Caroline Severance

Book excerpt: CAROLINE SEVERANCE present s the biography of one of the forgot ten heroines of the American womans suffrage movement of the nineteenth century. Based upon twenty years of exhaustive research, this is the biography of a woman who was in the forefront of every human rights movement of her time. Caroline was an abolitionist, a suffragist, an advocate for womens health and women physicians, a peace activist, and a socialist. She was a leader of the suffrage movement before the Civil War and afterward lived to vote in an American presidential election. Born in western New York when it was the frontier of the United States, she ended her life on another western frontier, in Los Angeles, California. She has been recognized as one of the builders of the city of Los Angeles. She witnessed the opening of the Erie Canal, and more than eighty years later, the first air show ever held in Los Angeles. Always advocating the rights of women and realizing their potential as full citizens, she was a founder of the Womens Club Movement, which, far from being a purely social movement, was designed to allow women to discover that they had brains and leadership abilities. This movement was instrumental in the final passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote.