Margaret Tobin Brown - The Suffragist

Photo Credit:  Denver Public Library Digital Archives

The one and only “Unsinkable Molly Brown” was born in 1867 in Hannibal, Missouri (home of the incorrigible Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer). In addition to surviving the sinking of the RMS Titanic, Margaret was also a philanthropist doing what she could to help make people’s lives better in her hometown of Denver, Colorado. Not surprisingly, Margaret was also a suffragist – not a suffragette. While the movement for women’s voting rights had been going on since 1848, that unflattering name wasn’t coined until 1906 by a British reporter when the fight had started to escalate, and (my opinion) men were beginning to feel seriously threatened. The -ette suffix implied something “small or inconsequential.” Well, that tactic worked only in strengthening women’s resolve and fervor to win their rights. (Supported by historic facts, an insightful novel about the suffragette movement in Britian is Tracy Chevalier’s novel “Fallen Angels.”)

Of the two groups that campaigned for women’s voting rights in both America and the UK the difference was in that suffix - the suffragists used peaceful methods while the suffragettes’ intention was to acquire the right to vote by using any means necessary, sometimes employing violence.

Knowing Margaret to be the “survivor” she was it’s not surprising that she joined the cause for US women, which had been going on since before the Civil War. The 19th Amendment was finally ratified in 1920, which means that Margaret, who died twelve years later, lived nearly her whole life with this injustice a constant issue.

It’s so hard to imagine, well over one hundred years later, what those times must have been like – we women, particularly in the US, who live with such privilege today. How very lucky we are those intrepid souls like Molly Brown and the many other women of past generations marched for us, spoke out for us, fought for us because I don’t think we give it much thought at all anymore. (I’m speaking for myself now.) For those of us who are afforded with so many comforts and opportunities, voting feels like a given, a birthright, whereas in many other parts of the world women live with constant censure and have to structure their activities around their culture’s restrictions.

Photo Credit:  J. Howeth

We often immediately think of Afghanistan and the women subjected to Taliban rule, but “The Power of Women” written by 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Denis Mukwege, will open your eyes to similar conditions in another pocket of the world. With brutal frankness, Dr. Mukwege, an obstetrician and gynecologist in the Republic of the Congo, talks about the deplorable ways women are treated by the men of that culture.

And recently I read an interesting and equally disturbing article in National Geographic about the five places in the world where women are still not allowed to go even though three of the sites have been named UNESCO World Heritage sites.

The reason cited for the ban is that they are religious sites populated by men - prohibiting women from visiting these sacred sites is supposedly for their own safety. Which makes me ask – what? Women present too much of a temptation, and these monastics cannot be trusted around them. Honestly? If these men are so spiritually-minded, how could the proximity of a woman threaten their vows? Another suggestion for the prohibitions is that women might contaminate the purity of these significant spiritual locations.

You can read it for yourself here:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/no-women-visitors-travel-prohibited-off-limits

Pretty amazing, huh? I’m rather speechless by this. But I have to remind myself that as an American woman having lived during the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st, my attitudes have been shaped by my experiences, and I have been afforded the best of the best. So while I can try to understand viewpoints so drastically different from my own, that attempt will not be able to completely bridge the divide. How can it? Lives are customized by perspective.