With the Minnesota Legislature now in session and March being Women’s History Month, its timely to consider how women’s suffrage opened the door to allowing women to hold elected positions. Minnesota granted women the right to vote in 1919, but only in presidential elections. The following year saw the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, and women’s suffrage became universal in all states. (Minnesota might have been a tad slow on women’s suffrage, because of its brewing industry. Some camps feared that votes from women would tilt outcomes on questions that involved liquor.)
In the 1922 election, four women were elected as Minnesota’s first female legislators: Mabeth Hurd Paige, Sue Metger Dickey Hough, and Myrtle Cain from Hennepin County, and Hannah Kempfer of Otter Tail County. Women started to slowly trickle into the Minnesota House of Representatives thereafter, but none would represent a Ramsey County district until 1975 with the election of Margaret Mary “Peggy” Byrne. (Possibly the Ramsey districts were slow to elect women due to the long-held position of the Catholic Church against women’s suffrage and public roles for women in general. )
Mabeth Hurd Paige served the longest of the original four, completing a total of ten terms. Born in Massachusetts in 1869, she finished high school there before moving to Nebraska to care for her ailing grandmother. She attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln before going on to study art at the Academie Julian in Paris, France. Upon returning to the United States, she accepted a job teaching art in the Minneapolis public schools. She then married University of Minnesota Law School Professor James Paige in 1895. It was at her husband’s urging that she enrolled and obtained a law degree from the University, graduating in 1900. Later she became president of the Women’s Christian Association in Minneapolis, and also founded the Minneapolis chapter of the Urban League. Upon the passage of universal women’s suffrage in 1920, she successfully ran for the Minnesota House of Representatives in 1922 along with the other-named three. She retired from the Legislature in 1945 and died in 1961. Her legislative profile from 1923 presents more information on her.
