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Lillian Exum Clement bio and photo

Lillian Exum Clement bio and photo

Item Information

Title

Lillian Exum Clement bio and photo

Source

Carol Hammerstein. Women of the North Carolina General Assembly: Leadership with a New Perspective. Raleigh, NC: Office of the Secretary of State, 1995. North Carolina Collection, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-CH

Rights

https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en

Type

still image

Identifier

https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/items/show/6238

Text

Women of the North Carolina General Assembly
Leadership with a New Perspective

The story of women in the General Assembly begins in the highlands of North Carolina in 1894, when a baby girl was born to George W. and Sarah Elizabeth Burnette Clement. The child, Lillian Exum Clement, lived in a rural mountain home and studied in a one-room schoolhouse in Black Mountain, North Carolina until she was thirteen. When her father was asked to help build George Vanderbilt’s famous Biltmore House, the family moved to Asheville, where Clement finished high school and studied at Asheville Business College.

Clement was determined to study law, an unusual choice for women at the time. She took a job as a sheriff’s deputy and studied at night with private tutors. After earning one of the highest scores on the bar exam among 70 students, she quickly established herself as a capable criminal lawyer, the first female attorney in North Carolina without male partners.

This was not to be the only “first” to the credit of Lillian Exum Clement. In 1920, as the debate over women’s suffrage raged, the Democratic Party in Buncombe County asked the 26-year-old to run for a seat in the North Carolina House of Representatives. In a time when women were expected to be seen and not heard in public life - and were not even seen on the floor of the General Assembly - Clement accepted the challenge. She beat two male opponents in the primary election before the Equal Suffrage Amendment had passed. As the Democratic candidate in a traditionally one-party state, Clement sailed through the general election. She was elected to the 1921 General Assembly by a margin of 10,368 to 41 in an all-male ballot. Thus, Clement became the first woman to serve in the North Carolina General Assembly and, indeed, the first women to serve in any state legislature in the South.

Clement said of her experience running for office: “I was afraid at first that men would oppose me because I am a woman, but I don’t feel that way now. I have always worked with men, and I know them as they are. I have no false illusions or fears of them…I am by nature, very conservative, But I am firm in my convictions. I want to blaze a trail for other women. I know that…