Biographical Database of NAWSA Suffragists, 1890-1920
Biography Etta Grace Nichols McCauley, 1873-1951
By Michelle Moravec, Associate Professor, Rosemont College
Etta or Ettie Grace Nichols, known as Grace, was born to Freeborn Matteson Nichols, a farmer, and Cora Harvey Nichols in Mexico, New York on January 4, 1873. Nichols was very distantly related through her mother to famed "captive" Mary Rowlandson. Nichols attended Cazenovia Seminary in New York and graduated in 1894. Nichols trained as a nurse at the Homeopathic Hospital in Rochester, New York, graduating in 1898. On October 2, 1900, she married physician E.S.H. McCauley, who moved his bride back to his hometown of Beaver, Pennsylvania. They had one child named Ruth. Grace McCauley died on November 11, 1951 and is buried in Beaver Cemetery.
McCauley became involved in women's reform efforts in the 1910s through the WCTU and the kindergarten and playground movement. In 1915, she was elected to the school board in Beaver, Pennsylvania, was reelected in 1921, and served for a time as president of the board. Ultimately, she became the first woman president of the Pennsylvania School Directors Association. Although McCauley's involvement in the Pennsylvania Woman Suffrage Association is referenced in the History of Woman Suffrage, [LINK] specific details about her suffrage activities are lacking.
Following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, McCauley became active in the Pennsylvania League of Women's Citizens (the League of Women Voters), serving as a director in 1920. She was soon awarded the first of many political positions she would hold over the next decade. Governor William Cameron Sproul appointed her to the State Council of Education in 1921and 1923. She served as chairman of the Women's Republican Committee in charge of the 1926 campaign in thirty-one western Pennsylvania counties to elect John S. Fisher (1927-1931) and on the executive committee of the Republican state committee. Upon his election, Fisher appointed her Secretary of the State of Pennsylvania Department of Welfare, a position she held for his entire administration.
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