 Okay, all right great well hello and welcome everyone to we demand the suffrage road trip with and gas. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the mechanics, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library, the oldest in fact designed to serve the general public in California. We're also a cultural event center and a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the nation. So due to the continued pandemic. Many of our events are still virtual, but I urge you to consider becoming a member with us. Our library is now open four hours a day, Monday through Saturday or sorry Monday through Friday, and membership is only $120 a year. With that you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. So our speaker today is and gas, who considers herself a women's rights history activist. She is the author of we demand the suffrage road trip, which is the novel will be talking about today. This is a new story of a 1915 road trip cross country for the suffrage cause. Her first book was called voting down the rose Florence Brooks White House and man's fight for women's suffrage was about her great grandmother Florence, and that was published in 2014. So we have at the mechanics Institute we have the novel we demand and I'm going to have to get a copy also of voting down the rose. Just so we have everything that and has written and is also a frequent lecturer on suffrage history and is very active in promoting women's history and equality. And she serves as the vice chair of the gray town council. We have a nice cozy group with us today. I want to encourage you, our audience to please put your questions in the chat space, and we will get to them at the end of Anne's presentation, and are we. Let's see, I will also send out the link to the video to you later this week. Thank you so much for watching again. Are we ready and I think we're ready. Thanks for that. That introduction turner really appreciate it. I'm excited to be here with you all today. And I'm just going to start this slide show here. Here we go from the beginning. So, as Taryn said, this is a book that's based on a true story of this epic cross country road trip that took place in 1915. I wanted to just do a shout out to my daughter Emma Levitt who was my illustrator for the cover and for the in the chapter illustrations. So this trip in 1915 wasn't the first ever cross country road trip by car, nor was it the first one ever to be completed by women. But it's notable for being the first ever undertaken for a cause which of course was voting rights for women or suffrage, and women doing this kind of trip was still very much a novelty in those days. So, just to give you some context here. The trip was launched by something by an organization called the Congressional Union for women's suffrage for women left San Francisco's Panama Pacific International Exposition for Washington DC. The petition is to deliver to Congress and the president this monster petition with 500,000 signatures on it demanding an amendment to the US Constitution and franchising women. And they're supposed to arrive on December 6, the opening day of Congress, because they're big events planned that day. And, and they leave San Francisco at the end of September. And just periodically the reason why the petitions are such a big deal is that there's no polls in those days it was really there, they were the only way to represent the strength of women's demand for voting rights. Now California course already had a franchise women by 1915. And that's one of the reasons why they decide to launch the trip from there. And we'll get into that a little bit more in a minute. So just, let's sort of ponder this for a minute in 1915. It's, it's been 67 years since the Seneca Falls Conference which many people point to as the starting point for the suffrage movement. It's been 126 years since the Constitution was adopted. Those are really long periods, and women have really been talking about equality, there have been some women you know a minority perhaps but talking about equality and voting rights and other issues throughout that time period. And there's been some progress, but not a lot and the thing is in 1915 they didn't know, is it going to be another year before we get, you know, a federal suffrage amendment is going to be five years 10 years 20 they, they really didn't know. And, and so women had come to the suffrage movement from other causes like temperance or labor, social work. And they really wanted to get back to them they were tired of suffrage, they were tired of arguing about it and they're tired of women having to prove over and over and again, they're they're worth their you know their worthiness for the vote. So the Congressional Union is this kind of upstart organization that was founded co founded by Alice Paul and by Lucy Burns. And in contrast to the, what had been the primary suffrage strategy up until about 1913 or so, they're focused entirely on winning in a federal amendment amending the US Constitution to enfranchise women. And one of the strategies they're going to use to do that is to punish the political party and power for failing to move the federal suffrage amendment through Congress because. I mean, I had arranged for the, this federal amendment to be introduced into Congress and something like 1898. I mean I had that date quite right but still it had been quite a long