WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE SERIES
by Cherry Sokoloski
ALICE PAUL, A WOMAN WITH THE WILL TO WIN
Women's Suffrage Series by Cherry Sokoloski
This month, on Aug. 26, Americans will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The final years of the fight for women’s suffrage were highly dramatic, thanks in large part to the courage and tenacity of a remarkable woman, Alice Paul (1885-1977).
Paul’s approach was anything but polite. Her strategy was to embarrass President Woodrow Wilson for his stand against suffrage, and she actively campaigned against Wilson and his entire Democratic party during the 1916 election. Wilson won by a small margin.
Paul had an early education in radical politics. In 1907, in her early 20s, she traveled to England to further her studies. There was a strong organization in Great Britain at the time working to gain more rights for women, including the right to vote. These women used strategies that were much more militant than those of their sisters in the United States – such as throwing bricks through windows and going on hunger strikes.
Paul became involved with the group and was jailed three times for her participation.
When she returned to the U.S., Paul joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association and tried, unsuccessfully, to convince the organization to use some of the English tactics. The NAWSA, which had become quite conservative, was primarily working to gain the vote on a state-by-state basis. This strategy found favor with many politicians, since it was slow as molasses.
Paul and Lucy Burns started their own organization in1913 called the Congressional Union for Woman’s Suffrage, later renamed the National Woman’s Party.
However, Paul undertook one last project with the NAWSA, an elaborate parade in Washington, D.C. in 1913, on the eve of President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. About 8,000 women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue that day, including the famous Chicago suffragist Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
The parade was only the beginning of a five-year battle with the president, one that Paul and other suffragists would eventually win.
Perhaps Wilson should have guessed the strength of his adversary. The night before his inauguration in 1913, he arrived in D.C. to find no adoring crowds awaiting him. Asked where all the people were, an aide informed him that they were all watching the women’s suffrage parade.
A new approach
In 1917, following President Wilson’s reelection, the National Woman’s Party was looking for a new way to influence him. Another leader in the party, Harriot Stanton Blatch (daughter of the famed suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton) had a dramatic idea: the suffragists could organize a picketing campaign in front of the White House. No one had ever picketed the White House before.
The picketers carried banners with messages such as “Mr. President, What Will You Do for Woman Suffrage?” But they did not speak to each other or to people on the street, so they were called the “Silent Sentinels.” The picketing began in the bitter cold of January, 1917; it continued, six days a week, for almost two years.
In April of 1917, the U.S. entered World War I, and there was considerable pressure on the suffragists to quit their activities and focus on the war. Their suffrage work was “unpatriotic,” most people thought. More conservative suffragists – and even Paul’s mother – agreed with the critics.
Paul and her followers were not moved. The protesters used Wilson’s own words against him, carrying banners ridiculing his goal of “making the world safe for democracy” while denying democratic participation for women in his own country. Later, they resorted to burning Wilson’s speeches and even burned him in effigy in front of the White House.
Almost two thousand women, representing more than half the states, participated in the picketing campaign.
Jailed and abused
Paul, Burns and several other members of the NWP were eventually arrested and jailed in the Occaquan Workhouse in Virginia. The women endured cold cells, filthy floors and blankets, and brutality from the guards. They held hunger strikes and were force-fed through tubes, a cruel practice. They were also denied any communication with the outside world.
Eventually, however, word of their plight did escape the prison walls, and when the women’s treatment became known there was a general public outrage. The workhouse experience, dreadful as it was, helped to turn the tide of public opinion in favor of the suffragists.
This new public favor, plus the political fact that women could already vote for president in 18 states, finally persuaded President Wilson to change his mind. He announced his support of the 19th Amendment on Jan. 9, 1918. The next day, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of the amendment, but it took another year and a half before the U.S. Senate passed the measure.
Even that was not the end of the story. The 19th Amendment still had to be ratified by 75 percent of the states – which at that time was 36 states.
Next month, we will look at the fascinating finale of the suffrage drama, dubbed the “War of the Roses.” It’s the story of how Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment.
