League of Women Voters Glenview-Glencoe

09/07/2026

WOMEN KEEP MAKING HISTORY

In 1893, millions of people came to Chicago to see a vision of the future. Rising among the enormous palaces of the World's Columbian Exposition was something that quietly challenged the world outside its doors: a building created to prove what women could do.

The Woman's Building was planned, designed, managed, and decorated largely by women at a time when architecture, professional art, and public life remained overwhelmingly controlled by men.

Its architect, Sophia Hayden, was just 21 when she won the competition to design it. She had been the first woman to complete MIT's four-year architecture program, yet struggled to find professional work because firms were reluctant to hire a woman.

Now her building would stand at one of the largest international spectacles on earth.

Inside, women displayed paintings, sculpture, inventions, books, scientific work, handicrafts, industrial products, and achievements gathered from around the world. Mary Cassatt painted a massive mural celebrating the "Modern Woman." Sculptor Enid Yandell created monumental work for the building. Women from numerous nations contributed exhibits documenting lives and accomplishments routinely overlooked elsewhere.

But even this showcase of female achievement exposed the limits women faced.

Hayden was reportedly paid $1,000 for her design, while male architects responsible for major fair buildings received considerably more. When disagreements and relentless demands surrounding the project overwhelmed her, newspapers seized upon her distress as supposed evidence that women were emotionally unsuited to architecture.

The building itself suggested the opposite.

For six months, visitors walked through physical proof that women could design buildings, create monumental art, invent, organize, publish, manufacture, and participate in intellectual life.

Then the fair closed.

Like most of the exposition, the Woman's Building was demolished.

Its architecture disappeared, but the argument made inside it did not.

In 1893, women were given a building in which to demonstrate what they could accomplish.

They filled every room.

09/07/2026

WOMEN KEEP MAKING HISTORY
Happy Labor Day!

Happy Labor Day 🇺🇸

Labor Day has been a federal holiday since 1894, but the movement that created it began years earlier with workers organizing for better wages, safer conditions and a greater voice in the workplace—women were an important part of that history.

Rose Schneiderman began working in New York City’s garment industry as a teenager and became a labor organizer after helping unionize the factory where she worked. She went on to become a leader of the Women’s Trade Union League and a prominent suffragist, arguing that working women needed not only protections on the job, but political power.

For Schneiderman and many women of her generation, the fights for labor rights and voting rights were deeply connected. The ability to vote meant having a voice in the laws that governed wages, hours and working conditions.

Her story even appears within the records of the National Woman’s Party, where photographs of Schneiderman are preserved today.

This Labor Day, we remember that many of the rights associated with work today were not simply given—they were organized for. Women were part of that work, connecting the fight for a voice in the workplace with the larger fight for equality.

Photo: Rose Schneiderman, ca. 1907–1918. Records of the National Woman’s Party, Library of Congress.

09/07/2026

“Influencers” (also known as “creators”), or regular people with large social media followings, hold significant power in the information age. As the term suggests, their posts can influence their followers’ thoughts, spending habits, and even their votes. Political influencers play an act...

09/05/2026

On September 17 (Constitution Day), join lawyer Michele Honora Thorne as she shares how the Declaration of Independence inspired amendments to the Constitution - and the surprising role that women played.

Ms. Thorne is an Illinois attorney, human rights advocate, and legal historian. She holds undergraduate and law degrees from Northwestern University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. She serves as an adviser to the American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession's ERA Committee.

All ages welcome. Light refreshments served. Free to attend but registration is required on the Evanston Library website.
Presented by a partnership of North Shore Village Network, League of Women Voters Evanston, and Evanston Public Library.

09/05/2026

Join us for a Voting Rights Town Hall with ACLU IL on September 14, 2026 at 7:00 PM at the Wilmette History Museum.

Hear from guest speaker Ed Yohnka, Director of Communications and Public Policy for ACLU Illinois, and members of the LWV-Wilmette Fair Elections and Voting Rights team about the efforts underway in Illinois and nationwide to protect voters' rights and safeguard our elections, the challenges ahead, and ways you can take action before, during, and after Election Day.

This is a fantastic opportunity to ask questions, connect with fellow league members, neighbors, and friends, and sign up for action opportunities. Light refreshments will be provided.

This free event is open to the public, but registration is required. For more information on the upcoming election and your voting options, visit our one-stop election shop at www.vote411.org .

09/05/2026

Women keep making history

In 1915, suffragist Alice Duer Miller made an argument against women's pockets. Every word of it was designed to sound ridiculous.

"Why We Oppose Pockets for Women" appeared in Miller's Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times, a collection that turned the arguments used against women's voting rights back on the people making them.

Her case against pockets was wonderfully straight-faced.

Women did not have a "natural right" to pockets. Most women clearly did not want them, because if they did, they would already have them. Pockets might create arguments between husbands and wives. They might even destroy male chivalry because husbands would no longer need to carry women's belongings.

Then came the warning about what women might actually put inside them: to***co, pipes, wh***ey flasks, chewing gum and "compromising letters."

"We see no reason to suppose that women would use them more wisely."

The joke was not really about clothing.

Miller had taken familiar anti-suffrage reasoning and changed the subject. Claims that women did not want the vote, were naturally unsuited to political life, or might disrupt marriage and traditional gender roles suddenly sounded very different when applied to something as ordinary as a pocket.

That was Miller's specialty. A novelist, poet and committed suffragist, she used humor as political argument, exposing contradictions without needing a lengthy rebuttal.

More than a century later, the piece remains funny because the satire is so precise. Miller understood that sometimes the quickest way to dismantle a bad argument is simply to use it somewhere else.

09/04/2026

She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.

09/04/2026

Women keep making history

09/02/2026

VOTING RIGHTS MATTER

Your right to vote shouldn't come with a paperwork obstacle course.

The SAVE Act would create new barriers to voter registration and make it harder for Americans to cast their ballots.

Voting is a right -- don't restrict it!

Tell Congress to oppose the SAVE Act!