Stone, Marcenia Lyle (Toni), 1921–1996

Marcenia Lyle (Toni "Tomboy") Stone broke both gender and racial barriers by becoming the first female professional baseball player in the Negro Major League. During her career, she played with a variety of men's teams before making history when she joined the Indianapolis Clowns, a Negro Major League Team.

Strohfus, Elizabeth (Betty) Wall (1919–2016)

Elizabeth (Betty) Wall Strohfus fell in love with flying airplanes in the 1940s and became a Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) during World War II. She fought for WASP veteran recognition in the 1970s, and from the 1990s until her death, she traveled across the country to tell her story and inspire others.

Swisshelm, Jane Grey (1815–1884)

Jane Grey Swisshelm lived in Minnesota for only six years, but during that time she left a lasting mark on the state. While in St. Cloud, she founded a newspaper that she used to advocate for women's rights, argue for the abolition of slavery, build up the Republican Party, challenge the authority of the Democratic machine there, and promote violence against Dakota people.

Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association

When Sybil Carter started her first lace-making classes at the White Earth Reservation of Ojibwe, she set the stage for a major economic enterprise. In 1904, friends of Carter organized the Sybil Carter Indian Lace Association to help ship and market lace made by women on reservations to East Coast consumers. The association provided a good source of income to Native women. It also, however, held stereotypical and negative views of them and excluded them from leadership roles.

Tanbara, Ruth Nomura (1907–2008)

In August of 1942, Ruth Tanbara and her husband, Earl, were the first Japanese Americans to resettle in St. Paul as a result of President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. They assisted the St. Paul Resettlement Committee during World War II and remained in the city after the war’s end, becoming life-long community leaders in St. Paul.

Tripp, Alice Raatama (1918‒2014)

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. Tripp went on to steer a surprisingly successful gubernatorial campaign, and even briefly tried her luck in the 1980 presidential election.

Ueland, Clara (1860–1927)

Clara Ueland was a lifelong women’s rights activist and prominent Minnesotan suffragist. She was president of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association when the nineteenth amendment was passed in 1919. That same year, she also became the first president of the Minnesota League of Women’s Voters.

Valesh, Eva McDonald (1866–1956)

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.

Van Cleve, Charlotte Ouisconsin Clark (1819–1907)

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.

Wahl, Rosalie (1924–2013)

Rosalie Wahl was a pioneering figure in Minnesota law during the second half of the twentieth century. She became the state's first female Supreme Court justice at a time when there were no women on the U.S. Supreme Court.

WARM: A Women’s Collective Art Space

In 1976, the doors opened to a new art gallery—the first in Minnesota dedicated exclusively to women artists. During its fifteen years of operation, WARM: A Women’s Collective Art Space (often referred to as the WARM Gallery) was at the center of women’s visual arts programming in the Twin Cities. Informed by second-wave feminism and in step with the national Women’s Art Movement, the WARM Gallery built a new arts community focused on promoting equality. It gave women artists the professional experiences necessary to compete in the art world and provided public access to women’s art, history, and theory.

Whipple, Evangeline Marrs Simpson (1857–1930)

At the turn of the twentieth century, Evangeline Whipple used her wealth to improve the lives of women, people of color, and the poor. She supported social justice for Native Americans in Minnesota, for African Americans in Florida, and for villagers and World War I refugees in Bagni di Lucca, Italy.

Wilder, Laura Ingalls (1867–1957)

Laura Ingalls Wilder was sixty-five when she published Little House in the Big Woods, a novel for young readers inspired by her childhood in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. Her book, and the others that followed, made her an icon of children's literature. The Little House series offered generations of children a glimpse into life on the nineteenth-century American prairie and immortalized a sod house on the banks of Minnesota's Plum Creek.

Williamson, Jane Smith (1803–1895)

Jane Williamson was a schoolteacher and anti-slavery activist in Ohio before she came to the Presbyterian Dakota Mission at Lac qui Parle in 1843. She spent the remaining fifty-two years of her life working with Dakota people.

Willmar 8 Bank Strike

For nearly two years, eight women employees of Willmar's Citizens National Bank, dubbed the Willmar 8, picketed in front of their downtown workplace seeking pay equity. They never got pay increases, they never got strike-related compensation, and after the strike, only one woman returned to work at the bank for more than a few months. But for the women's movement, the 1977-1979 strike was a resounding success. It opened a chink in the armor of the institutional sexism women faced in the workplace.

How Women Have Shaped the State

Women in Minnesota: Weaving the Web of Society in the North Star State

Rhoda R. Gilman, a founding member of Women Historians of the Midwest and a former candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota, considers the influence of women in Minnesota: the Willmar 8, the Schubert Club, the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association, and much more.

Women Industrial Workers in the Twin Cities, 1860s–1945

For women to earn wage income in the 1800s, they first had to overcome the conventional, and often legal, strictures that led to the saying, “a woman’s place is in the home.” In the early twentieth century, technological and economic change—as well as two world wars—transformed the industrial workplace, and much of daily life. In Minnesota and throughout the US, the women’s suffrage movement overlapped with these changes and helped the campaign for economic and social equality, including the right to work.

Women on the World War I Home Front

After the United States entered World War I in 1917, Minnesota women, like Americans across the nation, were called to contribute to the war effort. Though some went to Europe and served as nurses, drivers, and aid workers on the battlefields, many more participated on the home front. They took on new jobs, conserved vital resources, and joined volunteer organizations. At the same time, they struggled to come to terms with conflicting ideals of patriotism, loyalty, and what it meant to be an American.

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