Reality Bypass

Suffragettes in Texas June 15, 2010

I’ve been working lately in the Special Collections and archives at my University which has been a unique treat. Reading letters and articles from 50 or 100 years ago, or more is an interesting insight both into history and a fertile source of new ideas for writing. For instance I always dithered on what my character Benjamin’s job would be during his non-vampire days, and reading and learning about the jobs of the wealthy but still working, crowd of exiles in the United States let me give him an authentic job: poetry and running a personal newspaper. It seemed to be a popular passtime for educated men with money in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I’ve also been working with the documents of suffragettes in Texas and one thing that particularly stood out to me was naming. All of the women were named Mrs. John Doe, or Mrs. Harry Smith, other than a few. I found it intriguing how these women were working for equal rights and were pioneers of feminism but many of them we don’t even really know their names, they became simply the “Mrs” to their husbands. It also lead me to wonder if I’d have been a suffragette in that time and to examine my feelings towards voting. It was a 60 year fight for women to earn the right to vote, something we take for granted now. In fact in the documents some of the states permitted non citizens to vote, while women could not.