Rightfully Ours

How Women Won the Vote

By Kerrie Logan Hollihan

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2012 Kerrie Logan Hollihan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-883052-89-8

Contents

A TIME LINE FOR WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE,
PREFACE,
1 Lucy Stone,
2 Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
3 Susan B. Anthony,
4 Finding a Platform,
5 Sidetracked by War,
6 One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,
7 Prisoners in a Gilded Age,
8 Rolling into a New Century,
9 Parades, Pickets, and Prison,
10 Over the Top,
RESOURCES,
INDEX,

CHAPTER 1

Lucy Stone

On a farm near West Brookfield, Massachusetts, lived a young girl named Lucy Stone, the eighth of nine children. In 1820s Massachusetts, farm life was hard. Lucy and her sisters and brothers labored along with their parents; they cared for livestock and grew food. Like so many American women in the early 1800s, Lucy’s mother, Hannah, saw four of her nine children die.

For Hannah and other women who worked on farms, life could be bleak and cheerless. The work seemed to never end. They nursed their babies, kept their little ones from falling into fireplaces or down wells, cooked meals over open fires, cleaned, raised chickens, grew vegetables, and did the family’s washing and ironing — which itself took two days each week.

As a farm woman, Hannah Stone lived a rigid life with her duties spelled out for her. No one questioned how hard she worked; it was expected. The night before Lucy was born, her father was away from home, and Hannah had milked all the cows. When baby Lucy arrived, Hannah despaired. “A woman’s lot [life] is so hard,” she often said to her daughters. Lucy Stone grew up hearing that she should have been a boy.

Hannah’s husband, Francis Stone, worked hard on the farm as well, but Lucy feared her harsh, unbending father. Francis Stone was a drunk who slapped his children around. “There was only one will in my family and it was my father’s,” Lucy wrote.

Francis Stone tried to make a better life as he moved up from pounding cowhides in a tannery to running a 145-acre farm. Like other Americans, he had hopes that his sons would do better than he had. The farmer toiled to ensure that his sons went away to school in Maine, and he paid their tuition at Amherst College. But Francis Stone did not have the same goals in mind for his daughters. In Lucy’s day, few fathers did.

A Woman’s Lot

Lucy, like her brothers, grew up learning how to read and do math, but she was not treated in the same way. In the 1820s, most “book learning” for girls took place at home, crammed in with all the other duties of each day. Only a few towns in Massachusetts had established public schools, so boys like Lucy’s brothers went to private schools in towns or left home to attend private academies. From there, the most promising — and those whose fathers would pay — studied at college to become doctors, lawyers, or ministers.

On Sundays, Lucy and her family sat in hard pews in the Congregational church in West Brookfield, listening to long-winded sermons. These were the days of America’s “Great Awakening,” when religious fervor swept across the young nation. From the shores of the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, crowds gathered to hear preachers urge them to save their souls. Thunderous ministers, the celebrities of their day, drew people from far and wide.

Children like Lucy heard American churchmen preach about personal salvation from church pulpits in cities and towns and wooden platforms erected in big tents at camp meetings. To