About Women by Lisa Alther

Author:Lisa Alther
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

Ruth Maria Griswold Green Pealer, Lisa’s suffragist great-grandmother (ca. 1897).

In addition to her journalism, her work for women’s rights, and her various genealogical groups, she was secretary-general for the United Spanish War Veterans and Women’s Auxiliary, president and treasurer for the Women’s National Press Association, and a member of United States Daughters of 1812, the Order of the Eastern Star, and the Order of Patrons of Husbandry. So she was a very busy girl.

The goal of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony was to get each state to pass an amendment allowing women the vote. They got four states during their lifetimes—Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Utah. Women on the frontier had proven themselves equal to men in terms of hard work and courage.

FG: Also there were not that many women out there, and men did whatever the women wanted to encourage them to stay. You see that even in the western movies. The towns were entirely male, and when a few women arrived, men were enchanted and wanted to please them.

LA: Also, it wasn’t any real threat to the men, since there were so few women. Their votes couldn’t swing an election.

FG: Yes, when women rank as a minority, men let them do what they want, as a token of male generosity unlikely to alter the response to any serious issue.

LA: My great-grandmother was part of the third generation of the first-wave American feminists. In 1920, an amendment to the national constitution was finally ratified by the necessary three-fourths of the states—thirty-six, in other words. Sadly, this was after my great-grandmother died.

The thirty-sixth state was Tennessee. The vote looked very close, and organizers pro and con spent a lot of time and money in Nashville lobbying the legislators. It looked as though the suffragists were going to lose by one vote.

During the voice vote, a representative from east Tennessee, my home region, a young man of twenty-four who everyone thought was opposed to the amendment, voted for it. So the bill passed both in Tennessee and in the nation as a whole.

The opponents were so enraged that the young legislator had to climb out a window and hide in an attic. Somebody asked him later why he changed his vote, and he said the previous night he’d received a letter from his mother in the mountains saying, “Be a good boy, and do the right thing.”

What interests me most is that it took nearly three generations to accomplish this, seventy years.

My other maternal great-grandmother raised championship Buff Plymouth Rock chickens in partnership with her son, which they showed and sold for breeding purposes. They also judged poultry competitions nationally. Her daughter, my maternal grandmother, worked as a secretary for an incubator company before her marriage.

After their marriage, my maternal grandmother and grandfather moved to West Ninety-Third Street in New York City, where he worked as a lawyer for the Erie Railroad. He used to tell about coming home and finding his wife in tears because she had no work, no friends, no income, nothing to do.

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