Orangevale Woman's Club

GFWC & OVWC volunteers in action. We Rise To Lift Others Will you join us to help?

Edith Houghton was born on December 29, 1879. She was educated at Bryn Mawr College and John Hopkins Medical University. She worked as a social worker focusing ...on unwed mothers and their children. In 1905, she married Donald Hooker. Together they established the Guild of St. George of Baltimore, which provided housing and services for unwed mothers and their children. She became involved in the suffrage movement. Edith established the Maryland Suffrage News, which remained in publication until suffrage was achieved. Hooker then focused her attention on ensuring women to have equal political and civil rights. Edith Houghton Hooker was the mother of five children and the aunt of Katharine Hepburn. Edith died on October 23, 1948. Photo Source: Public Domain See more

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to our friends and neighbors!!

And you know, she was a proud member of our Federation. I’ve been told she lived up the street from what became our current Federation house and was the one that noticed the the house for sale and suggested it would make a great place for our national headquarters. It’s a gorgeous place and worth the visit if you are in Washington DC.

It feels appropriate to end the suffrage centennial year with a week in New Jersey. Yeah, yeah, second prize is two weeks in Jersey but in all seriousness, res...pect is due. New Jersey was first. Women could vote in New Jersey from the beginning. After the Revolution, each state made its own choices about who got to vote. Women were excluded everywhere--except New Jersey. There, unmarried women, including women (and men) of color, could vote if they could meet the standard property requirement. The Museum of the American Revolution searched for these voters, found them, and recreated their world in an amazing exhibit that is now fully online. The site explains how women and men of color got the vote in NJ and how they lost it. https://www.amrevmuseum.org//when-women-lost-the-vote-a-re The textiles are particularly spectacular: look for -- 18th-century women’s pockets! -- a shortgown worn by free woman of color Elizabeth Dorn, with a video explaining its significance -- an 1876 dress (below) that may have been present when suffragists stormed the centennial stage. Settle in - you can spend as much time at the online exhibit as you would if we could all go to the museum in Philadelphia. Start with the opening video, where a dozen historians make the case that these women voting in the Revolutionary period really mattered. When NYTimes reporter Jennifer Schuessler wrote about the exhibit early this year, she shared the questions historians asked for years: did any NJ women really vote? Only elite women? The exhibit answers clearly: Ordinary women--Black and white--when they were given the chance to vote, they did it. So what went wrong? Well, you’re not gonna believe this but The state grew, and more women, people of color & immigrants began turning out. Politicians who were threatened by this responded by suppressing the vote: limiting polling places, intimidating voters. Then they outright accused the voters of fraud. Eventually, the white men in the legislature brokered a deal that preserved their own power and scapegoated women and people of color. In 1807, New Jersey changed its voter laws to exclude them, and to _broaden_ the group of white men who could vote. Stay tuned for more... Image below: Women at the polls in New Jersey in the good old times. From Harper's Weekly, Nov 13, 1880, via Ann Lewis suffrage collection.

Born in Boston on Christmas Day in 1806, Martha Coffin Pelham Wright was the youngest sister of Lucretia Coffin Mott. Her family moved to Philadelphia when she ...was three and her father died when she was nine. Her mother began to take in boarders to support her family. At age 16, Martha fell in love with and later married 37 year old wounded war veteran Peter Pelham, a boarder in her home. He died in 1826 and she and her child moved to Seneca Falls, NY where she taught in a Quaker school for girls. Here she met and married young law student David Wright. In the summer of 1848 Martha was six months pregnant with her seventh child and her sister, Lucretia Mott came to visit her. This visit reunited Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, and together with others they planned the first women’s rights convention in July 1848. For Martha, this began a 20 year-long dedication and commitment to women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Martha was an ardent abolitionist and her Auburn, NY home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. She traveled and lectured extensively on behalf of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the National Woman Suffrage Association, which she served as president in 1874. She died in 1875 at the age of 68 and is buried in Auburn, NY in the same cemetery as her friend Harriet Tubman. See more

Happy Hanukkah!

Merry Christmas! We Rise By Lifting Others

Love the work and results of Saint John’s