time but it just been completely hung up in Congress. You know, through procedural rules. And so, in 1915 the Democrats had both a presidency through Woodrow Wilson, and they had both houses of Congress so they're going to punish the Democrats by encouraging women to vote against them in in the 1916 election. That's kind of what this trip is about actually. It's a warning to the Democrats that if they don't pass it in the next session, the, or make at least, you know substantial progress. The Congressional Union will organize the four million women voters of the West to vote against the Democrats in 1916. If they're successful, they could stop Wilson from being elected. So a few things this is a graphic from the Congressional Union around this time, and a few things to note about it I mean, so the women voter, the equal voting states were all kind of west of the Mississippi. And they are illustrated by these white states here. And this, this modern woman voter is going to come across the country to the aid of her benighted Eastern sisters here in the black pit of despair. And a few things to note about this woman here. She's young. She's beautiful. She looks like a goddess. I mean she's kind of wearing like a Greek goddess, you know kind of wearing those robes. And she's white. And those things are not an accident that's this is very much the way that the suffragists at the time we're trying to portray, you know who would be the modern woman voter should the federal amendment be passed and ratified by the states. So, you know there there certainly was a lot of racism in the suffrage movement. It reflected the racism in the country as a whole I don't think the suffragists were, you know, more racist than anybody else they were simply, you know grappling with the reality of a country that didn't value it's it's citizens of color. Moving on the plan here is they're going to launch this trip from the Panama Pacific International Exposition, because they know that millions of people are going to be coming through this exhibit. You know to see that the whole exposition and they're going to some of them are going to trickle into the Congressional Union's booth and sign their petition. So, this is their booth at the oops at the Panama Pacific. It's a little grainy I'm sorry but I had to kind of blow it up. And you can see that what they call their great demand banner there that we demand an amendment to the United States Constitution and franchising women, they're at the back of the booth, and sure enough, they, they are able to collect a lot of signatures on their petition. And, you know, they're, they're kind of, they're getting their sort of ducks in a row here they're getting ready to do their next big event, which is they're going to have the first ever in the history of the world. There's a lot of attention of women voters at the exposition in mid September, and they're doing this to kind of unite women behind this strategy of going after a federal amendment and there was competing amendment at the time I'm not going to go into that detail they called the Shaffer off amendment they were that was causing a lot of confusion in the ranks. And so they really wanted to unite women around this, what they call the Susan B Anthony amendment, and get them excited about and they're going to launch the suffer John voice East to Washington, and, and meet with Congress and the President. That's the plan, and they're, they're really excited about you can see that this is the front cover of the suffragist, which is the weekly newspaper of the Congressional Union. And over the course of the spring and early summer there, you can in the, in the issues of the suffragist you can see that they're, they're talking about they're going to have 100 women make this trip across the country it's just going to be amazing it's going to get all out of the press, they're really going to draw attention to the fact that the majority of women in the country are not allowed to vote. And, and, and they're going to get this done but the problem it's a great idea everybody loves it, but the problem is no one volunteers to make the trip. And so it's getting later and later this convention is going to come up in September they have no one to go. And suddenly one day into their booth at the Panama Pacific wander. They have a woman, Incuborg Jean step on the left and Maria, Jean Berg who's behind the wheel. And they say, we'll do it, we'll take the petitions back to DC because we live in Providence, and that's not that far from DC. And so we can do this. And so everybody's like, yeah, we're saved, because they say, we're planning to buy this new car this brand new car in San Francisco, and, and drive it back home. So they were already to planning to make this trip so they didn't have to fundraise to cover their costs they had a brand new car. You know, this Congressional Union had almost no money. So they were psyched that that the Swedes as they came to be called were willing to make the trip. So I'm going to introduce you a little bit more to who made this trip. This is Incuborg, and she's, she was called the mechanization or the mechanic for this trip. She was 50 years old in 1915. And she was kind of a radical. She was a member of the industrial workers of the world. She was self employed. And she was very independent. And in the book, this is how I describe her as a young woman. She's