~PARA vPAR@ ` nTEXT ` `Edson, Katherine Philips1870╨1933reformer and public officialBorn on January 12, 1870, in Kenton, Ohio, Katherine Philips was well educated in public schools and private academies. While studying music at a Chicago conservatory she met and married Charles F. Edson in October 1890. They settled in Antelope Valley, California, where Katherine Edson soon became active in organizing support for woman suffrage. In 1900 they moved to Los Angeles, and she joined the Friday Morning Club, a pioneering women╒s club (founded nine years earlier by Caroline M. Severance) and the original inspiration for her work in Antelope Valley. Through the Friday Morning Club╒s various public reform and health campaigns she became involved in public affairs. In 1910 she was chosen a member of the board of the California Federation of Women╒s Clubs, a post she held for six years. Also in 1910 she campaigned for Hiram W. Johnson for governor. She played a significant part in the campaign that secured a woman suffrage amendment to the state constitution in 1911. In 1912 she was elected to the Los Angeles Charter Revision Commission and became the first woman to be named to the executive committee of the National Municipal League. She also became a member of the Progressive party╒s state central committee. In the same year Governor Johnson appointed Edson a special agent of the California Bureau of Labor Statistics. In that post she carried out investigations of violations of or shortcomings in state labor law. Her investigation and lobbying resulted in closing a loophole by which student nurses had escaped the protection of the eight-hour law for women, and she drew up a comprehensive wages and hours law that, with Johnson╒s strong support, was enacted by the legislature in 1913. She was then appointed to the five-member Industrial Welfare Commission created under the law to set standards of hours, wages, and working conditions; she became executive commissioner in 1916. In that year she became a member of the Republican party╒s state central committee. During World War I Edson served the federal government as industrial mediator for California and the navy as a mediator and inspector of labor conditions at firms working under navy contracts. In 1920 she was a delegate to the Republican national convention, and notwithstanding her support for Governor Johnson╒s unsuccessful bid for the presidential nomination she was named to the party╒s national executive committee, on which she served for four years. In 1921 she was appointed by President Warren G. Harding an adviser to the U.S. delegation to the Washington Limitation of Arms Conference. In 1927 she became chief of the California Division of Industrial Welfare. She was relieved of her post and her membership on the Industrial Welfare Commission by a new administration in 1931, but she loyally remained as an adviser to her successor, a patronage appointee. In 1932 she was elected to the board of directors of the National League of Women Voters (she had been a director of the California League since 1922). She died in Pasadena, California, on November 5, 1933. ╓styl `
