Blog / Last Updated: January 7, 2025
By: Dianna Wynn
Over a century after our founding — and the passage of the 19th amendment that granted many women the right to vote — some people question why the League of Women Voters keeps the word ‘women’ in our name. Why the continued focus on just half of the voting population? Doesn’t the League serve all voters, welcome members of all gender identities, and want everyone to participate in democracy? Doesn’t the League include men in our membership? If so, why do women need to stay front and center in our organization?
These are all valid questions. Yet to me, now more than ever, it’s clear that “women” is an essential part of our name — and always will be. Women must remain persistent in our fight for equity and respect in a world we contribute to in a multitude of ways.
From our nation’s founding until 1920, women were generally shunned from American politics and virtually invisible in our democracy. Laws and policies ensured that we were largely not seen and not heard. The founding of the League of Women Voters, by the very suffragists who fought for the passage of the 19th Amendment, is an important part of women’s history in this nation – and that history should never be erased.
Read the full blog post by LWVUS president Dianna Wynn: https://www.lwv.org/blog/why-we-will-remain-league-women-voters