Sources: Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists by Jean H. Baker, 2005; Votes for Women by Winifred Conkling, 2018; Women’s Right to Vote: America’s Suffrage Movement by Katie Marsico, 2011.
CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT PUSHES FOR CHANGE – POLITELY
Women's Suffrage Series by Cherry Sokoloski
The last battles of the women’s suffrage movement were dramatic – and even bloody at times. That time in the early 20th century was similar to a football team on the first yard line, trying to score. The offense tries to scratch and claw its way over the line, while the defense uses all its strength and strategy to deny a touchdown.
So it was with women’s suffrage. It’s good to point out that women were not “given” the vote, nor were they “granted” the vote. They had to fight every inch of the way.
In the July and August articles, we look at the final struggle for Congressional approval of the 19th Amendment, and the two competing strategies that, together, won the day.
Thousands of women devoted themselves to getting women’s suffrage over the finish line, but two especially stand out: Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947) and Alice Paul (1885-1977). The two women fought tirelessly for the same end, but they couldn’t have been more different in the strategies they used.
This month, we’ll focus on Catt, a gifted speaker and organizer. Raised in Iowa, Catt worked her way through college, since her father didn’t think higher education was necessary for women. She graduated from Iowa State Agricultural College in 1880, the only woman in her class.
Catt worked as a teacher and later became superintendent of schools in Mason City, Iowa, the first woman to hold that post.
In the 1990s, Iowa State University named a campus building after its famous alumna. The move was controversial, however, since Catt was not immune from the racism of her time – especially when trying to woo Southern senators to the suffrage cause.
Catt devoted more than 30 years of her life to women’s suffrage, serving twice as president of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association. Unlike Alice Paul and other younger women, she preferred to work within the establishment; she was polite and ladylike. She founded local suffrage chapters nationwide and worked on numerous state suffrage campaigns, believing that as more women voted in the states, the federal goal would be easier to achieve. She called that strategy her “Winning Plan.”
For several years, she also led the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.
New York victory
One important victory for Catt was the campaign for suffrage in New York State. Catt organized a huge parade in New York City, and her cadre of activists undertook an effort to reach every household in the state with their message.
The successful vote in November of 1917 was a huge milestone for the cause.
The New York campaign was considered “the Gettysburg of Suffrage,” in that it turned the tide but didn’t end the war. Some New York politicians even jumped on the women’s suffrage bandwagon during this campaign, sensing a shift in the winds that could affect their own reelection chances.
Since Catt wanted the country to adopt a constitutional amendment, she worked hard at the federal level, too. She cultivated a friendly relationship with President Woodrow Wilson, who had long resisted women’s suffrage. “Who is going to make the home, if the women don’t?” he once asked.
When the United States entered World War I in April, 1917, Catt pledged NAWSA’s loyal support to Wilson. She organized an army of women to help with the war effort on many fronts, including support for the Red Cross and selling Liberty Bonds. This, despite the fact that Catt was actually a strong pacifist.
Women took over jobs vacated by men, working in munitions factories and farming the land. They also served overseas as nurses and ambulance drivers. Catt was sure that the women’s war efforts would sway the president and earn them the right to vote.
In fact, these wartime contributions did make an impact on public opinion and the president. There were other persuasive factors as well, orchestrated by Alice Paul and her more radical allies; we will take a look at those in next month’s article.
The shift in public opinion, plus the political fact that women could already vote for president in 18 states, finally persuaded President Wilson to change his mind about women’s suffrage. He announced his support for the 19th Amendment on Jan. 9, 1918. The next day, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of the amendment, but it took another year and a half before the U.S. Senate passed the measure.
Even that was not the end of the story. The 19th Amendment still had to be ratified by 75 percent of the states – which at that time was 36 states. The tireless Catt worked on this year-long effort as well.
When women finally had the vote, there was no longer a need for a national suffrage organization, so the NAWSA morphed into the League of Women Voters. Catt had a hand in that, too.
Sources: Great Women of the Suffrage Movement by Dana Meachen Rau, 2006; PBS documentary “The Vote”.
