Women of Nevada: Part III
She began to volunteer her time on various community and environmental projects, and also to lobby for equal rights and bills she believed to be important to help improve quality of life in Nevada.
She was elected to the Nevada State Assembly in 1972, and later to the Nevada State Senate in 1978. Here, she continued to work for equal rights and also for preservation of libraries and public lands, community relations, and tourism issues.
One of her greatest services for Nevada was in helping to establish the Nevada Women's Archives, and in co-founding the Nevada Women's History Project. Together, these organizations have gone on to gather information about women and their contributions in shaping Nevada, and have established a means of preserving the cultures of the people who built Nevada into the state we enjoy today.
Jean Sybil McElrath
Ms. McElrath was born in Arizona and came to Nevada with her family in 1924, settling into the home in Wells, Nevada, where she would live until her death in 1967.
This amazing woman contracted progressive rheumatoid arthritis in her teens and was soon bedridden, had lost her sight by the time she entered her thirties and was nearly paralyzed as she neared her forties. She had a remarkable mind for memory and knowledge. In her teens, she had graduated valedictorian from high school, took correspondence courses in journalism and freelance writing, and was tutored in Latin and Spanish.
In spite of her debilitation, she taught herself Braille and had her family create special Braille caps for the keys of her typewriter so that she could write poetry, newspaper columns, feature articles, and historical books. She had a great gift for writing, and earned the friendship and admiration of many people throughout her town and the state.
She would not accept the word "handicapped" being applied toward her, because she believed that everyone had some sort of disability. It was a matter of facing that handicap, seeing it as a challenge, and then working to overcome it.
She loved to listen to the stories of anyone who had one to tell, and she collected these stories and then often retold them as only a true storyteller could. Many of her readers did not even realize she was blind, or an invalid. Many did not know that her knowledge of the scenery of Nevada was from her childhood memories, from the friends she spoke with, and from the books she
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