For Betty Bailey and her daughter Mary Lyn, making lives better for women is second nature. In fact, it runs in their family.

Lyn, a Corvallis, Mont., native, currently serves as board president for Supporters of an Abuse-Free Environment (SAFE), a domestic violence and sexual abuse shelter in Hamilton. A committed advocate for women’s rights and social justice, Lyn doesn’t have to look far for her inspiration.

Her 92-year-old mother has been sticking her neck out for women in the Bitterroot Valley for more than 70 years.

“For as long as I can remember, Mom has been there for women in need,” Lyn said, recalling the time her mom invited a Mexican farm laborer to stay with her family after seeing the woman being abused by her husband.

“That kind of thing was not common,” she said. “There was a lot of class distinction (in the Bitterroot) in those days.”

Sitting at a dining room table littered with newspaper clippings and family photos, Betty is quick to credit her own mother for their family’s progressive beliefs. Her mom, Ethelyn Harrison, served for 28 years as Dean of Women at Montana State University, before retiring to Corvallis in 1953.

“Mom was a suffragist, very definitely,” Betty said. “Her father came here from Ireland and thought it was terribly important for his daughter to have an education. Mom went to the University of Minnesota in 1908 and became a Suffragette.”

Betty laughed, recalling the story of her father’s realization that his wife-to-be was a modern woman.

“Dad was a dentist in Minnesota and they were engaged,” she said. “He looked out his window and saw Mom marching in the street. That kind of thing wasn’t popular in those days – it almost broke up their engagement.”

Born in 1916 and raised in northern Minnesota, Betty moved to Bozeman when she was in the eighth grade and eventually attended M.S.U. It was there she met her husband, Homer Bailey, an agriculture student from the Bitterroot. The two married in 1937 and settled on the family farm on Bailey Lane north of Corvallis.

Homer’s father, W.S. Bailey, had come to the Bitter Root Valley with his young family during the Apple Boom in 1912 to live off the land. But after only a few months he decided to play it safe and return to teaching. He was hired as the first superintendent of Corvallis Consolidated Schools.

Over the years, W.S. Bailey bought land, cattle and sheep and eventually pursued his dream of farming. When Betty arrived with her new husband in 1937, the Bailey farm was a diversified operation with land near Corvallis and Darby, she recalled.

“I didn’t know much about farming in those days,” she said. “I remember the first time we went to the sheep camp up above Darby, I told people we’d been ‘stamping sheep’ instead of branding them. I was very much a city girl and my parents thought I’d never make it on the farm.”

When asked what she would like people to remember about her family’s role in Bitterroot Valley history, a couple of things came to mind, she said.

“Shortly after World War II, Homer and a man named Ralph Erickson went down to Nevada and bought a fire engine,” she said. “It didn’t have a heater and it was the middle of the winter, so they took turns driving it up here.”

After getting the fire engine running, Bailey and Erickson went around the Corvallis area trying to gather support for a rural fire department, Betty said.

“Hardly anybody was interested in helping because they were asking for money,” she said.

The two men outfitted the fire engine and got a building in Corvallis, she said. Not long after that there was a flood and all the buildings in Corvallis had water in them.

“They used the fire truck to pump out all the buildings, and suddenly it was everybody’s idea to start a fire department.

“It sticks in my craw that Homer and Ralph weren’t mentioned when they wrote the history of the (Corvallis Volunteer) Fire Department.”

Another bit of history that Betty is afraid will be forgotten involved a German prisoner-of-war camp on the Bailey’s farm.

“During the war, the U.S. government made an agreement with Mexico that Mexicans would come up to do farm labor while the local boys were away at war,” she explained. “So they built a Quonset hut off the Eastside Highway on our farm to house the laborers.”

The agreement did not work so well, she said, because the Mexicans who came to the Bitterroot didn’t like the work. After a season or two, the Mexicans didn’t come back so the work camp was converted to a P.O.W. camp.

“We had search lights and armed guards,” she said.

One day, Betty recalled, a conversation took place between a German prisoner and one of her neighbors that she will never forget.

“George Wandler had returned from the war and was working in the field,” she said. “A German P.O.W. came up and asked him if he had been in such-and-such a village during the war. George said yes.

“Then he asked him if he had taken a prisoner in that village. Again, George said yes. Well it turned out he was the prisoner.”

The P.O.W. camp, Betty said, was only there for less than a year, but she’s never heard any mention of it.

“I’d like to see them put up a marker there commemorating that P.O.W. camp,” she said. “It’s a part of history that I’m afraid will be lost.”

When Betty’s mom, Ethelyn Harrison, retired to the Bitterroot in 1953, the retired college dean volunteered to use her training to help out at the Corvallis school library.

“Mom got in there and started organizing the books,” she said. “She moved a set of encyclopedias down to the kids’ level so they could use them.

“The librarian came in and said these books were new and too good for the kids to use. Mom got so mad she quit.”

Harrison, Betty said, lived at a time when a person could really make a difference. And after she helped women in America get the right to vote, her mother never took that right for granted.

But Harrison’s support for women had its limits, Betty said. She did not, for instance, support the nation’s first woman in Congress, Montana’s Jeanette Rankin.

“Mother was very patriotic and had two sons in the military – one of whom was killed in the war,” Betty said. “She was a Roosevelt Democrat and did not like Jeanette Rankin much because of her opposition to the war.”

Harrison’s surviving son, Betty’s brother John Harrison, served on the Montana Supreme Court for 34 years and, at 95, still lives in Helena.

As the daughter of a suffragist who devoted her life to the cause of social justice and equality, Betty Bailey is proud of the progress that’s been made nationally and locally in the area of women’s rights.

“Women are completely independent now,” she said. “When I was in school no woman would ever think of being an attorney and there were hardly any women doctors. But nowadays, you even see women in the construction business.”

“I think the women are going to run over the men pretty soon,” Betty said with a laugh.

But one thing that hasn’t changed, she said, is that some women still suffer terribly at the hands of abusive husbands.

“I remember having a friend in Missoula who belonged to a very prominent family,” she said. “I would go to visit her and she’d have a black eye or a broken arm. She’d always claim she’d fallen down.”

Betty said she thinks having S.A.F.E. in the community is a wonderful thing, and she’s not surprised her daughter Mary has taken an active role in the organization.

“I remember back when my mother was dean of women, she would get a call in the middle of the night and she’d leave to go help some girl,” she recalled. “Well Mary is the spitting image of my mother.

“I’m just glad she and the folks at S.A.F.E. are doing what they’re doing.”