Elizabeth Lewis Otey

Otey née Lewis was born on October 4, 1880, in Lynchburg, Virginia. She was the daughter of the suffragist Elizabeth Langhorne Lewis and John Henry Lewis.[2] She attended Randolph-Macon woman's college and Bryn Mawr College. She earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Berlin.[3] She went on to author reports on labor and employment for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the United States Department of Commerce and Labor.[2]

In 1910 Otey became a member of the Lynchburg Equal Suffrage League, which was founded by her mother Elizabeth Langhorne Lewis.[1] The same year she married Dexter Otey with whom she had one child.

Otey was a member of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia as well as serving in the Congressional Union for Women Suffrage and the Virginia National Woman's Party.[2][3] She marched in the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession[1] and in 1916 attended the Republican State Convention to advocate for the party's endorsement of woman suffrage.[2]

After the ratification of the Nineteenth amendment in 1920 Otey ran for the statewide office of superintendent of public instruction.[4] She won the Republican party's nomination, but lost the election.[3] In 1931 Otey ran for the Virginia House of Delegates as a Socialist. In 1933 she ran for United States Senate, again as a Socialist against the incumbent Harry F. Byrd and lost.[2]

Otey went on to work for the Social Security Administration and the Foreign Economic Administration. She retired in 1948.[1]

Otey died on February 28, 1974, in Lynchburg.[1]

In 2018 the Virginia Capitol Foundation announced that Otey's name would be on the Virginia Women's Monument's glass Wall of Honor.[5][3]

• Elizabeth Lewis Otey at Find a Grave