Our History
From “The White Bear Looks Back,” the 1995 celebration of League of Women Voters 75th birthday. Compiled by Carol Bergeson and Carol Pedretti.
“Let us form a League of Women Voters….What should be done
can be done; what can be done, let us do.”
Carrie Chapman Catt speaking to the 1919 convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
WHAT CAME BEFORE
In 1840 Lucretia Mott was denied her seat at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London because she was a woman. She and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wife of a delegate, were so outraged that they made a pact to start a women’s movement in the U.S.
That movement was launched at the first Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucrecia Mott. The proposition coming out of that convention was: “It is the duty of the women in this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”
Seventy-two years and 800 campaigns later (to 480 state legislatures, 227 party conventions, 56 state referendums, 47 constitutional conventions, and to 19 sessions of Congress) the final state vote for ratification was to take place in Tennessee. A young legislator heeded his mother’s plea, switched sides, and the 19th amendment was ratified by one vote! The amendment was proclaimed in effect on August 26, 1920.
The Minnesota League of Women Voters formed in October, 1919, several months before the National organization. Their aim was to “Complete the enfranchisement of women and to increase the effectiveness of women’s votes in furthering better government.”
THE LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS IN THE WHITE BEAR LAKE AREA
The League of Women Voters in the White Bear Lake area has had a complex history of trying to fit into the varying forms and units of government as they developed through the years in this area.
The earliest recollections of White Bear Lake charter member, Alice Gehrenbeck, went back to the mid- or late-1930s. A small group of women began to realize that they had a responsibility to vote with more background knowledge. Doris Guthrie and Helen Sohl met with a dozen area women at Helen’s Birchwood home in 1940. This first local organization grew to encompass the areas of Mahtomedi, Birchwood, White Bear Lake Village, and White Bear Township. (Minnesota League historical documents first list the ‘Recognition,’ probably as a provisional League, of the White Bear League in the 1940 annual report.)
They met in the basement of the original White Bear Lake Carnegie Library and received help from the Minnesota League. (1944 LWVMN annual report refers to White Bear a Local League.) An item in the White Bear Press of 1945 relates that the White Bear League met in the library and had a discussion of the Federal Office of Price Administration and of the food situation nationally.
An article in 1946 says that the White Bear and Birchwood branches of the League held meetings to discuss a proposed loan to Britain to promote trade and a proposal for a United Nations organization.
Over the years, the local organization changed boundaries. The Birchwood-based League split into two, separating the Washington County and Ramsey County members in about 1948, thus creating the Mahtomedi Area League and the White Bear League. They had separated from each other in order to study their own particular type of local government more effectively.
In time, several area local Leagues joined together. What is now called the White Bear Lake Area League of Women Voters serves 31 northeast suburban communities from Afton to Forest Lake and Shoreview to Stillwater, five school districts (Forest Lake, Mahtomedi, Mounds View, Stillwater and White Bear Lake), four state legislative districts (Senate Districts 33, 36, 40 and 41) and northern portions of Ramsey and Washington counties.