Gilded Dreams: The Journey to Suffrage (Newport’s Gilded Age)
Even the most feminist among us (me) could stand to learn a lot more about the history of the women’s rights movement in the U.S., starting with the fight for the right to vote, a term appropriately referred to as “suffrage,” evoking the suffering of an entire group denied even the most basic of rights.
Women, as Donna Russo Morin’s important novel Gilded Dreams points out, not only could not vote in U.S. elections but could not own property or even money. Neither did the children they bore belong to them but were wholly dependent, as they were, on the beneficence of men. Women weren’t legal citizens; we were little more than chattel. The suffrage movement was about the vote, yes, and about so much more.
In the wake of the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a pioneering legal advocate for equality, and the attacks on women’s reproductive rights that will surely follow, we would all do well to read Morin’s novel.
Her tale of Ginevra, an Italian immigrant, and Pearl, a wealthy socialite, is as much about the women’s friendship as about their activism in the women’s suffrage movement in the early 20th century, but the devotion of the women to their cause brings the book to life.
Morin places us squarely amid the passion, heartbreak, persecution, and determination that characterized the so-called “suffragettes,” and reminds us more than once that the fight for equality didn’t end with the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and it is still ongoing. It’s a prescient message for our time, as the overturning of Roe v. Wade looms large, access to birth control becomes endangered as the Affordable Care Act hangs in the balance, the Violence Against Women Act remains in limbo and equal pay for equal work remains elusive. A woman’s work truly is never done.
