County League of Women Voters turns 102

Last month, the League of Women Voters of Tompkins County hit its 102nd anniversary. The local league was formed Feb. 14, 1920, shortly after the national League of Women Voters was created and women won the constitutional right to vote. The nonprofit has continued to grow in the century since, and current members are just as passionate as the founders.

“I joined because I always have been interested in promoting political responsibility,” said Linda Duttweiler, a member for the past 45 years. “The league has had an excellent reputation in that all the way down through history. And I felt that it was a good way to become active in the community. I was looking for participation, and I wanted participation with a group that actually did something, that wasn’t just sitting around and grumbling about something.”

The county league’s membership is diverse, welcoming people of all ages and genders. The group is filled with newer members like Pam Tolbert and Megan Nettleton as well as group veterans like Duttweiler.

“I was looking for a way to get involved that wasn’t overly partied,” said Nettleton, who joined in 2016. “I didn’t want to join a party. I wanted to just be involved but with a nonpartisan organization, and I looked at a few and I didn’t really like any of them. And then, my friend that lives in Ohio was like, ‘You should look into the League of Women Voters.’ And that was like, ‘Oh, I wonder if Ithaca has one’ because we’re kind of a small town. And I found a really awesome chapter here. So, that’s how I got involved.”

That nonpartisanship was also a big draw for Tolbert, who joined in 2020.

“There’s a lot of research that lays behind when the league takes a position on an issue,” she said. “Solid research, good discussion, those are aspects that I also [find] very appealing. It’s an important function that it’s not a partisan focus. It’s dedicated to trying to encourage multiple viewpoints.”

Because it has over a century’s worth of experience under its belt, the league of course has a laundry list of efforts that members have done throughout its history, including annual soup and bread luncheons, voter registration events and even advocacy down in Albany. Duttweiler described one of the larger advocacy efforts the group took on and the impact she’s seen the group have in her time with it.

“Our league, along with some environmental people [and] college professors, really had a major impact in preventing a nuclear power plant from being put on Cayuga Lake around 1970,” she said. “And they also worked to prevent another down on Long Island. So, my awareness of what people could do on a local level, based on some hard work, learning how to advocate, how to do your research, how to present your information and I think all the way down through, that is what I continued to learn from and to admire about the league.”

Considering much of the league’s work prior to 2020 was in-person advocacy and education efforts, the pandemic unsurprisingly created significant challenges for the nonprofit. But, as Nettleton said, the pandemic has also had a silver lining.

“It’s caused our league to be more innovative,” she said. “Since we couldn’t do in-person voter services, voter registrations and pass out information, Sally Grub, our president, and a whole bunch of other women connected with the food banks and made flyers and passed out thousands of flyers to the various places. We’ve done Zoom events. We’ve ramped up our social media, which is a good way to attract newer members, which wasn’t really a focus before. But when everything shifted to online, it definitely caused us to think outside of the box.”

That switch to virtual has also created more participation, Tolbert said.

“Last spring, … there were a a series of debates prior to county elections in Danby, and I was astounded by how many people turned out on Zoom,” she said. “And I think it was just so much easier to do that. So, there are some weird advantages, in retrospect, of this disaster.”

Duttweiler added that Zoom has allowed the county league to connect more with leagues in surrounding counties like Broome.

“Anytime that you can interface with local groups to support a cause is really positive,” she said. “We’ve had some Zoom meetings that have included Broome and Cortland. I’m not sure about Schuyler. But we also have pulled in people statewide that have come in. We had a wonderful cryptocurrency meeting a month or so ago. And I think we had close to 180 people come to that, and that was statewide. So, there were some perks to not being able to meet in person. And I think they took advantage of that.”

League members remained dedicated to their mission despite the pandemic upending much of its status quo, which is a testament to the nonprofit’s longevity. Duttweiler said the biggest reason the group has been able to not only survive but thrive for the past century is “because we live in quite an active, caring community.”

“People are involved,” she said. “They pay attention to issues. And they like to learn how to do something about the issues. … I think that if Ithaca continues to be the kind of community it is, we will continue to have good, strong activity.”

As for the future of the league, Nettleton said a big area of focus for this year is to create more connections between the league and other community groups.

“There’s so many great organizations in Ithaca,” she said. “And so, our plan for the rest of the year is to introduce ourselves and be like, ‘Hey, we have six volunteers. I see you’re having an event. How can you use us?’ So, just try to build some community partnerships so that all these great organizations can work together instead of like, ‘Oh, I saw they did that, but we missed it because nobody knew about it.’ So, we really want to just increase those connections in the community by just helping.”

To learn more about the League of Women Voters of Tompkins County, visit its website at lwvtompkins.org. To learn more about the national league, visit lwvny.org.

Jessica Wickham is the managing editor of Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to them at editorial@vizellamedia.com.