“Rochester is run by women.”

That is what former Olmsted County Board Chair Jean Michaels told visiting First Lady Barbara Bush in November 1989.

“In 1989… the head of the city council, the chair of the county board, and the chair of the school board were all women,” says Amy Caucutt, longtime League of Women Voters member and contributing author of Taking the Lead: Rochester Women in Public Policy, 1970-1990.

City Council President Nancy Selby, County Board Chair Michaels, and School Board President Pam Smoldt weren’t alone atop their respective institutions, either; women held numerous positions on most of the other boards in the city.

It’s a similar landscape to today’s city leadership.

But, as history tells us, it took decades of women organizing, educating, and grinding to circumvent the old ways of Rochester’s male-dominated power structures.

This article highlights some of the women who changed Rochester’s trajectory, but it is by no means comprehensive. These women’s stories and choices intersect with countless others, and the history is ongoing; women in business, medicine, and otherwise are carving influence into history as you read this.

The suffrage movement

Sarah Burger Stearns was a suffragist well before her 1866 arrival in Rochester; she attended her first suffrage convention as a teenager and later waged a failed fight for admission to the Michigan University law school (it did not accept women at the time). She did win the support of Ozora Stearns, a law student and former colonel and commander of the 39th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. By the time Stearns moved to Rochester as Ozora’s wife, he had been elected mayor of the city.

“Almost all of [the suffragists] had husbands in public life, either mayors, or county attorneys, or city attorneys, something like that. But it's not like they were quiet,” says Caucutt.

Sarah Burger Stearns / Courtesy the History Center of Olmsted County

Stearns also had an ally in the publisher of the Rochester Post, where she wrote and published pro-women’s suffrage articles. Her articles highlighted daily adversities of Minnesota women, while letting them know that the movement toward suffrage and women’s rights was growing, amplified by her and others.

In 1867, she and Mary J. Colburn secured the first hearing before a legislative committee with a bill that would give women the right to vote by removing the word “male” from existing statutes. It failed to pass the committee by one vote.

Though effective only as an artifact of the past, gendered language continued to be the norm in civic documents. Rochester’s own city charter didn’t strip its gendered language until 2017, thanks to people like then-Mayo High School junior Leah Folpe.

In 1868, the 14th amendment was ratified. Black men got the right to vote. Women did not. A schism in the universal suffrage movement occurred.

A Feb. 3, 1866 Rochester Post article credited to Stearns says, “We can’t see why color is not just as good a qualification for voting as sex, nor why a woman is not just as competent to choose a member of the Legislature as a negro.”

Simply put, the men comprising the post-Civil War, radical-Republican-led-congress saw Black men as a higher priority in the country’s multi-layered system of disenfranchisement.

“These [suffragists] are women who already had some access to power,” explains Wayne Gannaway, executive director of the Olmsted County History Center. “That was one of the things Frederick Douglass said, [that] it would be great if white women could have the right to vote, but currently, no black person has the right to vote. White women can at least lobby their husbands, their brothers and so on.”

Stearns persisted. She organized the Rochester Woman Suffrage Association in 1869, and co-founded the Minnesota Women Suffrage Association in 1881, then served as its president until 1883. She was also a National Woman Suffrage Association Board Member from 1876-1885.

Those organizations were vital connection points for the suffrage movement.

“A lot of the women that were involved in the suffrage movement were also involved in all kinds of good deeds in the community. During that period, there were so many Women's Club kinds of things,” says Caucutt.

Stearns would have rubbed elbows with women like rural powerhouse and future vice president of the Farm Bureau Jesse Pridemore, who was known for fixing a city road with a team of women-led wagons in the 1810s; Rochester’s first woman minister, Eliza Tepper Wilks of the Universalist Church; Amelia Witherstein, who was elected to the Rochester school board in 1875 (she also happened to be the grandmother of the Withers family, who owned the Post-Bulletin). Even Susan B. Anthony came here to Rochester, to speak on Christmas Day, 1877. (You can learn more about these figures and their connections at the Olmsted County History Center’s current exhibit, “The Onward March of Women’s Suffrage.”)

Dr. Booker Granger / Used with permission of Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research

These clubs weren’t only political organizations in town. The Civic League, which Dr. Booker Granger (who became Mayo Clinic’s first female physician in 1898) was a part of, helped set public health guidelines for Rochester. In 1914, Dr. Granger became deputy director of public health, becoming instrumental in setting up the city’s first garbage collection system.

Teaching the City

Belva Snodgrass started her teaching career here two years after the 19th amendment was ratified. It was a career defined, in part, by a reputation for strict discipline. Despite a tough reputation, Snodgrass might be Rochester’s ultimate example of “you’ll thank me when you’re older.”

Belva Snodgrass / Courtesy the History Center of Olmsted County

Snodgrass seemed to understand that boredom bred trouble. She brought Girl Scouts to Rochester in 1927, and during the 1930s, when a wave of Halloween vandalism struck the city, she used her position as principal of Rochester High School to organize yearly Halloween parties at the high school. She also brokered a deal with local businesses and the students: if the vandalism stopped, the Soldiers Memorial Field football field would get lights. In 1936, the lights went up.

In 1954, she became the first woman to be named to the Police Civil Service Commission. One month after her retirement from the district in 1956, she was appointed to the Rochester Public Utilities Board; she was the first woman to sit on it.

On October 20, 1971, Snodgrass’s 81st birthday, mayor Dewey Day declared Belva Snodgrass Day. She was joined by over 300 former students at a celebration party.

When it came time to name the city’s new middle school, Snodgrass’ name was an immediate frontrunner, though some residents scoffed at the potential for put-downs like “BS Junior High.”