not that different in 1915. Her life like a half broken cold plunging from one thing to another, curious and nippy fighting efforts to reign her in. As time went on Maria helped study her but she was always restless alert for something new. And in 1915 I say she was a wild and grim thing with close set deep blue eyes startling out from her weather beaten face knows like a prize fighter stubborn chin. So that's, that's Incuborg. And this is Maria. Maria actually purchased the car. She had her own business as well she was a midwife. She was 55 years old in 1915. She estimated she'd had this midwifery business for decades and estimated that she had delivered some 2000 babies. Her personality was quite a bit different from Incuborg's. This is the way I describe her in the book, Maria was as frugal with words as she was with money. She said both were things you couldn't take back if you use them unwisely. She liked routine and didn't look for trouble, but could hold her own if it found her. Once Incuborg had seen her verbally dismantle a cocky Coleman who'd tried to shortchange her on delivery. Mostly though she was easygoing and steady. Sarah Bardfield ends up, you know, having, she was the next person on the trip she was kind of considered the envoy or one of the two envoys. She lived in San Francisco. She was about 34 at the time of the trip. She was a hot mess. She was divorced mother of two, the kids live with their father also in San Francisco. She was a Bohemian and a poet, a veteran of other suffrage campaigns notably in Oregon. And Nevada. But she was in frail health at the time of this trip she'd had malaria over the summer there was something wrong with her heart. I've never quite gotten to the bottom of but she complained about it constantly. And she had other kinds of heart problems as well she had kind of a broken heart because her lover, this man named Charles Erskine Scott Wood. Erskine, as she called him he, he was 30 years older than she was and live with his wife and family in Portland, Oregon. And so they were separated and it really she kind of experienced that as a kind of death. Sarah profess to believe in free love but Erskine really did. He was a serial flander and had a lot of other lovers, apart from her even as he was married to his first wife. So much of what we know about the trip comes from Sarah. She wrote these voluminous letters to Erskine over the course of the trip and, and she didn't like Ingeborg and painted her in kind of unflattering terms. So the next the fourth person on the trip was meant to be Francis Joliff. She was the other envoy. She also was from San Francisco. She was a socialite but was, you know, part of this are prominent family politically connected. She had campaigned extensively for Wilson in 1912 and that was one of the reasons why they wanted her on the trip. She was also supposed to be good at fundraising, but she made it only as far as Sacramento, and then she dropped out, and she didn't rejoin them until Albany, New York. So she was not really present during most of the trip. And then there's Mabel Vernon, who was the advanced organizer and so her job was to sort of hopscotch across the country by train ahead of the envoys. And set up these mass meetings in the larger cities and towns, and set up, especially meetings with congressional delegations because Congress was on break in September. They wouldn't read, they wouldn't, you know, get back together in DC until December so most of them were home in their districts and they would send these delegations of women to visit them and kind of twist their arms around the federal amendment. And Mabel was really quite amazing. She was from Delaware. She was just an incredibly hard worker, absolutely relentless and really was responsible for a lot of the trip success. So lastly, I want to introduce the car as a character and I have her, this, you know, Ingeborg and Maria named her Emilia Rattu after a Swedish suffragist. And she was brand new in San Francisco, she was built by the Willis Overland Company out of Toledo, Ohio. We've made a special push at the, to gain market share at the Panama Pacific by advertising extensively and dropping their price and they advertise in Swedish language newspapers which may have been where Ingeborg and Maria find out about her. But anyway, you can see that she doesn't really have a top. She has no air conditioning, of course, no heat. And, and it's going to be a tough ride across the country because they're heading across the Great Plains in the west. They're going up to high elevation, it's going to be cold. They're going to hit rain and snow. It's really going to be a rough trip and here's, they're going to be following, especially in the west, what was known as the Lincoln Highway. It was very aspirational in 1915 and they hadn't really got it sorted out yet it was certainly not the cross, you know, country highway system that we know and love today. The, the darker line is, is kind of the Lincoln Highway and the red line shows where they departed from it to take in some additional states. So that's their, that's their plan. So they have this great launch in San Francisco and they make their way up through Sacramento, they lose Francis Jolliff, and then head across into Nevada and Utah. And here's, they have some adventures and the, the Great Basin and, and, and Nevada, eastern Nevada, but here they are and