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First Women to Serve in North Dakota Legislature

Minnie Craig

By Dr. Barbara Handy-Marchello

In November 1922, North Dakota voters went to the polls to select legislators. Minot voters elected a 33-year-old “slip of a girl,” Nellie Dougherty to the House. In the district surrounding Esmond, voters chose Minnie Craig, a former teacher and active member of the Nonpartisan League. Both made headlines as the first women to sit in the legislature.

Dougherty (1888-1955) and Craig (1883-1966) came from different political positions. Dougherty had been a teacher, but in 1922 was a stenographer in the Independent Voters Association office. The job generated an interest that propelled Dougherty into electoral politics. Upon election, Dougherty declared that she would be “redeeming the pledges of the Independent Voters’ organization and working to support Governor R. A. Nestos.”

Minnie Craig became interested in politics during the 1919 legislative session. By 1922, she was prepared to campaign for herself. Though often described in newspapers as “an excellent cook,” she understood the power of women in the political arena. Women should, she said, “play politics as women and not as weak imitations of their ‘lords and masters’.”

Both women were successful in their first term. Each introduced a bill and they became the first two passed by the House. Dougherty’s legislation imposed penalties for drunk driving. Craig’s required hotels install locks so guest rooms could not be opened from the outside once locked on the inside.

Dougherty served on several committees, chairing a special committee investigating conditions at the Mandan Training School thought to be “crowded, unsanitary and . . . deplorable.” Craig, meanwhile, chaired the House Banking Committee.

Throughout the legislative session, the women remained curiosities to the press. When a bill to ban dancing in schools divided the House, for example, newspapers consulted the women for their opinions. Craig favored the bill; Dougherty was opposed. The bill was supposed to enhance community morals, so Dougherty’s opposition was courageous.

When the National Guard invited legislators to attend its training camp at Devils Lake. they were to be housed in tents, sleep on cots, and live much as soldiers did. In deference to their sex, Dougherty and Craig were offered “quarters in a downtown hotel.”

Dougherty declined to run for a second term in 1924, but remained politically active and helped to organize the Democratic Party in 1923. She was appointed postmaster of Minot in 1933.

Craig served six terms. In 1933, she was elected Speaker of the House, the first woman in the United States to hold that position. After that, she went to work for the federal government and never held elective office again.

Dr. Barbara Handy-Marchello is a historian and co-chair of the North Dakota Woman Suffrage Centennial Committee.

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