"How can women wear diamonds when babies cry for bread?" Kate Barnard demanded in one of the incendiary stump speeches for which she was well known. In A Life on Fire, Connie Cronley tells the story of Catherine Ann "Kate" Barnard (1875-1930), a fiery political reformer and the first woman elected to state office in Oklahoma, as commissioner of charities and corrections in 1907--almost fifteen years before women won the right to vote in the...