill (1880-1975)
A starring role at the State House

  By KATHERINE GREGG
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

She went from the vaudeville circuit to the Rhode Island political stage, from silent film actress in such screen esoterica as "Joe Lincoln's Cape Cod Stories" to gavel-wielding chairman of the 1924 National Democratic Convention at Madison Square Garden.

From parochial school gymnastics and elocution teacher to federal narcotics agent.

"Could Talk On Anything, Often Did," said the headline above a newspaper profile of the seemingly unstoppable Isabelle A. O'Neill several years before her death in 1975 at the age of 94.

"Home James. And don't spare the horses" was the most memorable line she recalled from her short-lived acting career. But her political career left a permanent mark on Rhode Island history.

In 1922, two years after women gained the right to vote, Isabelle Ahearn O'Neill - youngest of 13 children of a former Woonsocket city councilman - became Rhode Island's first woman legislator. She was elected to represent the citizens of Smith Hill in the Rhode Island House.

Other state and national titles would follow: deputy Senate floor leader, Democratic national committeewoman. Radio brought her voice home when she temporarily chaired the party's marathon 14-day, 103-ballot national convention.

"No, I shall not wear a hat during sessions," she said soon after her first election, in response to an inevitable question in her day. "And I want the men to smoke and do anything else they would have been accustomed to do in the State House. I ask for no favors because I am a woman."

She won a three-way race, and went on to serve eight years in the House before moving up to the Senate for another two terms. As one columnist put it: "She says she is going to the State House to represent what she considers the sound judgment of the women of the state, and that she will seek to have the legitimate necessities of the women and children cared for in legislation."

As a legislator and divorced Roman Catholic, Mrs. O'Neill sought to create a Court of Domestic Relations to reduce the number of divorces. While her bill never passed, a similar court was set up two years after she left the Assembly. She fought to expand widow's pensions, and ended up the recipient, herself, of one of Rhode Island's first special pension bills.

A newspaper clip from the early 1950s tells the story: "The General Assembly in its dying hours yesterday remembered one of its former longtime members with a generous pension." To wit: an additional $151.65 a month for a grand total of $2,500 yearly.

In her third term, she drafted a drug control bill that was considered a model for the times, and used her position to rail against doctors who made drugs too easily available. Through her efforts, the state also created a Rhode Island Narcotic Board, which became the springboard for her next career.

In 1933 she left the Senate for an appointment to "one of the most important" jobs given a woman during the Roosevelt administration: legislative agent for the narcotics bureau.

Never a suffragette, Mrs. O'Neill once explained that she got into politics because she was so well acquainted with Providence in 1922. Politics also gave her a national stage.

Decades later, 40 women who had followed Mrs. O'Neill's path to the State House gathered at Micheletti's restaurant in Providence to take stock of how far they had come, and to swap "Isabelle" stories. Among them: the acquaintance who remembered Mrs. O'Neill raising hell whenever the Republican doorkeepers tried to shut her Democratic constituents out of the House and Senate galleries.

"There are lot of uncertainties connected with the new Assembly, but nothing is surer than that Mrs. O'Neill will be heard from. She has made it a practice to be heard from regularly and at frequent intervals ever since she was 17 years old," proclaimed a political columnist in her day.

Source: Files of the Providence Journal.

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