LWVAC is proud to have several Life Members—those who have been League members for 50 consecutive years! We’ve set out to interview them. Here we talk with Jean Chalmers, as first published in the January 2018 LWVAC Voter.
Jean was raised on a farm in northern Alberta, Canada, and went to live with her grandparents in Victoria, B.C. when her father died. Although she was a Protestant, she was educated in a convent school. As a young adult, she moved to London, then to New York, where she met and married David Chalmers, a UF Professor of American History, in 1958.
Jean has led many organizations in Gainesville (including the League of Women Voters) and has been a City Commissioner and Mayor. Today she is a Real Estate agent for Thomas Group Realty. David is a Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida.
When did you join the League?
Enid Mann, a close friend, and LWV Board Member, used me to go door-to-door registering voters for the League. The absurdity of a non-citizen out there registering voters soon became too apparent and I turned in my green card for a true citizenship. (My family had crossed the US/Canadian border every generation since the Revolution!)
What issues have moved you the most?
My Quaker beliefs and convent school upbringing taught me to be socially conscious and to fight for social justice and civil rights. I have led many organizations dedicated to this, namely The Southern Regional Council (of which the Human Relations Council was a local branch), the Gainesville Women for Equal Rights, the League of Women Voters, and the American Association of University Women. I was a founder of Florida’s first integrated nursery school, The Millhopper Cooperative Nursey School. I was elected to two terms on the Gainesville City Commission and served as Mayor.
In addition, I represented the interests of local governments on the national Democratic Leadership Council in 1985.
Jean Chalmers discusses the needs of local government with Governor Clinton of Arkansas
What big changes have you seen in the landscape—political, the League, Gainesville?
In the 1950’s and early 60’s there were no sewer or water lines in the segregated neighborhoods in east Gainesville. I do remember my first exposure to the power of the League way. Nina Starr, chair of our Housing Committee, took photographs of many of the terrible slum rental houses in those neighborhoods and presented a slide show to the City Commission. She made a resounding point by bringing before the City Commission photographs of the deplorable conditions around houses that the Commissioners themselves owned.
What advice or lessons learned would you pass on to our members?
I would like to see the League engage our millennial members in a study of the internet—what it is doing to our political system and what can be done to control or contradict all the false information.
I believe James Fenimore Cooper’s observation is true today:
Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to publick opinion. This is a weak point of our defenses, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to be the true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, and the wrong the right.
I also think it would be valuable for us to tell the stories of former felons who have become model citizens, but are still denied the vote in Florida. The LWV could have a letter-writing campaign telling the story of many of these individuals and the sham our current system makes on “one man, one vote.” Reading these stories in the Gainesville Sun might give our citizens a better understanding of the impact of the issue.
