Submitted by: PDG Thomas Riley
Imagining Women in Rotary: Minnesota Women did it over a century ago.
President-elect Jen has asked all of us this coming year to “imagine Rotary”. In fact some Rotarians have been imagining Rotary from close to its inception some hundred and seventeen years ago. Among these are the strong women who imagined Rotary more than a century ago.
In 1980 I began to make the transition from young hippy archaeologist to staid Associate Professor in a department of Anthropology at a major university. By 1983 that transition was so far advanced that I owned a suit and tie and a pair of wing tips, my hair and beard had been trimmed to reasonable length, and I had ditched the necklace of puka shell and fruit bat teeth that I had acquired during excavations on some Pacific Island for a Seiko watch with an expandable wristband. I had also accepted a part-time position as Associate Dean of the Graduate College at my university, and was an almost acceptable facsimile of a rising not-so-young-anymore academic.
All of a sudden I was being asked to join organizations that had not been on my radar screen until then. I had been given an award as “Outstanding Young Professional” by the Jaycees and I was asked to join two different Rotary Clubs. I was able to deflect these requests by saying that I would never join an organization that would not accept any of my three daughters as members. In 1986 I became head of the anthropology department at my university, and I was able to add that I would not join an organization that would not accept half of my department (all feminists) as members.
In 1987 all my excuses became moot, and in 1991 I became a Rotarian.
The early strong personalities who pioneered the presence of Women in Rotary have been all but overlooked over the years since Rotary first recognized women members in 1987. In that year Dr. Sylvia Whitlock became the President of the Duarte, California club, “The Mouse that Roared”, and created momentous change in the formerly all male organization.
Dr. Whitlock and the members of the Duarte Club had been admitting women since 1985 and had been expelled from Rotary because of their stance. Undeterred, the Rotary Club of Duarte kept meeting, calling itself the Ex-Rotary Club of Duarte, and sued for recognition in California. With their case finally ruled on by the SCOTUS, Rotary changed forever, and Dr. Whitlock became the first recognized Female Rotary Club President.
Women had played a role in Rotary over the years through auxiliaries and informal organizations, and a few women have been noted as attending Rotary meetings in the U S regularly since the 1940’s, but not as regular members. As far as we can tell, though, the first attempt to introduce women to Rotary occurred many years before that momentous time in 1987 when, in 1911 in Minneapolis and Duluth Minnesota, two women only “Rotary type” clubs attempted to join the new National Association of Rotary Clubs.
The first of these clubs was the Women’s Rotary Club of Minneapolis, Minnesota, which formed in April of 1911. Just the year before, Rotary had become “international “ when the Minneapolis and Duluth clubs “imagined Rotary” by jointly sponsoring the charter of the Rotary Club of Winnipeg in Manitoba. That move was formally recognized during Rotary’s 1912 Convention in Duluth, Minnesota. It transformed Rotary and set it on a transnational path that blossomed into the Rotary we see today, an organization of 1.4 million Rotarians and Rotaractors who have made a massive impact upon the world.
Those two men’s clubs had a second opportunity in 1911 to “imagine Rotary” when the Minneapolis Women’s Rotary Club was formed in the image of Rotary Clubs that were all male. Chartered by the Minneapolis Women’s Rotary club,The Women’s Rotary Club of Duluth was formed. Those two clubs were formed by women for women business leaders. During its 1912 Convention the governing body of the new International Association of Rotary Clubs considered whether to accept women into Rotary and firmly rejected the idea.
What was the Women’s Rotary Club of Minneapolis and how was it formed? An article in The April 27, 1911 edition of The Minneapolis Star Tribune gives a picture of the struggle behind the formation of the bylaws, which was begun by prominent business women in Minneapolis in the first week of April of that year. By beginning of the third week in April two different approaches to a business oriented social club had been formulated among the twenty two women who had convened to create a club that would emulate the structure of the clubs of the National Association of Rotary Clubs.
One of the competing ideas was to form a club that strictly followed the bylaws and structure of men’s rotary clubs. The other was to form a club that it would call a “utility club” that would have its own bylaws and that would follow its own course as it grew over the years.
At the formation meeting of April 21st at the West Hotel, at Fifth St and Hennepin Avenue, the two ideas clashed and the participants decided to form two separate and distinct clubs.
On April 26, the new Women’s Rotary Club and the separate Utility Club met to elect officers and approve their constitutions.
The new Women’s Rotary Club elected Ida May Barrows as its first President, with Gertrude Stanton as its First Vice President, and Helen Wood as Second Vice President. Ida May Barrows was a journalist, while Helen Wood was a senior employee in the West Hotel, at the time one of the finest hotels in Minneapolis.
The First Vice President of the new club is perhaps its best known charter member.
Gertrude Stanton was the first female optometrist and ophthalmologist in the State of Minnesota. She had set up her shop in the new Dayton’s Department store and she played an important role in the development of Optometry in the state and the region.she was a founding member of the Northwest Optometry Association.Dr. Stanton was also active in the Minnesota State Association of Optometrists, and she was active in several community organizations in Minneapolis.
Less is known about the founder of the Duluth Women’s Rotary Club. Mrs Irene C. Buell, who is generally recognized as the driving force behind it, was an attorney. She had worked and studied law at night at the St. Paul College of Law, receiving her Bachelor of Laws in 1907. Not content with that, Mrs. Buell, a widow with a young son, attended the University of Minnesota School of Law and received her Master of Laws in 1909. She was the only woman that year in a class of 22, and in 1909 was one of only two women in the Ramsey County Bar Association. She definitely knew Dr. Stanton and perhaps knew some of the other women who formed the Minneapolis Women’s Rotary Club.
By the end of 1910, Mrs. Buell moved to Duluth Minnesota to take a position as Junior counsel to a corporation there.
We know little more of Mrs.Buell, except that she is recognized as the 36th woman in the United States to be admitted to argue cases before the SCOTUS, an achievement of real note that occurred in 1910.
After the initial founding of the two clubs, Mrs. Buell addressed the 1912 Rotary Convention at their meeting in Duluth, Minnesota. It was at this meeting that the name of Rotary was changed to the
International Association of Rotary Clubs. Her impassioned plea to accept Women’s Rotary Clubs was rejected by the conveners, even as the organization changed its name after accepting the Winnipeg club, also chartered in Minneapolis and Duluth by the two men’s clubs in those cities.
When the International Association of Rotary Clubs refused to charter the two women’s Rotary clubs from Minnesota, Dr. Stanton was active in the incorporation of the Minneapolis Women’s Rotary club which is active until the present time.
The club currently meets at the Minneapolis Women’s Club, 410 Oak Grove St. in Minneapolis on the first Wednesday of every month from September through May. Its meetings generally go from 5 PM until 8 PM in the evening with the first hour devoted to networking, the second to a presentation, and the third to a business meeting. The motto of the club is “Service, not Self”, and the logo of the club features a ship’s wheel with the profile of a woman’s head at the center rather than the initial wagon wheel or later cogwheel of Rotary International.
The fate of the Minneapolis Utility Club and the Duluth Women’s Rotary Club is less clear. The Duluth Women’s Rotary club continued on in relative obscurity until 1917, when it appears that it disbanded. Mrs. Buell was active in it until at least 1914, when she moved south again to St. Paul.
What IS clear, though, is that Imagining Rotary was an early part of District 5580’s DNA, as well as that of D5950. If we had imagined just a little harder back in 1911, Rotary would likely be a stronger and larger institution than it is today. We should properly recognize those women who lead the fight back then to create a more inclusive Rotary.