they make it to Salt Lake City. This looks, this is very typical of the kinds of mass meetings they had this one was on the steps of the capital there and they would bring out all these women who had worked on suffrage in the past, as well as the mayor the congressional delegation the governor if they could get them whoever they could find and get these to these events. But then you can see they, they, they look a little burned up. They come across the desert and it was a tough go but they made it. But the roads are not very good in those days. And one example is that they are here or actually I just want to mention they make it through Colorado Springs, here's a, here's a, I just love this photo because you can see how they look like they're ready to kill each other and, and I don't know if you've ever done a long trip with with somebody, even when you love them dearly they can drive you mad, and, and, and you just want to be done with them. And that's kind of the way they look in this photo. The other woman in the cars is the is Bertha Fowler who was chair of the Colorado branch of the congressional union. So anyway, I was talking about the mud. You know that they get into from time to time and here they are. This isn't their car. It's a, it's a photo from very much the same period in Kansas. And they do get stuck in the, in the mud in Kansas and I'm just going to read you a quick excerpt of how this, this goes. The mud was the real worry though. In some sections it came halfway up Amelia's tires and she had to plunge through one hole after another. Maria clung to the steering wheel grim faced as Amelia turned along slipping and sliding. They rode silently listening to the sound of the engine laboring, all of them fluent now in the language of pistons and sparks and alert to any sign of distress. No one else was traveling this late at night and aside from the occasional farmhouse they were utterly alone. Without warning Amelia's nose dropped and there was a sickening slide into deep muck her engine wailed as Maria tried first to jam forward through the mud hole, then to reverse backward over the lip they just come down. No luck. After a death rattle Amelia quit for good. Water began seeping through the floorboards as Maria ground on the starter but the engine wouldn't catch. How do they extricate themselves from that mess. Do they make it to DC on the appointed day and time. You'll have to read the book to find out. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about how I got into this book. I learned about it in the course of writing my first book which was, as Taryn said voting down the rose Florence Brooks White House of Maine's fight for women suffrage and I, I always thought that it would just it was an incredible trip and I wanted to learn more about it. Histories of the American suffrage movement often mentioned this trip, but only briefly, sometimes they just give it a paragraph or two. And, and very often in your work Maria are aren't even mentioned. And when they are we see them only through Sarah's eyes which I said, as I said earlier was mostly unflattering I mean she didn't care for them and she didn't, especially in your work she didn't like. In, in the histories about this trip has always gotten the love. And, but I've been fascinated that people who've read the book have told me that they don't particularly like Sarah. They really love in your board Maria. So clearly it matters. Who's telling the story, who gets to paint the picture. There's a quote from Nigerian author to Amanda and goes the aditchie that I really like where she warns of the danger of the single story. It says the single story creates stereotypes and the problems with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. And until the last five years or so, or maybe 10 years that the single story that have been told about the suffrage movement was from the perspective of white middle class women like Sarah, and it was incomplete. Thanks to push back and research from people of color and their allies we started to have a much richer and more complex understanding of the US suffrage movement from start to finish. In 2015 I spent eight weeks retracing their original room, and the question kept coming up, whose history was this clearly wasn't black history and not indigenous peoples because they weren't even considered US citizens until 1924. There were no Hispanics or Asian Americans on this trip, and not a lot of labor, you know working women or working class women. That's part of what pushed me to tell this different version of the suffrage story. And ultimately I wrote a novel because it was the only way I could think of to get away from that single story and tell it from the perspective of those who'd been other in silence, writing it as a novel still allow me to pay tribute to the grit and determination of the women who made the trip, and the suffrage movement that launched it. So I wove together fact and fiction using the history of the actual trip as my training wheels. In the last efforts I even went to Sweden. I wasn't able to learn much about Ingeborg and Maria. She's, they simply didn't leave the kind of written record that Sarah had left. So I had to create their characters around a little, I was able to find out about them. And here's some examples of how I did that. So, we know from the census that Ingeborg and Maria live together from at least 1895. So I made them romantic partners, they were lesbians, although there was no actual documentation of that. Not surprisingly because people weren't actually you know weren't trying to call attention to themselves around that in those days, but so called Boston marriages were pretty common in the early 20th century. Where two more affluent unmarried women live together. So it could have been just that, but there was definitely a queer element in the suffrage movement. And in fact Mabel Vernon and even Alice Paul some people have have sort of talked about them. You know, being lesbians. Sarah and Mabel both described Ingeborg is irritable. I chose to reframe that as justified. The trip she and in Maria were kind of erased from the story. For example, newspaper coverage would only announce the arrival of Sarah and Francis sometimes, leaving out the Swedes entirely. And during that period when Francis wasn't even on the trip. Newspapers would still talk about her as as being present. Because the Congressional Union didn't know when she would rejoin them so they kept issuing these news releases saying, oh, you know, Francis Joe was on this trip. But so even when she wasn't physically present and hadn't been around for weeks, she gets press and and sometimes Maria and Ingeborg would not be even mentioned. And that may might have made me a little cranky. I don't know about you. And it might even have made me, I don't know, send press releases to Swedish language newspapers describing the trip but leaving out any reference to Sarah and Francis, mentioning only Rian Ingeborg which is exactly what ends up happening I was able to find in Swedish language newspapers. And here it says, you know, Miss Ingeborg Jinsted is out traveling in a petition car across the country. She departed from San Francisco. And here's this is in Kansas City. And she's the president of the Women's Political Equality League in Providence, Rhode Island, her girlfriend bought the automobile and she and Miss Jinsted are traveling, bringing with them a petition about amending the constitution. And, you know, so there's no mention at all of Sarah or Francis Jola. So, and this, I was only able to find a handful of existing or extant Swedish language newspapers from the route that they took but but I thought this was quite funny I had somebody translate this for me. What I had them do is meet with historical figures along the way. Joe Hill is one example of this. He was a famous industrial workers of the world activist, and a songwriter, who was in fact imprisoned outside of Salt Lake City. And he went through. He was just weeks away from being executed for murder. Many believed he didn't commit one that he'd been framed for so they could just simply get rid of him. The authorities who were tired of his needling them about labor. He was a fellow Swede and I think that Ingeborg certainly would have known his story and would have wanted to see him and so I have her meet with him and prison. And so I went through Salt Lake City. And the IWW was known to be more inclusive as a labor union, accepted black members and its members spoke different languages. And I imagine that Ingeborg believes inequality and is frustrated that they weren't meeting with black suffragists as they came across the country. So she and Maria also meet with IDB Wells Barnett, who is this amazing journalist suffragists and anti lynching activist who live in Chicago. And then finally another person that I have them meet with is Clarence Darrow. It's this kind of weird fact that Sarah Bardfield's older sister Mary had been his lover for many years. So Sarah did actually know him. And it and he turns out to be a bit of a disappointment for Ingeborg he's not quite as supportive as suffragists as she wanted him to be. By the way, the book includes an afterward where I tend to separate fact from fiction. I that was a useful exercise for me because as I, as I continued to fictionalize the story I started losing track of what was actually true. When I did my trip in 2015 dumb Trump hadn't yet become the Republican nominee for president although he was getting a lot of attention. Still, as I came across the country there was a lot of hope that Hillary Clinton would be the country's first woman president. And as I was working on the book before and after Trump was elected. There was a tremendous amount of anti immigrant anti labor racist and misogynistic sentiment being promoted by Trump and his supporters. And the church was showing me that 1915 looked a hell of a lot like 2015 which I found really frightening. So I ended up weaving a lot of that into the book as well. I, and I want to talk to about the petitions a little bit more, which are such a big part of the story. For me, they're a potent symbol of how long and hard women had to work to win voting rights, and how uncertain the future of the suffragists in 1915. The petitions also remind us that as frustrating as it must have been for them in the US, the suffragists, the suffrage protests were always peaceful, not like January 6 here in this country. And as in keyboard reflects on the petitions in the book. It occurred to her that the pages of all the many petitions gathered over decades from white women and colored from eastern or western states by Susan B Anthony and countless others would stretch for hundreds of miles. And every page would have carried the hopes and dreams of both the signers and the collectors. What a wretched waste of time it all had been she thought suddenly angry. And ultimately, the generations of women who had worked so hard to reach this moment could have set their hands to some better purpose. How many more petitions would be required to end this one battle. And so this petitions we've through different groups of women over time and ultimately become the road under the wheels of Amelia and the illustration that Emma designed for the cover of the book. It's about a journey on many levels of the 1915 trip itself, the journey the suffrage movement took to where it was in 1915. The journeys the individual participants took how it changed them, and it did change them in material ways I think. And though I'm not in the story it reflects my own journey which I'm still on and understanding this history and its connections to the present. So, these are the fabulous four, as I call them. I think at the end of the trip you can just see how how big they all look they just Mabel Vernon later said that her health never really recovered from this trip. You don't know the language of the 19th amendment, which ultimately, through which women did or most women did ultimately win the right to vote, the right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or bridge by the United States or by any states on account of sex from the Seneca Falls Convention it was 72 years to get this language into the US Constitution. Unbelievable. And, and this is a quote that I love from Alice Paul she says I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction most reforms most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality. So, this is my contact information. Thanks for coming on this journey with me. I think we can. I'll stop sharing my screen and we can go to Q&A. I'm having trouble hearing you at this point. That's because I had myself muted. I think by now I'd get it. Thank you for that you know I just want to link to where people can buy the book. I'm sure that your local bookstore can order the book, but you know I believe it is available on Ingram that should be how I purchased it. Yeah, I'll put in the chat. I've seen authors publishing is where is the publisher that I used and so I can get link you directly to their website as well if you. It's also on Amazon but I know that everybody likes to use Amazon. I had some wonderful conversations with the local bookstore just around the corner for me at Mechanics Institute Alexander books and the owner there she told me how much of a difference it makes when you buy a book from a local bookstore. It really, really does, you know, keep them afloat and Alexander books can send you books within 72 hours, which rivals Amazon Prime so anyway that's my plug for local bookstores. That's absolutely great. I have a lot of questions for you regarding your writing process, but I wanted before we get to that I wanted to ask if anyone has any questions we're a small enough group you can just turn your mic on and ask and directly. Well, I will ask a warm up question then. Did you mention and the sources that you used for this book was, I hope you found a diary or something really juicy. Yeah, I actually flew out to California and to the Huntington library, and that has Charles or since got woods papers or at least a big chunk of them including the correspondence between Erskine and Sarah. I read her letters there. It's also possible to get the National Women's Party papers that the Congressional Union becomes a National Women's Party so that's how they're often referenced, but their, their papers are held at the Library of Congress. So you can, but there are affiliate libraries that have microfilm and so I was able to get those the relevant microfilm you can request by time periods, shipped up to Portland, Maine and and and look at the microfilm in the library there. Yeah, so that allowed me to look at all the correspondence that was happening. You know between various members of the of the planning team for this trip, and, and leading up to it and during it. And then I guess that the other two big sources were the suffragists because they were talking about the planning for the trip. And then the, you know what was happening during the trip, as they were heading across the country and then newspaper articles. Wonderful. It looks like Sherry has a question. Sherry, do you want to ask directly or do you want me to read it to you. Read it aloud. Please read it because I'm actually my dog that's office. So Sherry wonders, do you know where the petition is today, because in the book you say they were lost. Yes, interesting question. It's true. I was never able to find the petitions I thought for sure they would exist in the National Archives or library somewhere. But no. And, you know, I have my own suppositions about that I mean I think, you know, they do get kind of lost in the book and or there's this sort of like kerfluffle around. How do we know there were 500,000 signatures who counted that well was Alice Paul who counted it and you start seeing this correspondence go flying back and forth between Mabel and the team that was still at the Panama Pacific and their sort of headquarters in DC saying, Where are the petitions, and we don't have them. And so I, I think they really did have to sort of pull something together for that final, you know, the final