I grew up a child of the League of Women Voters, and as we celebrate the centennial of the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote, I would be doing my mother and her League sisters a disservice if we didn’t mention that this year, the League turns 100 too.
As children of the League (as we called it in our house), my brother and I were drafted into its service early on.
We spent more than a few Saturday afternoons knocking on doors, hand-delivering voter guides to our neighbors in time for whatever election was coming up.
Our little fingers folded letters for League meetings and membership drives, and our little tongues went numb from licking the envelopes — until one of our mom’s friends showed us how to use a damp sponge to seal them instead.
We made our own dinner and got ourselves up for school when our mom went to Springfield, the state capitol, to lobby Illinois legislators for a yes vote on the Equal Rights Amendment.
And when Diana, one of Mom’s closest friends, ran for state representative we were drafted to phone-bank the western suburbs for a Republican who my very Democratic mother supported with all the grassroots organizing experience she had. (Diana won, and my brother and I got to serve as pages for a day in the Illinois General Assembly, which I hated but that’s not the point.)
The point is that being as children of the League, my brother and I — and everyone else involved in this grassroots organization — had a front-row seat to the workings of local and state government. And we learned early on that elections don’t just happen — they require everyone to take part.
As we celebrate the centennial of women being granted the right to vote, the League of Women Voters remains a bipartisan organization dedicated to voter education and voting rights. For more information, and to join, read more here.