Sharon Harrison, District Supervisor
3200 NW 39th Street
Oklahoma City, OK 73112-6298
(405) 917-2150
Fax: (405) 917-2199
Opened in 1977
Community Security
Kate Barnard was an active social reformer when she was elected as Oklahoma's first Commissioner of Charities and Corrections in 1907. She was the first woman ever to be elected to a statewide office in the United States and without a single female vote. At that time women could not vote in Oklahoma.
From the time of her election in 1907 until the end of her two terms of office in 1914, she got 30 statutory laws passed through the Oklahoma Legislature, a record that few legislators could boast or compete with even today. These laws all had to do with what we would now call the Department of Mental Health, the Department of Human Services, and the Department of Corrections. At that time there were no prisons in Oklahoma.
