Calvert Sufferagettes

Calvert Sufferagettes

personal photo

During Hillary Clinton's speech tonight, she mentioned that this is the anniversary of the Suffragette movement. ( I looked it up and noticed that the sign in this photo is spelled sufferagette, while online it is spelled suffragette. I went with the way the sign in my picture has it spelled. After all, the photo shows women who were involved and, if that's the way they spelled it then, that's fine with me.)

I thought it would be appropriate to remember the women (and men) who were involved in obtaining voting rights for women. Many of them went through a great deal.

Do you know who these women are?

Flossie gave me this wonderful old photo and asked if I know who the ladies are. I don't have any idea. But it's a great historical photograph of a time that we don't often hear about.

We assume that they are Calvert ladies.

The fire escape steps behind them sort of remind me of the fire escape that is on the back of Calvert High School, leading from the auditorium down past the cafeteria. However, depending on when this picture was taken, the school may not have even been there, yet. I don't really know where the picture was taken.

While women couldn't vote, in times past, they still could persuade their husbands, in a lot of cases.

By the time I was old enough to vote, Texas had a poll tax. Most husbands would pay the money for their wives, if they were supportive of their wives. However some still had the idea that wives were something like property, or were to be kept dependent, or "barefoot and pregnant", as the saying went. Stay in the kitchen and out of anything that was deemed really important. The fee was a whopping $2.50, but you would have thought it was a small fortune. And, in most households, the men controlled the pursestrings. Women had to beg for everything they got, trick their husbands, or they had to save back something from anything that they were able to get their hands on.

I had been sick and had to go back home to live at the time that I was old enough to vote. My notice, and my mother's, came in the mail. I wondered how you knew about how to vote, since we didn't have a lot of communication back in the 1950s. Not much in the way of tv, but there were newspapers, radio, newsreels, magazines, and, sometimes, a candidate might come through town to make a speech or shake hands along Main Street. The main thing was to listen to the elders and see who they were endorsing, it seemed. People would visit all along Main Street in small groups, seeing who the elders or their bosses were endorsing. I tried to listen and watch as much as possible.

But, when it came time to pay that poll tax, all I heard was "Women are too stupid to know how to vote right." And there went our opportunity to vote.

Later, when I was working, I was able to pay the tax and vote. And, I've tried not to miss voting since. And I encourage others to participate as well. It hasn't been that long ago when a lot of men probably thought that their horses had more sense than their wives or daughters.

"We've come a long way, baby," from having to fight to get to vote, having to beg for $2.50 to pay the poll tax, to having a woman, "a traveling pantsuit sister", run for our highest office and make a speech before thousands while her husband, a former president, looks on.

Wouldn't the ladies in the photo be thrilled !

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Hope that you enjoy seeing this photo as much as I have. There are some wonderful old pictures of Calvert. We really should try to get as many as possible together and do something with them. We talked about that in 1986 for the Sesquicentennial.

This is also a good reminder to label your pictures while you remember who is in them and where they were taken!

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If you can identify these ladies, let me know.

More Calvert Drawings

Barbara sketched the Calvert City Cemetery

In the top photo, Barbara is sitting by the car, sketching one of the gates to the cemetery in Calvert. Her sketch is the drawing below the photo.

This lovely park-like cemetery is the final resting place for many of our family members, friends, neighbors, and members of the community.

We grew up just a few houses away from the cemetery.

I remember that, at one time, Edie, who lived next door to the cemetery, would alert us kids to a funeral going on. Several of us would go home and get a fruit jar, put water in it, and pick wildflowers that grew in the empty lots around us. As mourners left the cemetery, we timidly presented them with a jar or a handful of Indian Paintbrushes or tiny little yellow, purple or blue flowers.

We had a lot of Indian Paintbrushes, but I know of only one spot where there were Bluebonnets growing wild at the edge of town near the school. Of course, we believed that we would be put in jail immediatly, if we picked a Bluebonnet, so those were not even considered. There were lots of flowers in the park across the street, but we dared not pick any of those, either. The temptation was great, but, if Mrs. Sneed saw you pick a flower in the park, well, it would be too bad! And, on top of it, there was supposed to be a $5 fine if you got caught picking a flower in the park. We knew better than to pick any of the flowers from the beds of the neighborhood ladies' homes. And, the wildflowers were really pretty and cheerful.

I thought that the deceased would have a lot of flowers on their grave. But those left behind must feel sad at leaving their loved one in the cemetery. So, maybe they could use some pretty flowers to make them a little happier.

The dark clad recipients quietly thanked us and left the cemetery as we walked backward into Edie's yard to watch.

I don't have any idea who the people were, or who had died. It just seemed like something we should do since we were so close to the cemetery.

In this cemetery, there are quite a few graves that are at an angle. These are victims of the terrible Yellow Fever epidemic that wiped out about half the town. No one knew what caused Yellow Fever, so the graves were put at an angle in hopes that no one would ever open those graves and allow the germs or whatever might be causing the illness, to escape and cause another outbreak of Yellow Fever. The population was over 4, 000 at that time, and, after the epidemic, about 2,500 remained. The population remained in that range, even when I was in school.

Since they were burying people, night and day, I don't think that anyone will ever know exactly how many people died then, or even who they all were.

My great-grandfather had a cobbler shop, one of the first businesses in town. He had a "Chinaman" working for him who contracted Yellow Fever and died. That's the closest that any of my family members came to the disease, as far as I have been able to find out. But old timers talked about it, and it is still a topic of conversation even today.

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Stork Update!

The nest in Przygodzic has 3 babies in it! Three eggs have hatched, with 2 more to go! I haven't been able to see them as one of the storks is always sitting on the nest when I have taken time to look. But I can tell about the eggs from the animated little eggs at the bottom or their camera shot.

You can check out the other links, and the link I have that says Stork Cams, which has a list of many cameras trained on stork nests in various places.

Hope the babies make it this year!

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I added something for those of you who are Hillary Clinton supporters and for those who just like to design t-shirts. It's under Design a T Shirt. She had a "widget" on her website to add to your blog, where you can design a t-shirt for her campaign. Unfortunately, the whole thing doesn't show, but I think enough is showing so that you can design a shirt, or click on links you want.

I know one thing. After my recent experience of trying to paint a t-shirt with acrylics on a stretchy t-shirt, I'll try not to do that again! I started it a year ago, and I'm still not finished! That material is so hard to paint on!

I don't know how anyone can paint enough t-shirts to make a living at it, go to shows, and that sort of thing. One was enough for me! I have another shirt to paint, but this one may just remain plain-unless I really get in the mood for doing something frustrating! (I guess that should read challenging. I think that painting on fabric is a lot more than challenging, though. It's sort of like sewing. It doesn't take long before I am ready to throw the sewing machine in the garbage can, when I try to sew! Not nearly enough patience.)

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I enjoyed watching Bill Stubbs on Houston PBS tv. "Moment of Luxury" took us to New York last night. Really enjoyed the trip. In our area, the program is on Monday night at 8 p.m. Check your listings to see when it is shown in your area.

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