Wild Women Of The West: Frieda Fligelman & Belle Fligelman Winestine

Jeannette Rankin has a statue in Montana’s capitol and in Washington D.C.’s Statuary Hall, but two young suffragists from Helena, Montana, stand as boldly in history as champions for the cause of women’s rights. Frieda Fligelman, born in 1890, and her one-year-younger sister, Belle, were the only children in a prosperous, well-educated, Jewish household, who grew up in the brand-new state of Montana. Both girls were sent to the University of Wisconsin for college degrees, and both championed the Progressive causes popular in the first decades of the twentieth century. 

Both young women worked for suffrage during their college years, and in 1914, Belle moved home to Helena, where she wrote articles on women’s rights and other subjects for the Helena Independent and began stumping for both the vote and Jeannette Rankin’s election to Congress in 1916. Belle literally stood on soap boxes on the capital city’s street corners, scandalized her stepmother to the point that she threatened to evict Belle from the family home. 

After Rankin’s election, Belle moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as the congresswoman’s secretary and speech writer—four years before women would finally earn the franchise on a national scale. While in Washington, she became passionate about the need for women to fight for better conditions for women and children. She would never stop working toward her goals of equality, eventually running unsuccessfully for Montana’s state senate in 1932.

Frieda Fligelman enrolled at Columbia University to study sociology after graduating from the University of Wisconsin. After World War II, she returned to Helena and founded the Institute for Social Logic—a think tank intended to examine the way public policies are formed. Belle, who had married Norman Winestine, had also returned to Helena to raise children and work on women’s rights and child welfare. The sisters would be lifelong advocates for women’s rights and were active in the American Association of university women, the League of Women Voters, and other public organizations that supported equality under the law. In the run up to the 1914 election, Belle worked with Lora Edmunds and Mary O’Neill to publish the Suffrage Daily News, a four-page daily argument for the vote that included arguments from men and women and coverage of great events like the Suffrage Parade led by Jeannette Rankin in September 1914 down the main street of the capital city.