AFRICAN-AMERICAN SUFFRAGIST WINS 2020 PULITZER PRIZE
Women's Suffrage Series by Cherry Sokoloski
If Ida B. Wells-Barnett were alive today, she would no doubt be protesting police brutality against black men and women, joining the millions who are filling the streets of America – and the world – with demands for justice after the recent murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
But Wells-Barnett lived 100 years ago, and in her time the biggest racial threat was the lynching of black men, especially in the South. As a black journalist, she led a long crusade against lynching by writing and lecturing both in the United States and the British Isles.
This year, Wells-Barnett’s contributions came alive again when she was posthumously awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Special Citations and Awards. She was recognized for “her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.”
Wells-Barnett was also an ardent suffragist – one of many black women who fought for women’s right to vote.
This month’s article honors her courageous life and achievements.
Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was born to slave parents, one year before the Emancipation Proclamation. She was the eldest daughter in a family of eight children. After emancipation, her parents moved the family to Holly Springs, Miss., but when Wells was only 16, both her parents and one sibling died in a yellow fever epidemic. Determined to keep the family together, Wells supported her siblings as a rural teacher for four years before moving to Memphis, Tenn., where her aunt provided a new home for the family.
In Memphis, she continued to teach. In 1884, while traveling by train to her school, she refused to move to segregated seating because it was in the smoking car. She was forcibly removed from the train, sued the railroad and won! However, when the local decision was appealed to the state supreme court, it was reversed – a major disappointment to the young reformer.
A few years later, she also lost her teaching job after she criticized the inferior quality of schools for colored children.
Wells found her strength in journalism, and she became part owner of a small newspaper in Memphis. But in 1892, three black businessmen were lynched in the city, one of them a personal friend. Their grocery store was apparently taking business from a white man’s store. This sad event proved to be a turning point in her life.
Wells wrote a scathing editorial against the lynchers and the white people who condoned the killings, then left town to attend a conference in Philadelphia. While there, she learned that her editorial had caused a riot in Memphis; mobs had wrecked her press and run her partner out of town. Wells was threatened with lynching herself if she returned to the city.
So, she stayed in the North, where she continued her crusade against lynching as an investigative reporter.
In 1894 Wells moved to Chicago and published a detailed history of the lynching of blacks and others since the Emancipation Proclamation. The next year, she married a fellow crusader for African-American rights, Ferdinand Lee Barnett. Barnett was a lawyer and the founder of Chicago’s first Negro newspaper. Wells took the name Wells-Barnett, a very unusual choice for her time.
The couple raised four children, along with two from Barnett’s first marriage, and for several years Ida devoted herself to raising her family.
Wells-Barnett lived in Chicago for the rest of her life. She founded the city’s first black women’s club and the first black kindergarten. She was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Often compared to Joan of Arc by her admirers, Wells-Barnett sharpened her pencil and got to work whenever she saw injustice or inequality. In 1910 she organized the Negro Fellowship League to help recent black migrants from the South. In 1913 she founded the first Negro women’s suffrage group, the Alpha Suffrage Club.
And that brings us to a dramatic moment in the suffrage movement, one that proved yet again that Wells-Barnett was made of incredibly strong stuff.
In 1913, Alice Paul organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C. on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration as President of the United States. Wilson had not been supportive of women’s right to vote. The parade was a huge affair, with horses, costumes and pageantry. It was organized so that women from individual states would march together.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett arrived with 60 fellow suffragists from Illinois; she was the only black woman among them. There had been considerable discussion among the parade’s organizers about participation by black suffragists, and although Paul wanted to support the black women, she agreed to a compromise to appease Southern suffragists: African-American suffragists could march as a group at the back of the parade.
That was not good enough for Wells-Barnett. She had the support of many of her fellow Illinois suffragists, one of whom said, “We should stand by our principles. If we do not the parade will be a farce.” However, the organizers did not bend.
When the Illinois delegation got into formation, Wells-Barnett was not among them, and her friends thought she had moved to the back of the parade. She was, however, merely waiting in the wings. When the Illinois contingent passed by, she joined them, proudly taking her rightful place alongside her sister suffragists.
