Every election season, the concerns resurfaces: the League of Women Voters has become a left-leaning organization. Its support for environmental protections, reproductive health access, and voting rights expansion, critics say, proves it has abandoned its non-partisan roots. Currently, the League does appear left leaning.
History shows a nuanced story.
The League was founded in 1920 by Carrie Chapman Catt, six months before the 19th Amendment was ratified, as a vehicle to help newly enfranchised women exercise their hard-won right to vote. Its mission has been singular ever since: protect democracy, expand ballot access, and empower every citizen to participate in self-governance. That mission has not changed. What has changed is which political party chooses to stand beside it.
The 19th Amendment itself was a bipartisan achievement. The constitutional guarantee that women could vote did not pass on the strength of one party’s conviction. Republican and Democratic legislators together ratified it after a seventy-year struggle. The League was born from that coalition. Its DNA is fundamentally cross-aisle.
Consider the League’s support for environmental protections — perhaps the most frequent target of those who brand it as liberal. Who created the Environmental Protection Agency? Richard Nixon — a Republican president — signed it into existence in 1970. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act: all products of a Republican administration with bipartisan congressional support. The League’s environmental stance didn’t emerge from left-wing ideology. It emerged from a consensus that once transcended party lines entirely. If protecting air and water is now considered partisan, that’s not because the League moved — it’s because party politics did.
The same story plays out with reproductive health. Nixon signed Title X of the Public Health Service Act in 1970, expanding access to family planning and contraception for low-income Americans. His reasoning: that preventing unwanted pregnancies supports women’s health and reduces the need for abortion. That was once a Republican idea. The League has simply remained consistent while the party platforms shifted around it.
Voting rights are perhaps the clearest example. The League has fought for automatic voter registration, extended polling hours, protection against voter suppression, and fair redistricting for over a century. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed with ninety-four percent of House Republicans and eighty-two percent of Senate Republicans voting in favor. Supporting the right to vote was not a partisan position. It was an American one. The League stood in that tradition then and remains there now.
The pattern is undeniable: the League holds a position; history shows it was once broadly bipartisan; one party moves away; and abruptly the League is accused of partisanship.
This is not a defense of any political party. Democrats certainly have their own complicated history with defending voting rights, civil liberties, and democratic norms. The point is not that one party is virtuous and the other is not. The point is that the League is not a political instrument of either. It is an institutional guardian of democratic participation and principles — a role that requires consistency precisely when political winds are most volatile.
The League does not tell voters whom to vote for. It registers them. It hosts candidate debates. It publishes nonpartisan voter guides presenting all candidates’ positions without editorial favor. It goes to court to challenge rules that make it harder for eligible citizens to cast a ballot. These are not liberal activities. They are the activities of an organization that believes democracy functions better when more people participate in it.
For over a century — through suffrage and civil rights, through wars and recessions, through administrations of both parties – the League has taken positions long term, after years of study, and our positions have not really changed though the political climate definitely has. The League has stood at the same post: democracy’s door, holding it open.
The League hasn’t changed its values in 106 years. The principles it defends — access to the ballot, a livable planet, the health and dignity of every citizen — were never meant to belong to one party. They were meant to belong to all of us. And, when that changes, we all lose.
Jan Phillips, League of Women Voters La Plata Board Member
The League of Women Voters has never endorsed or opposed any candidate for public office nor any major party in it’s 106 year history.