Women’s Rights Through the Generations
The author with her mother, Ginny Wille, whose right to birth control was not constitutionally protected until 1965. Photo Sarah Whiting
Like all married women in Minnesota at that time, my great grandmother Louisa legally ceased to exist as a person when she married in 1868; her legal “personhood” was absorbed into her husband’s. So it perhaps wasn’t surprising when a bill to give women the right to vote in all elections, introduced into the Minnesota House that same year, was greeted with derisive laughter and quickly withdrawn.
Louisa and other Minnesota women gained their first voting rights in 1875, when a constitutional amendment was passed allowing women to vote on local school matters and be elected to school boards.
Twenty-three years later, another Minnesota constitutional amendment gave women the right to vote for and serve on local library boards. These amendments reflected the prevailing societal perception that women’s participation in the public sphere should be limited to issues relating to the education of children.
Those perceptions were still in place for my grandmother Pearl. Born in 1890, she was teaching in one-room schoolhouses by the time she was 19. However, when she applied for a position at a different school in 1916, the school board chair informed her the board didn’t let “their” teachers go out on school nights, Grandma replied haughtily: “Mr. Otte, if I can handle thirty children every day, I can certainly decide when I can go out.” She not only got the job, she got a raise to $50 a month.
I grew up next door to my grandparents, on a farm in southern Minnesota, so I heard my grandma’s stories over and over as a child. One thing she never talked about, however, was not being able to vote until she was 30 years old.
It took the first-wave feminists decades to achieve their goal of universal suffrage for women. They persevered through arrests, jailings, beatings, and ridicule, to achieve the most basic right of citizenship. With this significant victory, the first wave of feminism came to a close.
The Fight for Women’s Rights Continued
When my mom Ginny got married in 1948, abortions were illegal in Minnesota. State law also prohibited dispensing “any instrument … or drug … for the prevention of contraception,” although there was a confusing exception in the law for lawfully practicing physicians. Mom didn’t want to have another baby right after my sister was born, but her Catholic doctor refused to provide any kind of birth control, and she got pregnant with me when my sister was only five months old.
I was born in 1949, a little more than 10 years before the second wave of feminism began. That wave achieved its first legal victory in 1963, when the Equal Pay Act was passed by Congress. In 1965 the Supreme Court finally ruled, in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, that married women had a legal right to contraception, based on the marital right to privacy.
I eventually learned about these hard-won victories of feminists after starting law school in 1971. Just as quickly, however, I learned that women still had a long way to go. I kept my own name when I married another law student in 1972, and was initially refused the right to register to vote unless I registered in my husband’s name. Abortion rights were decided by Roe v. Wade in 1973.
In 1974, a newly elected female legislator introduced a bill into the Minnesota House giving spouses the right to choose from five name options upon marriage, including the right of each party to retain their own name. According to a 1974 article in the Minnesota Daily college newspaper, the House Judiciary Committee had delayed action on this “controversial bill.”
The Committee chair, an older male lawyer, was quoted as saying, “If a woman refuses to use her husband’s name, she really doesn’t want to vote. She is just being stubborn. I think this is phony equality. Let women be as equal as they want, but keep the [legal] records straight.”
I read the article while eating lunch between classes, and was so incensed by the chair’s remarks that I wrote a long, handwritten letter to him that afternoon. My letter reminded the chair that the U.S. Supreme Court had placed voting into a special category of fundamental rights, while recognizing that freedom of personal choice in marriage and family life was also protected by the Constitution.
From one of my closing paragraphs: “Although my name is that of my forefathers, I have been lucky enough to learn about the contributions my pioneer foremothers made to our family. The Willes have a long tradition of contribution to their community … and I aim to uphold that tradition with the same name that means so much to me. … My name is symbolic of my very existence.”
One member of the Judiciary Committee was from a town near the farm, and knew my grandpa and my dad. He had initially voted against the bill but changed his vote after hearing my “testimony.” That got the bill out of committee and to the floor of the House, where it passed.
Shortly after I sent my letter, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Cleveland Board of Education v. LaFleur. Two pregnant schoolteachers challenged rules that required them to take unpaid leave four or five months before the birth of their child and, in one district, forbade return to the classroom until the beginning of the term after the child was three months old.
The Court invalidated the mandatory termination and return rules, noting: “This Court has long recognized that freedom of personal choice in matters of marriage and family life is one of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
I supported the decision, of course, but genuinely couldn’t understand why anyone would actually believe that a woman was incapable of working the minute she might look pregnant. I knew how hard my grandma and my mom had worked on the farm during their pregnancies. It seemed like these rules were based on keeping women in their place — not genuine concern for their health or welfare.
I was now part of the second wave of feminism. I was angry much of the time, despite the legal victories that were being achieved. I was angry that my refusal to sacrifice my personal identity and my right to vote was dismissed by a man as stubbornness and “phony equality.” I was angry that the only way I could get my driver’s license renewed in my own name was to not acknowledge I was married. I was angry that our bank sent two credit cards in my husband’s name when we each applied for one, and that I had to escalate the issue to a vice president, explain the law to him, and threaten to move my account to get a card in my own name.
Despite having the resources to take on these issues, I was angry about the energy it took to engage in these battles. The legal victories continued, however. Shortly after my unpleasant conversation with the bank vice president, Congress passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, which prohibited discrimination by “any creditor, card issuer or other person” on account of sex or marital status in connection with the approval or denial of credit. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was amended that same year to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex.
Acknowledging White Privilege
One month after the Equal Credit Act was passed, my husband and I closed on our first house. Although we didn’t realize it at the time, our unacknowledged white privilege, due to my husband’s status as a white veteran, gave us access to a Veterans Administration loan with a mere $800 down payment on a $32,000 house. We were approved for the mortgage before either of us had passed the bar.
What a different country we would have today if all young people, including BIPOC and LGBTQ+, could have secured affordable housing over the past 50 years as easily and inexpensively as we did.
For 2025 coverage, Minnesota Women’s Press earned a community leadership award, three photography awards, and four editorial awards, including for coverage of social issues and for our Spring 2025 “Know Your Rights” special section supported by Unidos MN. Our publisher was named Journalist of the Year by Violence Free Minnesota for gender-based violence coverage.