event they have in DC, and just must have been desperately hoping that they're bluffed but I mean report they weren't saying that it was, you know, the length of a football field or several foot or miles long I mean it just it was crazy you would think that a petition that was that long would be enormous and and certainly it would be problematic to have it in their car with them, especially with no, no top or anything like that you know exposed to the weather. So I think it's likely they did, you know, ship some on ahead and maybe became parted with it but another time they say oh well, we actually had a duplicate copy, what's like, nobody believes that you know that you had a duplicate copy of all these signatures I just I don't believe it. So anyway, I yeah that's, it's funny that as central as they were to the whole trip and the purpose of the trip that you know they almost, that almost ends up being this huge problem for them. Okay, I have another question so I enjoyed hearing your rationale for not writing the traditional historical history of this road trip but making it into a novel. Did you what were the major roadblocks of choosing this, this path of fictionalizing it. Well, never having written a novel before was definitely one of them. You know I've had my own business since 93. And a lot of it has been federal grant writing for nonprofit and government clients and I, I had this sort of mantra that I told my clients for years. It's fiction so when it comes to these, these grants, we're going to create a business plan, you know, I'm not going to make it up, you know, you have to really think through how you're going to do this business. And so, you know, I had almost overcome that mindset of like, I don't write fiction. And, and I wanted to footnote everything when I first started writing it and I. So it took me a long time to get comfortable with the idea of writing fiction and, and giving myself permission to make up the things that I needed to make up in order to, to, you know, to have the story makes sense and I think I also, I was worried that it was going to be way too grim, because I was in a really grim mood. You know, during the Trump administration I'll be honest with you and, and I, and so I, I felt like I just, I wanted to expose all the terrible things that were happening around them at the time you know. And I thought well people are going to want to read this it's going to just bum them out so I tried to sort of lighten it up at intervals and that was a little bit tricky for me but like the meeting with a spiritualist or the seance that they go to, you know, spiritualists were actually some of the early suffragists, they, they had power, they could speak. And, and so I thought it was important to kind of highlight that little bit of suffrage history. But it was also meant in part just kind of lighten things up a little bit. And so some of the, the Mechanics Institute, for example, hosted several spiritualists who came and gave their on the lecture circuit and they came and gave talks, and I found it interesting that, you know, many of them were into, you know, women's rights and free love and, as well as the spiritual component. I mean, that's the cool thing about researching this history is that there was just so much of what we sort of take for granted today was was present than you know 100 years ago over 100 years ago. There were, there were plenty of lesbians and you know gay and lesbian people around there was plenty of sort of non traditional kind of behavior going on and it just, it wasn't as certainly wasn't as well accepted and people had to be a little quiet about it but but you know there was all it's really cool stuff and you can see this kind of through line right up to the present. It wasn't written about in the news but the newspapers but it was being talked about. Yeah, it was being acted out I mean I I mean one, one regret that I have is that there was all this in New York City there was this whole like enclave of super cool, you know, literary people and activists and gay and lesbians and just like this. I sort of thought that I would have them get drawn into that in some ways but I just I couldn't really figure out how to make that happen and I decided it was just too much of a rabbit hole but I mean I would have been nice to highlight that I think you know because I think that there really is. It didn't just like suddenly spontaneously happen and you know, 10 years ago or something. Right. Maybe that's the subject of your next book. That's right. I have another question how long did this project take you like from the moment your curiosity was piqued to the time when you're you know ready to publish it. Well it was a long time I mean because I, I, as I said I, I learned about it as I was researching my first book which itself took me 15 years to write. I mean, I was like raising a family and, you know, working at a busy consulting business I mean it was, there was a lot of distractions and so in my first book and so that took me and I just wasn't really sure that the, you know that I was going to actually pull it off until my mom finally said to me, I'm not going to live forever, you need to finish this book because he was Florence's granddaughter and so. But I always said I wanted to, I wanted to retrace the root of this 1915 trip, but I couldn't do it I wouldn't let myself do it until I finished my