“Let them have their fun,” said Snodgrass in a 1980 interview with the P-B. “There’s always been wise-cracking about my name.”

The school wound up being named Willow Creek.

Dr. Julia Herrick / Used with permission of Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research

In 1958, a less public retirement took place — Dr. Julia Herrick, who had worked as a biophysicist/researcher at Mayo Clinic since 1927 departed for Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, where she would contribute to work on the country’s growing space program. She had some experience in the field; in 1942, the Clinic granted her a leave of absence to develop radar technology for the U.S. Department of War, according to Virginia Wright-Peterson’s A Woman's War, Too: Women at Work During WWII.

Embracing differences

By the time Jackie Trotter arrived in the city in 1965, Rochester was in need of a different kind of education.

In the 1960s and 70s, hiring practices at IBM brought more families of color to Rochester, the Trotter family among them. Majority white cities often had trouble accepting a more diverse reality, and Trotter, who had attended an increasingly integrated high school in Chicago, had seen first-hand the education-quality-reducing powers of discrimination and white flight.

“Good, well-funded schools are the foundation of a democracy,” she told the League of Women Voters for its Taking The Lead book.

Soon after her arrival, Trotter and other African-American women founded The Ebon Sisters, which organized picnics, softball games, and Christmas parties. The group was a protective response; their children had formed plenty of close friendships with white classmates, but Rochester was not immune to racism.

An Ebon Sisters Christmas party / Submitted by Jackie Trotter

“All of our children were bullied for being African-Americans, every one of them. Not one of the children escaped that. So we wanted to provide a sense of community, because frequently they weren't allowed to be part of the community,” Trotter told us.

As a preschool teacher at the Rochester YWCA, Trotter began developing a curriculum to explain why people have different colored skin. She taught her young pupils about melanin, the amino acid responsible for how light or dark a person’s skin tone is.

When her first-grade son came home upset that classmates constantly felt his hair, she offered to present her melanin talk to his class. Her son’s teacher encouraged Trotter to give her talk to more classes.

After district officials told Trotter her she could only give the talk to classrooms she’d been invited to, word spread, and invites flooded in. Trotter gave her talk for the next 20 years at every elementary school in the district.

“I've never had a year of my life that hasn't gone by without young people — now people in their 40s and 50s — who've come up to me and thanked me for coming to their classroom and sharing things that they didn't know about,” Trotter told us. “What I wanted to do in going into the classroom was let children know the scientific reasons why we're different colors; to give kids a small understanding of African-American contributions to the building of this country.”

Eventually, Trotter became the Rochester school district’s first Black social worker. She also contributed to the Diversity Council’s prejudice reduction education materials, which are still used in schools.

Jackie Trotter / Courtesy the Diversity Council

Trotter worked to better Rochester outside education, too. She was a founding member of the local NAACP chapter in 1965, and was instrumental in other community organizations, like the Diversity Council.

“Racism and discrimination are inevitable in this country,” she told the P-B in 1993 as interim director of Building Equality Together, the organization that later became the Diversity Council. “We're just beginning to address it directly. It's important to take the energy to get rid of it.”

Taking Power

In the 1970s, the wave of progress initiated by Stearns and her compatriots finally crested into the highest reaches of local power. In 1970, Carol Kemper won election to the Rochester city council, becoming the first woman elected to the position. Despite holding a master's degree in political science, Kemper had been unable to get hired for a position in the city government. She had run for office on a dare.

Five years later, Nancy Brataas became the first woman elected to the Minnesota state senate (In 1927, Laura Ameial Naplan took over the seat when her husband died. But Brataas got elected in her own right).

“She was a force. She was a force but because she was an organizer,” says Caucutt, who started work as lobbyist for Olmsted County in 1990, when Brataas was a senator. “The women in the political parties were never the elected people. They were the ones who, you know, put the stamps on the envelopes.”

Nancy Brataas / Courtesy the History Center of Olmsted County

Case in point: the Minnesota Senate chamber didn’t even have women’s restrooms.

That changed with Brataas, who was asked to run by Republican bigwigs at a lunch. Brataas told them that, if she ran, she would need the right people, then proceeded to recruit the assembled power players to work on her campaign. They accepted, and she went in.

“She was a woman for whom the most meaningful unit of existence was, perhaps, the campaign,” wrote her daughter, Anne Brataas for MinnPost after her mother’s passing in 2014.

As detailed in “Taking Charge,” Brataas’ midwinter Pill-Hill-to-trailer-parks door knocking campaign inspired an unprecedented amount of small-dollar donations and enthusiasm from local women. In the end, voters gave her the job.

Aided by a colorful, meticulously organized filing system, Brataas developed a reputation as someone who could leverage power even from a double-minority position. She used bipartisanship to get things for Rochester, and supported the ERA.

As an important Republican organizer, Brataas’ influence spread outside of Rochester. She worked for the Nixon campaign, in charge of the Get out the vote in a lot of the Midwest states in Texas.

In 1977, Jessie Howard, a member of the Citizens Action Committee, was tired of then-mayor Alex Smetka, who she said “worked for kingmakers.” Early one morning after a party at the Kahler Hotel where they’d run into Smetka, Howard and a group of friends decided she should run.

Howard’s run for mayor took the city by surprise. She lost by about two dozen votes.

In 2018 Kim Norton became Rochester’s first woman mayor. She won her election by 16,872 votes.

Mayor Kim Norton’s inauguration in 2019 / William Forsman for Med City Beat

Bryan Lund is a Rochester-based writer and regular contributor to Med City Beat. Coincidentally, his father, Judge Kevin Lund, swore in Norton as mayor (above).