The Hope Chest

by Karen Schwabach

  It had been a very brief ceremony, because when the judge asked Chloe if she promised to love, honor, and obey Mr. Martin, Chloe had said, “Obey him? What is that doing in there? I certainly don't.”

  “Yes, really, that's a bit archaic,” Mr. Martin had said. “She's not my dog, you know. Don't you have a more modern marriage ceremony in there that you could do?” He reached politely for the book the judge was holding.

  “Do you two want to get married or not?” the judge demanded.

  “Yes, of course,” said Chloe, and Mr. Martin said, “That's what we're here for.”

  “Fine. I now pronounce you man and wife,” said the judge, slamming his book shut.

  “Why not woman and husband?” said Chloe.

  “I was already a man when I came in here,” said Mr. Martin.

  But the judge was through with them.

  The Antis had tried for several days to get the Tennessee House to overturn their ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, but instead the House voted and passed the amendment again. Then Governor Roberts signed the ratification and sent it by express to Secretary of State Colby in Washington, while the Antis kept sputtering and objecting and filing lawsuits.

  Meanwhile, Chloe and Mr. Martin—Hanover—found someone who could give them and Myrtle a ride to Chicago. From there they would figure out a way to get to Seattle with Myrtle. Seattle was where ships for Alaska sailed from.

  “But isn't that jumping bail?” Violet asked “Doesn't Mr. Mart—Hanover have a court date or something?”

  “Please call me Theo,” said Mr.—well, all right, Theo, Violet decided. “According to what my wife tells me, I'm not out on bail.”

  “He's not?” said Violet to Chloe.

  “Uh-uh,” said Chloe happily. “Myrtle introduced me to a gentleman named Mr. Ezekiel, who she said knew a lot about bribes. Well, not a gentleman, exactly, but a Suff legislator. He knew exactly how to go about it. But I had to sell the Hope Chest to pay the bribe, which means I did use the money Granny Mayhew left me to get married after all,” Chloe said with a sigh. “Just like Granny meant me to.”

  “I doubt your granny meant for you to spend it on a bribe to get your fella out of jail,” said Theo comfortingly.

  Chloe brightened. “That's true. And I did make a lot of miles in the Hope Chest.”

  “You have an education to get, Violet,” Chloe had told her before they'd left for Chicago. “You need high school— but don't take the domestic science program. Take sciences or academic, whichever you prefer. And then college. Remember what I said. College arms you to fight the great battles.”

  “And how am I supposed to get Father and Mother to agree to all that?” Violet said.

  “Insist,” said Chloe. “It won't cost them anything. There's your hope chest money.”

  Two weeks ago Violet would have replied that it was no good insisting with Father, who seldom even spoke to her, or with Mother, who had no opinions except Father's. She would have said that the hope chest money might be hers in theory, but in reality it was tied up to a future she dreaded.

  But now she knew what it was like to stand your ground. She knew what it was like to keep on when things seemed hopeless. And she knew that with patience and hard work, a radical, ridiculed idea—like women voting— could become as acceptable and ordinary as oatmeal.

  Historical Notes

  Real People

  ALTHOUGH VIOLET, MYRTLE, CHLOE, AND MR. Martin are fictional, most of the characters who appear in The Hope Chest are real, including Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Harry T. Burn, Joe Hanover, Hobie the Hobo, and Carrie Chapman Catt. The arguments used for and against women voting are all real too. In 1920 many Americans believed they were living at the dawn of a golden age, when war, alcohol, and poverty were about to vanish from the earth. Others believed that the United States was on the verge of a communist revolution.

  A few characters, including Mr. Ezekiel, Mr. Blotz, and Mr. Credwell, are made-up people whose stories really happened. History has been too polite to record the real people's names. You can read about them, and much more about the final showdown in Nashville, in The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage, by Carol Lynn Yellin and Janann Sherman.

  Miss Dexter is invented, but her attitude is not. Some suffragists were racists. Some of them would have liked to get the vote only for white women, but most realized that this was unreasonable.

  Woman Suffrage—Lost and Gained

  AMERICAN WOMEN REGAINED THE RIGHT TO VOTE in 1920, 113 years after they lost it. Women could and did vote in several states in the early years of our nation. The last state to revoke the vote for women was New Jersey, in 1807.

  Forty-one years later, in 1848, women began fighting to regain the vote at the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Among the speakers at the convention were three antislavery leaders: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Frederick Douglass. During these early years, the woman suffrage movement and the abolitionist movement worked closely together. Freeing both women and African Americans seemed to be two parts of the same goal.