first book which I finally did in 2014. And then, you know, I was my mom's executor and there was a bunch of state stuff I had to deal with and, but I finally realized now I can do it like now is a really good time to for me to take that trip and so I gave myself a year to plan what I called my sabbatical and I took about 10 weeks to make the trip and I see my husband's cousins Marion has been on the call and I started out in San Francisco staying with her. And, and that was just invaluable for me she just completely oriented me in the right direction for thinking about this whole project and and as she herself has been a long life, long, you know, an activist throughout her life as what were her parents so sorry that was that was super cool and so then I that I thought I was going to write my original plan was to write a nonfiction book and I thought I would do that. And I, but then I really wanted to write it from in your board and Maria's perspective and I just couldn't find out enough information about them so it took me a long time to let go of that and just. And then I ran for state representative in 2018 and that was another distraction so you know, just like one thing after another and the problem with me is I'm, it's really hard for me to keep my butt in the chair and right because I'm kind of an activist I actually like to get out and do stuff so. There's no need to apologize I mean all of these experiences and time that passes helps age the wine and make it wonderful so really that's how creativity matures and grows and and refines itself so no take all the time you need. I mean that's kind of what I figured in the end to I mean and I was it's a much better book for me having taken the time to really understand all that was going on and I mean you asked earlier about, you know, my other sources and I did a quite extensive reading and to early 20th century history and you know stuff about Darrow stuff about the labor movement, you know all kinds of different things and. So that all kind of went into the hopper. Yeah, you know there's there's a wonderful book called the past is a foreign country and that is so true. And you have to learn, you know the language the culture of the, the customs like you have to learn all of that, even though you think oh well. I haven't lived through it, but I've learned from it and you really haven't until you've done dove in dived in the immerse yourself in in that time period the place and all of that. That's what's going to help make your book wonderful. Yeah, and I think that I mean the other thing is that once you sort of built that scaffold in a way I mean then then you just complete you continue adding to it and and and it really gets fun and I was never an expert in earlier 20th century history really until I started all this. And I'm still probably not compared to real historians, but I, you know, I've learned a tremendous amount about it and I now I love reading but I just read a big biography of present of Woodrow Wilson. And I thought it was fascinating and one of the things that was clear was again the suffrage movement, he was the target in the later years of the campaign those last six years say he was such he was such a focus of suffragists because they were trying to move him to over to support the federal But in this biography, you know, the women hardly even get a mention I mean, you know, it's like, maybe a total of a couple pages he just doesn't really, you know, he's not a big, it was not a big focus of his and it just was interesting to see that sort of disparity. Does anyone else have any questions that they'd like to ask and you can see I have I have a board here behind me. This is a cut out done. And when I can start making, making in person presentations again she's going to come around with me. She's wonderful, although she does look a little tired. Yeah, I know it. It's true I, but I think it's, it's good to get around about she needs a little bit more recognition. Yes. And what, what outfit would she be wearing today I wonder. Yeah. That's not my choice to wear clothes to wear on a road trip. You know, those kind of dusty jackets, you know, just, they were, what are they called dust covers or something like that. But I mean hers actually did button down the front, but she also had a way to button it into pantaloons kind of these loose pantaloons so that she could work under the car and preserve her modesty. Fascinating. I wonder where all those buttons then huh. Zippers in those days that's for sure. Well, and I want to thank you for this. Fascinating treatment. And I look, I'm sorry I haven't read the book yet but I look forward to reading it. And I want to compliment you again on the cover, your daughter's cover, it's fantastic. And I, you know, it just is one of those covers that encourages one to read the book so tell her I said that it was great. Thank you so much you'll be delighted to hear that yeah she did a great job with it was fun to work with her on it she's a she's a, you know, a part time practicing artists so who knows maybe she'll do some other book covers. So I want to thank you for taking the time to talk with us and share with us your, your writing journey and the journey of these women. And thanks everyone for attending and I hope you all have a safe and healthy fall. Yeah, stay safe everyone, take care. All right, have a great afternoon. Bye bye. Bye bye.