Word: suffragists
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While the suffragist meetings and protests continued, the first woman who personally challenged the political hierarchy was the electrifying Victoria Claflin Woodhull of Homer, Ohio. Beautiful, energetic and not entirely scrupulous, Victoria and her younger sister Tennessee practiced many of the popular quackeries of the day: seances, psychic remedies, a bottled "elixir of life." Inspired, she said, by a vision of Demosthenes, Woodhull and her sister went to New York and arranged to introduce themselves to the newly widowed Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, 84. With her "magnetic treatment" Tennessee soothed the railroad tycoon so successfully that he backed the young sisters...
Woodhull, who eventually married a rich English banker, provided a meteoric symbol of change, but it was the regiments of suffragist foot soldiers who steadily kept applying the pressure, state by state. Their key opportunity came with the entry of various Western territories into the union. The new constitution of Wyoming (1890) was the first to include women's suffrage; then came Colorado (1893), Utah and Idaho...
...denied or abridged ...on account of sex." After nine years of stalling, the Senate voted the measure down. Early in 1918, apparently because so many women had done so much war work, the amendment finally was passed by the House. In the galleries, a tearful crowd of suffragists started singing "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." The next year, the Senate added its grudging consent, 66 to 30. This time there was no singing by the women. "To their weary senses," said Suffragist Leader Carrie Chapman Catt, "the only meaning of the vote just taken was that the Senate...
That was all too clear in the selection of the first woman to serve in the Senate. She was Rebecca Felton, 87, a veteran suffragist from Georgia. When a Georgia Senator died in 1922, a new man was elected to replace him, but the Governor decided to make a gesture by appointing Felton to the vacant seat until the new Senator could be sworn in. So the Senate suspended its rules for exactly one hour...
...father was a schoolteacher, his mother a suffragist, and the Cornish village of his childhood comfortable and insular. His parents wanted him to become a scientist, but after two years at Oxford he decided to study English literature instead. After graduation he held a succession of temporary jobs, including one with a provincial theater company, published a volume of poems when he was 23, and enlisted in the Royal Navy at the onset of World War II. In his early 30s, Golding came of age. "One had one's nose rubbed in the human condition," he recalls. He witnessed...