Maria and three other women ran toward the fire and the sound of weapons to pick up and move soldiers out of the building that the Germans seemed intent on destroying. With I am ready and willing to make the sacrifice for my country echoing more loudly than the whoosh of blood in her chest, Maria worked through the night.
The next morning, word spread quickly about what the women had done—how they ran not from the danger, as many men assumed they would, but toward it. How they thought not of saving their own lives but of laying them down so that others might be saved. Maria was in her late thirties, doing work reserved for strong young men half her age.
Maria received a commendation for bravery from the French government. And then she kept going, driving an ambulance, dodging bullets and potholes, until the war ended.[13]
When she returned from France, she married a professor of French, and she continued to host students and visitors at the adobe house she had grown up in, ringed by a picket fence, the bells of the mission tolling in the distance.
Eleven
Rebecca Brown MitchellIdaho, 1856
Suffrage wasn’t an idea that sprang up overnight. Women like Inez Milholland and Maria de Lopez climbed onto the shoulders of the people who came before. Much of what the generation of new women was able to accomplish was because of women like Rebecca Mitchell, who made sure the women of the West could vote long before Inez and Maria were even old enough to understand what suffrage was.
Rebecca was a young widow, the mother of two tiny sons, when she was informed that under Illinois law, all of her property, with two small exceptions, no longer belonged to her. When her husband died in the 1850s, nearly everything they owned, right down to the clothes on her own back, became property of the state. If she wanted to keep her trunk of wedding gifts, the dishes on which she fed her children, the chairs upon which they sat, she would have to buy them back from the government of Illinois. With the exception of the family Bible and a hymnal, she had nothing of her own.[1]
Coverture laws, like the one in force in Illinois, said that women were legally “covered” by a man. If she was single, her father was meant to oversee her, and if she was married, the job fell to her husband. Women had few rights of their own—not to own property, not even legal rights to parent the children she birthed. In Illinois, if a couple divorced, the man got to dictate the terms of custody, and if he wanted to keep a woman from seeing her babies, he could. If a woman was deemed too much trouble, was too opinionated or intelligent, if she had what a man regarded as any emotional instability, he had the legal right to take her to an asylum and institutionalize her. While Rebecca Brown Mitchell wasn’t institutionalized, she was imprisoned, as she called it, in the iron cage of the law.[2]
Rebecca married again, this time to her husband’s brother, a union that was ultimately doomed and ended in separation, but not before they had two daughters together. One of her daughters, not more than five years old, died, leaving Rebecca to raise three children on her own.[3]
Rebecca wasn’t a new kind of woman like Inez or Maria—she was from an older generation, the one that felt the weight of oppressive gender roles squarely on their shoulders. Rebecca wanted to attend college to become a minister, but she said she was rejected repeatedly, “hedged out by public opinion and sex prejudice.” She “chafed in silence, for at that time, women were to be seen and not heard.”[4]
Eventually, she found a missionary training program that was willing to accept a woman who was estranged from her husband. Rebecca felt the pang of wanting to do something meaningful with her life, of wanting to escape the ghosts of her past and start afresh. The West was calling.
By now, in 1882, Rebecca’s sons were grown, so she and her teenage daughter, Bessie, boarded a train from Illinois and settled in for the long journey—over the Mississippi, out past the prairies, across the Continental Divide, winding through the Rockies and the red rocks of Utah, and into a place that felt like it needed her more than she needed it: Eagle Rock, Idaho, the town that would later become Idaho Falls.[5] Like many towns of the West in the nineteenth century, towns like the one where Clara Brown lived in Colorado, Eagle Rock consisted of little more than a handful of shanties, a few saloons, and company houses built by the railroads. Eagle Rock perched on the banks of the Snake River, whose currents sprang from fissures in the rock, the water so ferocious that it tumbled into foam, its force an ever-present roar.
Rebecca was forty-eight years old and covered from neck to foot in heavy taffeta fabric. On the morning of her arrival, she stepped off the train and into a whole new world. She and Bessie began by trying to find a hotel or a furnished room to rent, which they quickly discovered did not exist.