Wells-Barnett remained politically active throughout her life, running an unsuccessful race for state senator one year before her death in 1931. In 2018, Chicago named a street after her and activists raised $300,000 to erect a monument to this remarkable American woman.
Sources: Crusade for Justice by Ida B. Wells; Votes for Women by Winifred Conkling, 2018; article by Becky Little in History.com, 2018.
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“BLOOMER COSTUMES” GIVE WOMEN MORE FREEDOM – FOR AWHILE
Women's Suffrage Series by Cherry Sokoloski
The mid-19th century was full of reform movements in the United States, and women were involved in many of them.
One such reform effort involved women’s dress. The conventional dress of the times included about 10 pounds of muslin petticoats, starched shirtwaists and tight corsets that actually squeezed internal organs and bruised ribs, plus long skirts that dragged in the mud as the suffragists went about their grueling speaking circuits.
In the early 1850s, the New Dress for women appeared. Consisting of a short dress over baggy trousers, the outfit was pioneered by Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s cousin, Libby Smith Miller, who designed it to use while gardening. Stanton and her neighbor, Amelia Bloomer, copied the fashion, and Bloomer advocated for the new dress in her newspaper, the Lily, in 1852.
The outfit thus came to be known as the “Bloomer Costume.”
The Lily was primarily a temperance newspaper, but the article about the bloomers drew a huge audience. In fact, the newspaper’s circulation grew from 500 per month to a whopping 4,000 because of the controversy. “I stood amazed at the furor I had unwittingly caused,” Bloomer said. “As soon as it became known that I was wearing the new drew, letters came pouring in upon me by the hundreds from women all over the country, making inquiries about the drew and asking for patterns.”
Stanton loved the new costume. She wrote in her autobiography, “Like a captive set free from his ball and chain, I was always ready for a brisk walk through sleet and snow and rain, to climb a mountain, jump over a fence, work in the garden.”
While the reform-minded women enjoyed their new freedom, their new outfit attracted considerable scorn and ridicule. The suffragists already endured plenty of criticism, but now men and boys stopped to stare at them, whistling and making rude remarks. The resemblance of the pants to blousy Turkish trousers didn’t help, since they were associated with Turkish harems and prostitutes.
Even family members were embarrassed by the bloomers. Stanton’s husband Henry hated seeing his wife in this “short” dress, even though it fell four inches below the knee. He thought that when she and her friends sat on stage at conventions their legs would be exposed, despite the fact that they were also wearing pants.
Men in the audience, said Henry Stanton, could tell “whether their lady friends have round and plump legs, or lean and scrawny ones.”
Elizabeth also got negative reviews from her young son, who was in boarding school. Missing his mother, he implored her to visit him – as long as she left her bloomers at home.
Before long the bloomer costume became a distraction from the message of women’s rights, and by 1854 most women had lengthened their skirts again.
Susan B. Anthony, who was late in adopting this new dress, was also the last to abandon it. She defended the outfit by saying, “Women can never compete successfully with men in various industrial vocations in long skirts.” She was angry at her friends who bowed to criticism, arguing that the “mental crucifixion” they endured because of the bloomers prepared them for the difficult work of freeing women from oppression.
But finally, Anthony acquiesced as well, spending the rest of her life in long dresses of gray or black. In later years she donned a red shawl, donated by suffrage supporters, and the shawl became a badge of sorts for this stubborn suffragist.
Women would have to wait many more decades before their accepted dress became less cumbersome and constricting. But bloomers, for their part, went the way of animal skins and grass skirts.
Sources: Votes for Women by Winifred Conkling, 2018; Great Women of the Suffrage Movement by Dana Meachen Rau, 2006; National Park Service.
THE BALL STARTS ROLLING: SENECA FALLS 1848
Women's Suffrage Series by Cherry Sokoloski
The 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, N.Y., is widely considered to be the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement. So, it’s ironic that the right to vote almost failed to make it onto the agenda.
