of the League's first fifty years. The two works were to be mutually suppor-
tive, reflecting parallel organization and published simultaneously. The two
volumes were considered equally important and their total value as substan-
tially greater than the sum of the parts. The basic outline was the product of
long discussions between the two authors, with the senior editor sometimes
a passive participant. Subsequently Guyol received valuable advice from the
recently retired deputy director of the LWVUS, Martha T. Mills, and, in spite of
a succession of incapacitating strokes, Guyol managed to select a significant
number of the documents before her death in 1994. Susan Ware's introduc-
tion to the guide for the League Papers on microfilm brought to life Guyol
and her enthusiasm for the League.

The real vitality of the League lay at the local level, but once again, the
experience varied widely, based on the temperaments and needs of individ-
ual members. For some women, especially those in small communities, the
League was the most exciting thing that ever happened. Mary Ann Page
Guyol, who joined the Red Wing, Minnesota chapter during the Depression,
recalled: "It filled a tremendous void in my life. . . . I was right in the middle
of the action, and I simply adored it." Guyol seconded the observation of
Belle Sherwin that the League was "a university without walls" when she ob-
served: "You see, women rarely thought about going back to college or
graduate school when the kids were gone. They couldn't afford it for one
thing -- and for another, it just wasn't done. So the League became our uni-
versity, our graduate school -- it was, well, just everything." ¹

I was approached in 1996 to complete the work, and agreed to do so,
starting in 1997. I was privileged to have Professor Walker continue serving
as editor and adviser for the project and to be able to call on my long friend-
ship with Martha Mills for her memory and knowledge to supplement my own
League recollections and research. Meetings with Martha during the
League's Forty-third National Convention in San Diego in June 1998 proved
to be indispensable to the book's completion.

Robert Walker urged me to send my draft to Ralph Young who, during his
mother's extended illness, had done the final editing of In the Public Interest.
For several years Professor Young has been teaching at the University of
Manchester in England, and I sent him one of the initial drafts together with
the collection of documents. His suggestions and very careful editing have
contributed enormously to the final product.

The documents selected for inclusion in For The Public Record come pri-
marily from the rich collection of LWVUS Papers in the Library of Congress,
which I reviewed in two separate visits. Most of the documents in that col-
lection were available to me on microfilm at the Wilson Library of the Univer-
sity of Minnesota. These included transcripts and records of national con-

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