They had not come this far to turn back now, so they began knocking on doors, eventually inquiring at every single home in Eagle Rock. Most of the residents were friendly but poor, and didn’t have space for a woman and her nearly grown daughter in their meager accommodations.
Eventually, someone told her about a shanty—a shed, really—near the back of a saloon. Rebecca and Bessie borrowed a broom, stuck a single candle in a beer bottle, spread their blanket on the floor, and went to sleep. The next day, Rebecca went back to every house in the town, again knocking and introducing herself, this time inviting the townspeople to send their children to school.
Which school would that be? you might be wondering. “The school Rebecca conjured out of thin air in a shed,” I would reply. On weekdays, Rebecca taught academic subjects, and on Sundays, she taught Christian Sunday school. The shed was an accommodation of the most “primitive kind imaginable, with no furniture save for two benches, which served at night for a bedstead and by day for seats for the larger pupils.”[6] The smaller children sat on boxes. Before long, Rebecca had forty children crammed into her rundown shed wedged between saloons. Rebecca told her little flock, “All things are possible to those that believeth,” which was Mark 9:23, one of her favorite passages from the New Testament.
Teaching in a shed wasn’t lucrative—more than once she felt desperate financially—and as winter approached, she knew she couldn’t make it in this northern climate with so little warmth. The cracks in the walls were so large that sunlight peeked through, and it was impossible to keep the growing piles of dirt and the sounds of hoofbeats out of the haphazard structure. Men from all the surrounding saloons stumbled in various states of inebriation near her door, but despite the hardship, Rebecca “never halted, doubted, or hesitated,” convinced that she was doing the Lord’s work.[7]
Living on the western frontier was more expensive than Rebecca had bargained for, and she dashed off a letter home begging for financial assistance from friends and family. She was a self-supporting Baptist missionary, which meant that it was her job to find people to send her money. She would have to wait weeks, at best, before she heard back, and to make matters worse, her daughter was sick. After dropping off the letter at the post office, praying it would arrive quickly, a man appeared at her door.
“Can I help you?” Rebecca asked Frank Reardon, one of the people in town who was better-off financially than many others. Frank replied that he was there to pay his son’s tuition.
Except the tuition wasn’t due yet. He had no reason to show up that day.
“Mr. R., why do you do this?” Rebecca asked. “Did you know I had spent my last cent, and now you come to pay your tuition before it is due?”[8] Frank held out the money, and Rebecca felt certain that this was a moment of divine providence. Hadn’t she just dropped off the letter? Wasn’t she desperate to buy her daughter something to help her condition improve? That settled it for Rebecca. This was her sign. She named the school Providence Mission.
When winter arrived, colder and snowier than she had dreamed possible, Rebecca knew she needed a safer place to live. Her work had ingratiated her with the community enough that she was able to find a small but better-insulated location for living in and schooling children in the community. But she knew that this too was temporary, and that she had to secure funding to build a larger building that could be used both as a church and school.
Rebecca worked for two solid years to scrape together the funds for her mission. Two years of teaching and appeals and fundraising from people she knew back in Illinois before she was finally able to dedicate a small chapel. When the space was finished, it also housed the new public school district that Rebecca helped found.[9] Eagle Rock was experiencing a population boom, nearly tripling its residents by 1885, three years after her arrival.[10]
Rebecca sought even more education, this time pursuing a formal teaching certificate. She helped open schools in neighboring communities and secured a pastor for the church she raised money to build. Bessie was now married, and Rebecca, a mature woman in her fifties, finally felt free to “drop her work and enter the open door.”[11]
By 1891, she set her sights on government, on the belief that America’s best days were ahead of her, on the idea that the marginalized needed to be treated fairly by society and the legal system. She would begin, she thought, by lobbying the Idaho legislature to achieve action on her three primary goals:
Raise the age of consent for girls from ten to eighteen. (Yes. Ten.)