  Alice Paul sewing a suffrage flag

  After the Civil War, the states ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, ending slavery and giving African American men full citizenship and the right to vote. Some suffragists reacted with resentment. The Fourteenth Amendment put the word male into the U.S. Constitution for the first time—before that, it had been the individual states, not the federal government, that denied women the right to vote.

  Suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony wrote the amendment that eventually became the Nineteenth Amendment. It was first introduced into Congress in 1878 but was voted down. At the time of Anthony's death in 1906, only a handful of Western states and territories allowed women to vote.

  Starting in the West and spreading to the Northeast, from Wyoming in 1869 to New York in 1917, the men in various states gradually agreed to let their sisters vote. No Southern state gave women full voting rights. The state-by-state fight for woman suffrage seemed slow and wasteful to Alice Paul, a Quaker suffragist from Pennsylvania. In 1916 Paul founded the National Woman's Party, with the goal of getting Congress and the states to pass the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. In this way, states where women were already voting could help bring the vote to states that might otherwise never let women vote.

  Congress passed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in 1919. When it became part of the Constitution in 1920, only one woman who had attended the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls was still alive—Charlotte Woodward Pierce.

  People believed that woman suffrage would bring about great changes, such as an end to war, child labor, alcoholism, and corruption. It was expected that women would all vote the same way. They didn't. Some people say that women ended up voting “whichever way their husbands did,” but with the secret ballot, that's impossible to know.

  As soon as the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, Alice Paul began working on an equal rights amendment. She continued working on this until her death in 1977. Thirty-five states ratified it. It never became law.

  Miss Maude Younger, legislative secretary of the National Woman's Party, working on her Ford with her dog, Sandy

  Despite his good deed on the morning of August 18, Governor Cox lost to Warren G. Harding in the 1920 election. (By the summer of 1920, both Harding and Cox were Suffs, just in case.) Harding's administration was plagued by scandal, but he did pardon the “Bolsheviks” who were still in prison for having spoken out against the War.

  The Influenza

  THE GLOBAL INFLUENZA PANDEMIC WAS A FORM OF bird flu. It started out as a fairly mild disease in the U.S. in the spring of 1918. By autumn it had traveled through Europe and Asia and back to the U.S., and had mutated into a deadly disease which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people worldwide. At the time, it was called the Spanish Influenza because Spain, a neutral country in World War I, reported a high death toll. The warring count
ries also had high death tolls but didn't report them because they didn't want to reveal any weakness to their enemies.

  Demonstration at the Red Cross Emergency Ambulance Station in Washington, D.C., during the influenza pandemic of 1918

  World War I

  WORLD WAR I BEGAN IN 1914 WHEN THE GERMAN army overran Belgium and invaded France. It officially ended on November 11, 1918, although sporadic fighting continued for many years. It was ultimately one of the root causes of World War II in 1939.

  The United States entered the War in 1917 and began sending large numbers of drafted and volunteer American soldiers (many carrying influenza) overseas in 1918. The arrival of the strong American reinforcements, combined with a revolution in Germany, led to a German surrender.

  Poster urging women to help the war effort, 1918

  Jim Crow Laws

  THE THIRTEENTH, FOURTEENTH, AND FIFTEENTH amendments to the U.S. Constitution ended slavery and made African Americans full citizens, but some states passed laws to keep blacks out of sight and out of public life. Public facilities were segregated throughout the South, and some states required “literacy tests” for voting. The tests were so complicated that nobody, black or white, could pass them, so the laws also contained a “grandfather clause.” The clause stated that you did not have to pass the test if your grandfather voted—that is, if you had a white grandfather. These laws were repealed in the 1960s as a result of the civil rights movement.

  Civil rights march on Washington, D.C., 1963

  Voting in America:

  A Time Line

  EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: MOST OF THE COLONIES have some form of elected government. Only property owners can vote. In some colonies voting is restricted based on race, sex, and religion, but the most important qualification is wealth.

  1776: The Declaration of Independence, written by slave owner Thomas Jefferson, states that “all men are created equal.”

  1777: Women lose the right to vote in New York.

  1780: Women lose the right to vote in Massachusetts.

  1784: Women lose the right to vote in New Hampshire.

  1787: The U.S. Constitution is ratified. It gives each state the right to determine the qualifications for voting. Most states restrict voting to male property holders over age twenty-one; some states bar free African Americans from voting.

