Our Arklahoma Heritage: Eliza Dorman Fyler - A Massachusetts transplant who battled for women's voting rights

In the scenic hills of northwest Arkansas, Eliza Dorman Fyler arrived in Eureka Springs in 1880 with her husband Frank and their young daughter Mabel.

Born in Massachusetts on March 11, 1850, she had moved as a small child to Wisconsin with her parents, Dr. Uriah Dorman and Eliza Alma Dorman. There she spent her formative years before marrying in 1870 and settling for a time in Missouri, where she first took part in temperance efforts.

The family’s relocation to Carroll County placed her in a town known for its springs and steady stream of visitors seeking renewal.

Fyler soon directed her energies toward securing broader rights for women. In September 1881, she organized the Arkansas Woman Suffrage Association in Eureka Springs and became its president. Her public statement to the Woman’s Journal outlined a clear purpose: winning legislation that would grant women all the rights and privileges of citizens in a free republic.

Conservative attitudes in the state made the work difficult, yet she persisted by inviting speakers from other states and building what support she could locally.

At the same time, she studied law through a local firm, a path open to ambitious individuals without formal university training. Denied full admission to the bar because of her sex, she gained permission from Fourth Circuit Judge J. M. Pittman to practice in his court under a constitutional opening. She assisted in cases and earned recognition as one of the first women to work as a lawyer in Arkansas and across the South.

Those restrictions only sharpened her commitment to suffrage.

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n 1884, she traveled to Washington as the first Arkansan to attend the national suffrage convention. Back home, she continued her advocacy even as the local association struggled. By October 1885, she acknowledged the group’s dissolution but voiced confidence that the larger movement was advancing.

Her sudden death on November 11, 1885, at age thirty-five in Eureka Springs ended her direct involvement. She was later buried in Oswego, Kansas.

Fyler’s home in Eureka Springs served for a period as a boarding house offering shelter to women affected by alcohol abuse, a practical expression of her temperance background.

Later known in local memory as Hatchet Hall, the property reflected the overlapping causes of the era. Her work preceded by more than two decades the arrival of Carry Nation, whose own temperance campaigns and residence in the same town became legendary.

The two women never met, separated by time and circumstance, yet both left marks on the same small Ozark community.

Through her organizing, legal efforts, and public voice, Fyler helped lay early groundwork for Arkansas women’s eventual gains in voting rights and civic participation.

n an age when few women stepped into such roles, she demonstrated what steady determination could achieve in Carroll County and beyond. Her story remains part of the layered history that connects Arkansas and Oklahoma families to the broader currents of reform in the late nineteenth century.