Secure women’s suffrage in Idaho.
Reform Idaho’s prison and parole system.[12]
You can see where Rebecca’s fire for empowering women comes from: her own experiences being legally stripped of all her possessions, being told that if she wanted her own clothing she would have to pay the government for it. Being denied access to the education she desired as a result of nothing more than her gender.
Rebecca was part of the temperance movement, which was inextricably linked to suffrage in the United States. As America’s cities grew and prospered, they became more densely populated and allowed for the proliferation of a popular pastime, mostly for men: drinking. Bars, pubs, saloons, and gentlemen’s clubs sprang up on every corner, selling a substance that impaired judgment, lowered inhibitions, damaged health, and that forced women to pick up the pieces of addiction. Liquor was profitable. And it harmed families, Rebecca and groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union believed.
The WCTU thought that if they could make alcohol illegal, men would be required to turn their attention away from the bottle and back to their homes. If they could make alcohol illegal, men would not be able to squander their wages, leaving their children to beg for food at the charity kitchens. If they could make alcohol illegal, fewer women would find themselves beaten for a minor perceived infraction on a Friday night after the pub closed.
But the women of the WCTU believed that in order to make alcohol illegal, women would need to be able to vote—men were not going to vote against their own self-interest. So the two movements, temperance and suffrage, grew together, two stems of the same vine. The suffrage workers of the time knew that equality is one of the cornerstones of justice, and justice one of the cornerstones of peace.
The WCTU sent representatives to Idaho to train local chapter members in advocacy. They taught them how to speak to audiences and how to make persuasive arguments, and Rebecca soon found herself rising through the ranks of suffrage and temperance workers, becoming the president of the state’s WCTU organization in 1891.[13] She was an in-demand speaker, and logged many miles through mountain passes, braving the dark and the danger while traveling around Idaho, Utah, and Montana to encourage women to work for the right to vote.
Women would gather for Rebecca’s evening lecture, setting out a plate of cookies they brought to share, offering each other cups of tea, making small talk about their families and the weather. Most had not been in a classroom setting in decades, if ever, and some worried that they were ill-equipped to learn in this way. Rebecca strode in, skirts rustling, her friendly, straightforward demeanor attracting attention. Even when she became elderly, she had a taut jawline and plump cheeks, her thin lips set into a type of audacity uncommon for a woman of her time.
On the chalkboard, she drew a column labeled JUSTICE, and set the column upon a base that was labeled TRUTH and RIGHT. She said there should be “one standard of moral, legal, civil, and personal rights for all without discrimination.”[14]
She then drew a light shining upon the column of Justice, the light of the Golden Rule. It illuminated the column from all directions. “Justice is inflexible,” she said. “It does not lean to the right or the left. Justice and truth are fixed eternal principles, but mankind has leaned away from this tower, until the standard lies prone upon the earth, at right angles with justice, the will or the passions of men being recognized as the law.”[15]
She described for the audience how, thus, men hold the lives of their wives in their hands, in the same way that he holds the lives of the animals he owns. She said, “Women are bought and sold and driven like cattle, or even worse.”[16] Rebecca’s vision was to realign mankind’s view of justice, so that it no longer lay prone upon the earth but rose up to its rightful place, squared with the immutable standards of what is true and what is right.
It would happen slowly, she predicted, but each increment would bring us closer in line with the standard: first, men must not be permitted to kill their wives, even if they are allowed to sell them. (I know, I know.) Then, a woman may gain the right to eat in his presence and speak to him. It could then progress to a woman being consulted about whom she wished to marry, even if she was treated like an enslaved person afterward. Step by step, Rebecca proffered, the whole of humanity would be lifted out of the deepest degradation and moved upward toward the perpendicular column of Justice.
“There is not a Nation in all the world,” Rebecca taught, “Christian or non-Christian, that gives to the daughter the same moral, legal, educational, and parental rights that the son claims for himself and keeps.”[17]