The year before, Elizabeth Cady Stanton had moved with her family from Boston to Seneca Falls, a small town where her husband Henry was starting a new law practice. Stanton already had three small children, and domestic chores were all-consuming.
This was not the life she was accustomed to. As a child growing up near Albany, N.Y., Elizabeth rubbed elbows with some of the most important progressive thinkers of the day. Her abolitionist cousin, Gerrit Smith, was interested in all the current reform movements, and a steady stream of progressive thinkers came to his home, including the famous Grimké sisters. This provided a stimulating atmosphere for the young Elizabeth, and she eagerly joined the spirited discussions and debates.
After Elizabeth’s marriage, she and Henry moved to Boston which also boasted an exciting intellectual environment. Stanton regularly attended lectures and meetings about the social reform movements of the time. She became friends with writers and reformers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
The move to Seneca Falls, then, was akin to putting one’s brain on ice. As Stanton recalled later, “I suffered with mental hunger, which, like an empty stomach, is very depressing.”
In July of 1848, Stanton was excited to receive an invitation to tea in a nearby town – especially when she learned that Lucretia Mott would be there. Stanton and Mott had become fast friends at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where women (even official delegates such as Mott) were forbidden from participating.
Mott, a Quaker with six children, was 22 years Stanton’s senior. A gifted public speaker who was ordained as a Quaker minister at age 28, Mott provided a powerful role model for Stanton. She encouraged the younger woman to trust her own opinions and to speak her mind. Mott’s marriage also inspired Stanton, since she and her husband John respected each other as equal partners.
Both women were angered by the convention snub, and before they left London they made a pact: they would organize a convention as soon as they returned home, and push for equal rights for women.
Life delayed the women’s plan a bit, but when the two met again in upstate New York in 1848, they were able to fulfill their promise.
Tea and revolution
There were five women at tea that summer day, all of them wives, mothers and grandmothers. Besides Stanton and Mott, the group included Mary Ann McClintock, Martha Coffin Wright and Jane Hunt. All had complaints about the injustices of their daily lives, and together they were inspired to take action: They would organize a meeting where women could discuss the challenges facing the female sex.
The women did not delay. After taking tea on July 13, they ran a notice in the daily paper on July 14 for a convention to be held July 19 and 20 in Seneca Falls. On the 16th, they met again to plan the meeting. Each would prepare a speech, and Stanton volunteered to take the words of the Declaration of Independence and fashion a new Declaration of Sentiments calling for women’s rights.
Stanton’s Declaration included these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” It also stated, “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”
Stanton also drafted 12 resolutions promoting women’s equality in education, employment, property rights, religion and suffrage. Only the suffrage resolution faced stiff opposition from the other convention organizers, who thought asking for the vote was far too radical.
Stanton stood firm, however, believing that voting rights were critical if women were to fight for other social changes.
The women were not optimistic about attracting a large crowd to the convention. After all, the public had received less than a week’s notice of the event, and it was haying season. But, on the morning of July 19, the organizers arrived at the Wesleyan Chapel to see dozens of people already gathered, and more still arriving.
In the end, more than 300 people attended the first Woman’s Rights Convention. Eleven of Stanton’s resolutions passed easily, but – again – suffrage was hotly debated and resisted. However, Frederick Douglass was in attendance, and he saved the day. He gave an impassioned speech in support of voting rights for women, and after hours of discussion the resolution finally passed, by a narrow margin.
By the close of the convention, one-third of those in attendance had signed the Declaration of Sentiments. Among them was a 19-year-old farmer’s daughter, Charlotte Woodward, already an enthusiastic supporter of women’s rights. Excited by the newspaper ad, she had even recruited six of her friends to attend the meeting.
Woodward was the only signer who would live long enough to see the passage of the 19th Amendment.
The Seneca Falls Convention made headlines across the country – but it was negative attention, with most newspapers ridiculing the organizers and their goals. Nonetheless, a prominent Quaker woman organized a second convention just two weeks later, in Rochester, N.Y. Other women’s rights meetings followed in Ohio, Indiana, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
Indeed, as Stanton said, the Seneca Falls convention had “set the ball in motion.”
