Women's History Month is coming to a close. As an organization with women in the title, we have to ask ourselves: what does it mean to be an organization called the League of Women Voters in 2023, when the ideas of community action, feminist politics, and voting are each hotly contested?
The Past
Women may be the most fraught term in our name. The league was founded by Carrie Chapman Catt, a suffrage leader, and its early members were the women who had fought to earn their right to vote. The passage of the 19th Amendment was the crowning achievement of first-wave feminism. Two things complicate this history, and in turn, our identity.
First, the league was (and is) not only for women.
Second, for too long, the league did not welcome all women. We have thought a lot about this aspect of our history, acknowledging the ways in which Black women were excluded from the suffrage movement and the shameful slowness with which the league joined the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Too often, the upper-middle-class White women who held positions of power within the movement were willing to compromise on the rights of women of color to win over White male power holders.
The Present
Today, gender justice in politics is urgently relevant. The overturning of Roe v Wade, and the wave of policies attacking transgender people — today is Trans Day of Visibility — are two pieces of an agenda that seeks to strip women and gender-diverse people of their bodily autonomy and equal citizenship. As we confront these threats, our feminism must be intersectional, and it must be inclusive of people of all genders, including men who believe in equality, who are willing to join us in the league.
The voter in our name is an active word. We aren’t just concerned citizens, but voters. It is a claim to power, the triumphant declaration of women who had just fought and suffered to achieve that right. We believe in the power of the vote as the central act of our democracy. Our vote is our equal stake in our communities, the recognition of our essential worth and humanity. We continue to question the boundaries placed on who can vote, how, when, and where they can vote, and policies that dilute the power of our votes, like gerrymandering and the Electoral College.
The Future
In Maine, the League of Women Voters is leading the way toward a better democracy. In the last few years, Maine passed the nation’s first statewide ranked choice voting law, strengthened our first in-the nation clean elections law, instituted automatic voter registration and online voter registration, and expanded access to absentee voting. We continue to be one of the states with the highest voter turnout, though we are not content with our 75 percent mark.
More than 100 years after its founding, the League of Women Voters continues to find new ways of living up to our mission of making democracy work, and we're inviting you to join that legacy and become a member.
We are a league because we believe in collective action, in community, and in the power of people coming together to solve problems and support each other. The league operates by the often-quoted principle attributed to Margaret Mead that “a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”