| John Cole |
On March 27, Anne Gass gave a spirited and instructive talk at the New Gloucester Library on a historical “road trip” from San Francisco to Washington DC. She has used all that she could learn about it and the three women who made it as the basis for a recent novel, We Demand: The Suffrage Road Trip (2021).
The “demand” in 1915 was for something that seems so obviously right in the era of Senator Susan Collins and Representative Chellie Pingree, a constitutionally protected right to vote for women, that it is hard to imagine a world in which it was denied. But that was the world of the Founding Fathers in 1776 and 1787 and of Susan B. Anthony a century later. What became the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 had first been introduced in the Congress in 1878, and what are now some of the reddest states of the Union (Wyoming, Utah, Idaho . . .) were the first to extend the vote to women in the 1890s. Several other western states were to follow by 1915. But not the United States.
Gass has immersed herself in the story of three intrepid women who helped to change that, learning what she could from written and pictorial sources—and from herself retracing the route they followed in 1915. By then, some of what are now the bluest states, including California and Oregon, had, as we men say, “granted” the vote to women. The youngest of the three women making the “demand” for themselves was Sara Bard Field, who had moved west to Oregon and now accepted the task of collecting 500,000 signatures for a petition to present to President Wilson in Washington. The other two were Swedish-Americans, Ingeborg Kindstedt and Maria Kindberg, a colorful pair from Rhode Island who wanted both to see their adopted country and to serve “the women’s cause.”
See it they did, from an open car on roads not well paved or even mapped, and serve it they did, organizing parades and rallies to gather signatures. The story of their long road trip, well researched and richly imagined by Gass, is metaphorically that of a nation founded on ideals of liberty in which all citizens deserve an equal voice and a vote. We’re still on that road.
“We Demand: The Suffrage Road Trip” by Anne B. Gass, illustrated by Emma Leavitt, is available at the New Gloucester Library. Learn more about Gass and the research behind the novel, including archival photographs, at annebgass.com and suffrageroadtrip.blogspot.com
