Susie Williamson Stageberg is known as the “Mother of the Farmer-Labor Party.” The Red Wing activist spent a lifetime fighting for unpopular political and social causes. She strongly opposed the merger of the Democratic and Farmer-Labor Parties in the 1940s.
One of the first four women elected to the Minnesota legislature in 1922, Sue Metzger Dickey Hough campaigned for gun control, strict capital punishment, and mandatory automobile insurance, among other issues.
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.
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.
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.
A self-proclaimed “jumper-inner,” Alice Tripp made her mark as a grassroots activist and self-taught farmer. She was a key leader of a movement opposing the CU Powerline, which began construction on western Minnesota farmland in the early 1970s.
Eugenie Moore Anderson emerged as a trailblazer for American women in international diplomacy during the post-World War II era. In 1949 she became the first American woman to hold the rank of ambassador.
For more than seventy years, the Minnesota-based writer and activist Meridel Le Sueur was a voice for oppressed peoples worldwide. Beginning in the 1920s, she championed the struggles of workers against the capitalist economy, the efforts of women to find their voices and their power, the rights of American Indians to their lands and their cultures, and environmentalist causes.
Hannah Jensen Kempfer was the first woman from rural Minnesota elected to the state legislature, serving nine terms in the Minnesota legislature between 1922 and 1942.