  1801: Residents of Washington, D.C., lose the right to vote.

  1807: Women lose the right to vote in New Jersey, the last state to allow women to vote.

  1848: The Women's Rights Convention takes place in Seneca Falls, New York.

  1856: North Carolina gets rid of the wealth requirement for voting—the last state to do so.

  1867: The Fourteenth Amendment makes African Americans citizens but defines voters as “male.”

  1870: The Fifteenth Amendment gives African American males the right to vote.

  1878: Congress rejects the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.

  1880s: A series of laws known as the Chinese Exclusion Act deny Chinese Americans citizenship.

  1887: The Dawes General Allotment Act states that Native Americans can vote only if they resign from their tribes.

  1898: U.S. Supreme Court rules that U.S.-born children of immigrants are citizens.

  1920: The Nineteenth Amendment gives women the right to vote.

  1924: The Indian Citizenship Act makes Native Americans citizens, with the right to vote.

  1943: The Chinese Exclusion Act is repealed; Chinese Americans gain the right to vote.

  1946: Filipinos gain the right to become U.S. citizens and to vote.

  Three suffragists casting votes in New York City, 1917

  1952: The McCarran-Walter Act gives first-generation Japanese Americans the right to become U.S. citizens and to vote.

  1961: The Twenty-third Amendment gives residents of Washington, D.C., the right to vote in presidential elections only.

  1964: The Twenty-fourth Amendment eliminates poll taxes, which had been used to restrict voting in the South.

  1965: The Voting Rights Act eliminates so-called literacy tests, which had been used to keep African Americans from voting in some Southern states, and gives the federal government power to oversee voter registration and fair elections in some areas.

  1971: The Twenty-sixth Amendment lowers the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen nationwide.

  1973: The Home Rule Act gives residents of Washington, D.C., the right to elect a mayor and city council.

  1974: The Supreme Court rules that states may deny felons the right to vote.

  1978: Congress passes the D.C. Voting Rights Amendment, which would have given Washington, D.C., residents representation in Congress. Only sixteen states ratified it.

  Acknowledgments

  NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE, IS A REMARKABLE CITY IN many ways. One way is that if you walk around downtown with a notebook, total strangers will come up and offer to answer your questions. Consequently, I owe thanks to many Nashvilleans whose names I do not know.

  In addition, I would like to thank the Nashville Room staff at the Nashville Public Library; Janann Sherman and the late Carol Lynn Yellin, authors of The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage, much of whose research I have used, with Dr. Sherman's permission; David Andrews, the concierge at the Hermitage Hotel (which does not have the same owners as it did in 1920, and certainly not the same policies); Alison Oswald, Susan Strange, and Kay Peterson at the Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, for instruction in the lost art of sending telegrams; Jennifer Spencer at the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum for information about Cameron House; Donna Melton, Rose A. Simon, Paul Odom, and the staff at Gramley Library, Salem College; Aaron, Jennifer, and Deborah Schwabach for reading and suggestions; and my editor, Lisa Findlay, whose idea this book was.

  About the Author

  KAREN SCHWABACH HAS BEEN VOTING SINCE 1984. She grew up in upstate New York and graduated from Antioch College and the State University of New York at Albany. She spent many years in Alaska, where she taught English as a Second Language in the remote Yup'ik (Inuit) village of Chefornak, on the Bering Sea coast. She currently lives in upstate New York. The Hope Chest is her second novel.

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Photographs: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-119710], p. 263; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-79502], p. 265; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-126995], p. 266; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-19918], p. 267; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-U9-10364-37], p. 268; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-75334], p. 271.

  Text copyright © 2008 by Karen Schwabach

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! www.randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at www.randomhouse.com/teachers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schwabach, Karen

  The Hope Chest / Karen Schwabach. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When eleven-year-old Violet runs away from home in 1920 and takes the train to New York City to find her older sister who is a suffragist, she falls in with people her parents would call “the wrong sort,” and end
s up in Nashville, Tennessee, where “Suffs” and “Antis” are gathered, awaiting the crucial vote on the nineteenth amendment.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-49594-5

  1. Women—Suffrage—Juvenile fiction. [1. United States—History—1913–1921—Juvenile fiction. 2. Women—Suffrage—Fiction. 3. United States—History—1913–1921—Fiction. 4. Sisters—Fiction. 5. Women's rights—Fiction. 6. Tennessee—History—20th century—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.S3988Ho 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2006036692

  v3.0