Source: Votes for Women! by Winifred Conkling, 2018.
March suffrage events:
The Loveland Museum at 503 N. Lincoln Ave. has several events planned for March. Info: 970-962-2410 or lovelandmuseumgallery.org.
The women’s suffrage series will be continued monthly throughout 2020.
Photo: Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, NY. Now part of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park.
WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT – IT’S THE CENTENNIAL YEAR!
Women's Suffrage Series by Cherry Sokoloski
On this date in 1920, most women in the United States were still not allowed to vote. But they didn’t have much longer to wait. On Aug. 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote was finally ratified by the 36th state, Tennessee – by one vote. And, that happened only because one legislator read a note that his mother had put in his pocket, and changed his vote from nay to yea.
When the next election was held in November of 1920, one-third of all citizens who went to the polls were women.
The 19th Amendment was also called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, honoring one of the pioneers of the movement.
The women’s suffrage movement has a history that is complicated and fascinating, and to mark the centennial of women’s right to vote, the North Forty News will publish one article per month in 2020 on aspects of the movement that we hope you will find interesting and inspiring – and perhaps surprising.
In learning about the movement, one conclusion is easy to draw: the suffragists were a bold, brave and tenacious lot. The early suffragists never made it to the polling booth. It took a second generation of activists – and more than 70 years – for women to enjoy that right. Along the bumpy road, suffragists were scorned, spit at and tortured in prison.
The Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 is often considered the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement, but the ideas that fed the movement were developed long before that. There are many examples, and here’s an interesting one: In 1776, Abigail Adams, wife of our second president John Adams, challenged her husband to consider women’s rights when forming the new nation. However, the idea of women’s equality failed to gain traction with the founding fathers.
In fact, the establishment of the United States marked a serious setback for women. While women of property had voted in the American colonies, the new Constitution allowed the states to determine who voted. Gradually, each state passed laws denying women the vote.
Other social reform movements
Early women suffragists got their start in other social reform efforts, notably the temperance and anti-slavery movements. They also developed their speaking and writing skills while working in those movements.
Women championed temperance because they had seen women and children beaten by drunken husbands and fathers – while laws of the time supported the men. They worked for abolition because many saw a parallel between slaves and women: both were treated with contempt by white men. And, they abhorred the sexual victimization of black women by their white masters.
Some feminists became paid traveling speakers for these two causes, even though public speaking by women was frowned upon. In the course of their work, they became more aware of discrimination against their sex.
For instance: In 1840, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and other women attended an anti-slavery convention in London. The women were forced to sit in the gallery behind a curtain, with no opportunity to speak or vote. This insult provided the momentum for Stanton and Mott to begin planning the first women’s rights convention, which was held in Seneca Falls eight years later. Women also formed their own anti-slavery society.
When it came to women’s rights, feminists in the mid-19th century had many complaints. They spoke out concerning property discrimination (once women married, their property transferred to their husbands), marital rape and battering, divorce laws, equal pay for equal work, reproductive rights and the right to have custody of their children.
They also decried the lack of access to higher education. Oberlin College was the first to admit women, in 1837. One of its first female students was suffragist Lucy Stone, who earned her own tuition because her father did not believe in higher education for women.
Eventually, many women came to believe that the only way to win equality in all these areas was through the right to vote. Some even refused to pay taxes because they believed it was not fair to pay taxes when they could not participate in the nation’s democracy.
Why did it take so long to win the vote?
Women who demanded the right to vote were considered radical and heretical. They challenged the existing hierarchies of society, including those in religious institutions, and their ideas were seen as threats. Interestingly, while the suffragists were supported by many men, they were also opposed by some of their fellow women.
Future articles in the North Forty News will feature some of the brave suffragists and also some of the movement’s challenges. We hope you will enjoy this glimpse into an important part of our history, and that it will serve as inspiration to women who are still fighting for equality today.
Cherry Sokoloski is dedicating this series of articles to her mother, Burnette Young, who was born in 1920 and has always stood up for the rights and well-being of women. Burnie is celebrating the suffrage centennial this year – as well as her own.