Tracie Peterson - [New Mexico Sunset 03] Read Online Free PDF Page A

vote!”
    Lillie eyed her daughter carefully. “Angeline, we need to discuss this more thoroughly with your father. I doubt he’ll be very enthusiastic to the idea of you traipsing off with strangers.”
    “It won’t be the idea of strangers that will bother him. He’ll be narrow-minded like most men and not see a need for women to vote.”
    “Angeline, I don’t care for your tone. When has your father ever given you cause to believe that he doesn’t esteem a woman’s opinion?” Lillie asked her daughter in genuine concern. Who had put such ideas into her little girl’s head?
    “Mother,” Angeline began very patiently, as though she were talking to a simpleton or small child, “women have been made to believe for a very long time that they were incapable of sound judgement. We marry and give birth to men, raise them to adulthood, but somehow when it comes to logic and sense, men believe us totally null and void—completely uneducated and without a hope of making responsible decisions. Yet who do they think trained them up? On who’s knee did they learn their first words?”
    Lillie stared at her daughter in complete shock. Angeline was unconcerned with her mother’s surprise. It was to be expected, she reasoned. Hadn’t Willa told her that women were as much to blame, maybe even more so, for their own lack of rights?
    “Mother, this is a new age, and the men and women of this world need to wake up to the realization that the world is growing up and moving on.” Angeline voiced the practiced words she’d heard at one of the many suffrage lectures she’d attended in Denver. “We have the automobiles being mass produced on an assembly line where workers are paid five dollars a week! There are aeroplanes that fly men in the air and moving pictures that can record things as they happen. And with all this technology and progress toward a better world, woman are still suppressed and treated as though they are second class citizens!”
    “Enough!” Lillie cried and put her hands on her hips. “Angeline, I’m happy to know that you spent your time learning about the world, but honestly, you rant this suffrage cause like you had been made to endure some horrendous ordeal. Your father and brothers have only treated us with the utmost of respect. Your father, a college-trained doctor, often seeks my opinion in cases of his female patients, simply because I am a woman. You have only known kindness and respect from the men in this community, and I resent the fact that you act as though it has been otherwise.”
    Angeline was taken aback by her mother’s outrage. “While it is true,” Angeline countered, “that our menfolk have offered certain deference to our opinions, they still see us as frail, weak creatures who need to be sheltered from the pains of the world.”
    “I don’t think I understand why you feel this way,” Lillie said a bit softer.
    Angeline came to her mother and took hold of her hands. “Mother, you wouldn’t believe the things that are done to women every day all over the world. Women, who because they have no voice and no chance to make changes, are put upon to be all manner of things for all manner of men. Some are bought and sold for the pleasure of others, and when they dare to raise a hand in their own defense they are maimed and often murdered!”
    Lillie sat down at her kitchen table, pulling Angeline with her to take the chair beside hers. “Angeline, I know full well of the ugliness in this world. I have chosen not to make it an issue in your upbringing because I hopedI could shelter you from it for as long as possible. Perhaps it was naïve of me. Perhaps it was unwise, but nevertheless, it had nothing to do with equal rights and whether women should or shouldn’t have the right to vote.”
    Angeline took in her mother’s words and weighed them against her newfound knowledge. “I didn’t mean to sound harsh,” Angeline began, “but Willa Neal told me that often women