WOMEN INSPIRED BY suffragist Sara Bard Field and her daring campaign
drive across the United States in 1915 will be surprised that she almost
didn’t go on that journey — because of a man. On the eve of her
departure, she wrote to her lover, lawyer Charles Erskine Scott Wood, “I
am absolutely yours for any service by way of this trip or by staying at
home.”
Luckily, he urged her to go. That undertaking not only changed her — as
she nearly froze in a Wyoming snowstorm, slogged through miles of mud in
Nebraska to get help for the immobilized car, and spoke before huge
crowds on the steps of state capitols from Salt Lake City to Albany —
but also the course of history. By the time her group reached
Washington, DC, they had collected four million signatures for the
suffrage amendment on the petition that she presented directly to
President Woodrow Wilson.
The decades-long tumultuous love affair between Field and Wood is the
centerpiece of Sherry L. Smith’s new book,/Bohemians West: Free Love,
Family, and Radicals in Twentieth Century America/. Both were avid
letter writers, and Smith discovered thousands of pieces of
correspondence — 2,700 just between the two of them, and more between
each of them and their friends, family members, and colleagues. Smith
used this voluminous correspondence, as well as an oral history of Field
and interviews with Wood’s descendants, to piece together their personal
and political history in great detail.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/free-yet-flawed-sherry-smith-bohemians-west/
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