In June 1922, the Minneapolis Public Library book wagon made its first trip from Minneapolis to Excelsior, a small village on Lake Minnetonka. Riding aboard the book wagon was Gratia Countryman, the library system’s visionary director.
Advocate for temperance and women’s suffrage. She was president of the Minnesota Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) for seventeen years and urged the WCTU to work on behalf of women’s rights more broadly.
Nelson spent the summers of the 1870s and 1880s in Minnesota, where she emerged as a state and national leader in the movement for women’s suffrage and the temperance campaign against alcohol use.
Annetta Johnson Saint-Gaudens (1869-1943) was a sculptor, activist, and member of the Cornish Art Colony.
Pioneer in the Deaf women’s rights movement
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.