Martha Angle Dorsett is best known for being Minnesota’s first female lawyer. After being denied the right to practice law in Minnesota in 1876, she successfully petitioned the Minnesota legislature to change the state law governing attorney admissions. With the law amended to permit admission regardless of sex, Martha went on to practice law and remained active politically throughout the rest of her life in Minneapolis.
In 1922, Mabeth Hurd Paige became one of the first four women to be elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives.
Sarah Burger Stearns was a committed reformer dedicated to the cause of women’s rights. She founded one of Minnesota’s first suffrage organizations, the Rochester Woman Suffrage Association, in her home city of Rochester. In 1881, she was elected the first president of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association (MWSA).
Known as the “flapper legislator,” Myrtle Agnes Cain was a lifelong women’s rights activist and labor organizer. When she was elected to the Minnesota House in 1922, she and three other women became the state’s first female legislators.
In 1888, a St. Paul Globe exposé of women’s working conditions penned by “Eva Gay” launched the career of Eva McDonald Valesh, a young writer. During the time that she lived in the state, Valesh left a big impression on Minnesota journalism, politics, and labor organizing.
The first female nominee of a major party for the US Senate, Anna Dickie Olesen was a celebrated orator and passionate social reformer who became one of the most prominent Democratic women of the early twentieth century.
Bertha Berglin Moller (Delin), jailed twice in Washington, DC, for leading a hunger strike, was one of Minnesota’s most passionate and fiery woman suffragists.
Charlotte Ouisconsin Clark Van Cleve was the child of a military family and a crusader for the rights of disadvantaged people in Minnesota and beyond. Born during her parents’ journey to help build the future Fort Snelling, she lived to see a fledgling community grow into an urban center.
Clara Ueland was a lifelong women’s rights activist and prominent Minnesotan suffragist.
Betty Connolly was a working class suffragist from Newton Highlands, Massachusetts who was affiliated with the National Woman’s Party.