Margaret Belle Scott Walser

Birth: March 16, 1878 Warsaw, Missouri
Death: January 11, 1942 Sedalia, Missouri

Role in Women’s Suffrage: Member of the suffrage ratification committee for Nevada appointed in January 1919 by Carrie Chapman Catt

HerStory: Margaret Scott was the daughter of John P. and Katie Pinkerton Scott of Warsaw, Missouri. She married Mark Walser.

Little is known of Margaret Walser prior to the couples coming to the Yerington area around 1910. Newspapers show she also lived in Lovelock in 1915, but by 1918 she was in Reno. She was involved with Woman’s Civic Club in Lovelock.

Mark Walser was an attorney and the President of the Nevada Packard Mine at Rochester, Nev. for many years and had other mining interests. In 1918 Mark was the director in chief of the Nevada Dry Campaign Association.

In 1918-1919 Margaret was President of the Twentieth Century Club in Reno and was second vice-president of Reno’s Women’s Civic Club.

Margaret was a member of the ratification committee, representing the National American Women Suffrage Association, and worked to convince Governor Boyle to call a Special Session in 1920 to ratify the 19th Amendment, which was called on February 7, 1920.

The Walsers left Nevada and moved to California in the mid-1920s. Mark died in 1936 and Margaret passed away in 1942, at age 63. She was visiting her sister in Missouri at the time of death and is buried in Sedalia, Missouri.

Researched and written by the Nevada Women’s History Project for the Nevada Commission for Women, 2020