Mila Tupper Maynard

Mila Tupper Maynard (née Mila Frances Tupper; January 26, 1864 – November 12, 1926) was an American Unitarian minister, writer, social reformer and suffragist. She is thought to have been the first female minister in Nevada. Tupper Maynard was greatly influenced by her sister, Eliza Frances Tupper, who was 20 years older and active in establishing churches throughout the Midwestern United States. Tupper Maynard accompanied her sister on these projects and became actively involved in the Unitarian church.

Her ambition was to become a Unitarian minister, but women were not admitted into seminaries for training. Instead, she graduated from Whitewater State Normal School (now University of Wisconsin–Whitewater) in Wisconsin and then went on to earn a Bachelor of Letters degree in philosophy at Cornell University in 1889.

Nevada In 1893, the Maynards served as pastors of the Unitarian Church in Reno, Nevada. While living in Reno, Tupper Maynard taught religious courses at the University of Nevada, established a choir, and administered to patients at the Hospital for the Care of the Indigent Insane. Her services at the hospital led to an appointment by the Nevada governor to attend the Congress of the National Prison Association (now known as the American Correctional Association). She continued providing twice-weekly lectures and numerous socialist-themed lectures. Her topics included property rights, prison reform, government involvement in religious education, and women's and children's rights.

While living in Reno, she began to write extensively on the women's suffrage movement. She addressed the Nevada State Assembly on February 11, 1895, on women's suffrage. Although the assembly rejected a women's suffrage bill soon after her speech, lawmakers later revived the amendment and the Nevada State Senate and Assembly ultimately passed it. Shortly after her landmark speech to the Assembly, Tupper Maynard provided pastoral care for Alice Hartley, who had been arrested on murder charges. She had killed her lover, Reno banker M.D. Foley, after he abandoned her and their baby. Most of Tupper Maynard's congregation and the local community objected to Tupper Maynard’s attention to Hartley, asserting that her actions condoned murder and the woman’s lifestyle as a "fallen woman". Tupper Maynard's colleagues from other faiths criticized her for appearing to sympathize with a criminal. By 1914, most of the original staff of The Western Comrade had left the publication. Tupper Maynard then focused her attention on establishing the Unity Church of Santa Monica. The United States' entry into World War I in 1917 proved a pivotal time for socialists. Many members opposed the United States entering the war, but others, like the Maynards, supported the country's involvement, which created a division within the Socialist Party. She quit the Socialist Party in 1918. For the next eight years, she taught religious studies until her death in Los Angeles in 1926.