Gentle Warriors

Gentle Warriors tells the moving story of the final phase of the Minnesota women's struggle for the vote under the leadership of the remarkable Clara Ueland. Clara Ueland, socially prominent wife of a successful Minneapolis attorney and mother of seven children, became president of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association in 1914. To that challenge she brought considerable skills acquired as a teacher, a household manager, and a community activist. She was a new woman of her time: politically astute, enormously competent, and widely respected. Under her leadership, enthusiastic, persistent suffragists were organized in some five hundred towns throughout Minnesota by 1919 - the year the state legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment. Through research in family papers, organizational records, and the vast literature on women's history, Stuhler shows how Minnesota's campaigners for equal voting rights reflect America's second generation of suffragists. Unlike the first generation of leaders - Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and others - the women who carried the struggle to its brilliant victory in 1920 are largely forgotten. Gentle Warriors brings them back to life, re-creating their energizing achievements, their bitter disappointments, their conflicts and friendships. On these pages, those committed suffragists who struggled on with such bountiful imagination, humor, dedication, and vision, take their rightful place in history.