The first Euro-American woman to live permanently on San Juan Island, she also served as a community leader and role model for hundreds of women who braved the primitive conditions of the island’s early settlement years.
In 1961, labor activist Esther Peterson, the head of the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor, urged President Kennedy to establish the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women in order to develop recommendations for achieving gender equality.
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Mattie was considered an important witness in prosecuting polygamy. Not only was she in a polygamist marriage herself, but as a doctor, she often delivered the babies of polygamist wives. To the federal government, a baby delivered to a polygamist wife was proof a polygamist marriage. The prosecutors had a warrant out for Mattie to testify. She did not want to be responsible for a man getting arrested, leaving so many children without support. She decided to leave so that she would not have to testify. For the next two years, she and her young daughter Elizabeth moved around in England and the eastern U.S., until the warrant for her had expired.