FINLAYSON, Euphemia (1892 - 1979), first female senator in Almorean history

Euphemia Finlayson (March 17, 1892 - July 3, 1979) was an Almorean suffragette and politician who was the first female member of the Senate in Almorean history, serving four terms as a senator from Frasyrland, from 1929 to 1945. She became the first female recipient of the Collar of the Gold Eagle after her retirement.

Early life and activism

Euphemia Cleland was born at Laine Hill, Frasyrland province, on March 17, 1892, the second of eight children of John Cleland (1870 - 1937), a bricklayer, and Jane Vass (1870 - 1960), a worker in a fish market. As a child, she was educated in public schools, and was sent to the Loudain Girls' Academy in 1904. After graduating from the academy in 1908, Cleland won a scholarship to attend Mulloy College in Baranor province as one of thirty-five female students. While studying life sciences at the college, Cleland met Margo MacLearnan (1893 - 1977), with whom she shared a lifelong, possibly sexual relationship.

In 1910, while a student at Mulloy College, Cleland attended a suffragettes' protest in Seavale that had been organized by the Almorean Association for Suffrage (AAS). While on a trip to the Talavora coast with a group of friends in 1911, Cleland was present at another protest. After graduating from Mulloy College with a degree in life sciences in 1912, she moved back north to Hinnevale, where she contacted local suffragette leaders. Together, these women founded the Frasyrland branch of the AAS in 1915. After participating in protests against the inauguration of John Carroway in February of that year, Cleland was arrested and spent six days in jail. In 1919, she organized protests against the Carroway administration in Hinnevale. In 1920, she was named to the Senate Committee on Suffrage during debates over the Adderson Amendment, which was ultimately passed in May 1921, granting suffrage to all Almorean women of voting age.

In February 1918, Cleland married Donald Geddes Finlayson (1895 - 1961), a member of the Almorean Party who was elected an alderman of Hinnevale in 1920. After the Adderson Amendment opened political offices to women in 1921, Donald Finlayson stepped aside from his alderman seat to take a position in the Nockarsh Telephone Company, allowing his wife to take his place in a special election. At the age of twenty-nine, Finlayson became the first female officeholder in Frasyrland.

Senate career

In 1924, Finlayson was elected to the Frasyrland Assembly as a member of the AMP, taking her seat alongside three other women. During a time of national crisis for the party, as President Edward Norton struggled to maintain civil order amid a collapsing economy and rising fascist movements, Finlayson sought to enshrine a commitment to womens' rights in the AMP platform. After the installation of rightist president Aurian Steele in 1927, and the failure of a joint resolution in the Frasyrland Assembly for the province to recognize the full equality of women, she decided to run for the national Senate. In the spring of 1928, Finlayson defeated Holyport mayor William Machray to secure the AMP nomination. She went on to defeat the Federalist candidate, Peter Mearns, in the general election, winning 49% of the vote, and became Almorea's first female senator on February 18, 1929.

Finlayson gained notoriety for giving a speech supporting the Senate's censure of President Steele in 1930, and soon emerged as a stalwart AMP loyalist. After Steele's assassination in 1931, Finlayson continued her strident opposition to his successor, Kirk Price, and was re-elected in 1932 after campaigning against his Nine Acts, which dramatically curbed civil freedoms in Almorea. After Price was overthrown by the military in early 1933, political normality was largely restored under establishment politician Joseph Constantine Bell. During the later 1930s, a time of economic prosperity in Almorea, Finlayson worked to secure federal funding for infrastructure in Frasyrland. In 1935, Congress created the F-36 and F-90 highways to crisscross the province. In 1936, the year Finlayson was elected to a third term, Taigh Bancaidh began work on a small skyscraper in Hinnevale.

Although Finlayson was returned to the Senate in the 1936 legislative elections, Congress was now thoroughly controlled by the Federalists. As a result, she wielded less influence during her last two terms in office. In 1938, she was awarded the Ribbon of Civil Excellence by President Bell as part of his "farewell list" of honors. As the Western Isles drifted towards a major war in the late 1930s, Finlayson spoke passionately in favor of peace. In December 1939, she gave a speech denouncing President William Valentine for his military buildup, particularly the creation of the Gray Hills Defense Force. Now considered something of a Frasyrland icon, Finlayson won a fourth term in the elections of 1940.

After the outbreak of the Imperial War in 1941, when Almorea was invaded by foreign powers led by Athara magarat, Finlayson abandoned her pacifist stance and rallied Frasyrland to the war effort. At the start of 1942, she began a campaign to raise supplies for the military that ultimately produced 400 tons of scrap metal, which the government melted down into ammunition. Despite her patriotic efforts, Finlayson opposed the federal internment of Magarati residents of the Kumal hangate in Baranor. She voted in favor of the impeachment of President Valentine in January 1943, for gross mismanagement of the war. Finlayson announced her retirement from the Senate in 1944, setting off a scramble among lesser Frasyrland politicians to replace her. She left office in February 1945 and returned to Hinnevale.

Later career

After leaving the Senate in 1945, Finlayson returned to the cause of womens' rights. She supported the postwar beginnings of the second-wave feminism movement. In 1948, Finlayson became a founder of the Association for the Improvement of Womens' Status and Equality (AIWSE), and raised funding for the campaigns of over 100 female office-seekers across Almorea. In 1950, she was awarded the Collar of the Gold Eagle by President William J. Adams for her achievements.

Finlayson was feted in Ellsburgh during the AMP's ascendancy in the 1950s. In 1953, she was the guest of honor at a banquet held in Carldon Hall for female members of Congress. In 1955, she published Sex in the North, a critique of patriarchal social structures in the hinterlands of Frasyrland and Gavshin provinces. After her husband died of cancer in 1961, Finlayson announced her retirement from political causes, but she flew to Kingsford in April 1962 to speak at a feminist rally. In 1963, she attended a march in Ellsburgh in favor of oral contraceptive pills, which had recently been made available. Despite her advancing years, Finlayson made numerous television appearances as the feminist movement came to the forefront of the Almorean consciousness. In 1966, she appeared on The Johnny Skene Show alongside a group of young Almorean feminist leaders.

In her later years, Finlayson remained dedicated to the cause of civil liberty. After the Oral Contraceptives Act was signed in 1970, legalizing birth control for many Almorean women, she grew more vocal in her support of the gay community. In 1971, Finlayson moved into the house of her longtime friend Margo MacLearnan, in Ille Mhàrtainn in rural Frasyrland. Amidst much speculation that the women shared a lesbian relationship, Finlayson cared for MacLearnan during her last illness and wrote a book, Towards a New Understanding, in 1974 that exhorted young liberals, and especially women, to run for office, predicting great advances for the gay community in the future. After MacLearnan died in 1977, Finlayson continued to live alone in her house. She was diagnosed with a malign tumor in 1978, and underwent chemotherapy treatments at Frasyrland General Hospital, but her condition showed little signs of improving. In April 1979, Finlayson received a visit from the first AIDS patient in Almorea, Rob Milfrederick, and touched him, helping to eradicate some of the stigma surrounding the disease.

Finlayson died at the Central Frasyrland Medical Center on July 3, 1979, aged eighty-six, of complications from cancer of unknown primary origin. She was buried alongside her late husband in his hometown of Shawville.

The Euphemia Finlayson College for the Social Sciences, a major component of the University of Frasyrland, is named after her. In 1980, highway F-90 was renamed the Euphemia Finlayson Highway in her honor. The Finlayson Act of 2002, which allowed cohabiting same-sex couples to file joint tax returns, is also named after her.