Minnesota Women: First in the Nation to Vote in 1920

At 6 a.m. on the morning of August 27, 1920, the City of South St. Paul held the very first election conducted on the day following ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote. The identity of the first woman to cast a ballot will be discussed as will the history of suffrage across the nation and in Minnesota for the seventy-plus years leading up to passage of the 19th Amendment. Lois Glewwe is from South St. Paul and believes that her own grandmother and three aunts voted on that important day. 

Lois Glewwe is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and received her Master's Degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of the published histories of South St. Paul, West St. Paul and Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, and is a contributing author in Minnesota's Trail of Tears: The Beginning of the Dakota Exile in Minnesota. She has written several additional published works including A Brief History of South St. Paul, published in 2015 by The History Press in South Carolina. Her stories of the first white and Dakota women in Minnesota are available online at DakotaSoulSisters.com where she has profiled approximately 20 women in Minnesota from 1835-1862. Lois is also an oral history transcriptionist for Barbara Sommer, Kim Heikkila, and the Minnesota Historical Society. She is currently under contract for a new book on Images of America: South St. Paul in Photos, by Arcadia Press, which will be out in December of 2021.