Time to separate fact from fiction. While all the authors wrote stories true to the time and place, some used actual people and locations.
Lisa Wingate’s characters are fictional, though the Reverend Octavia Rose was loosely inspired by a study of the real-life Reverend Olympia Brown, who was the first woman ordained as a minister with the official approval of a national denomination. Born in 1835, she was one of the few early-day suffragists to witness the culmination of a long-held dream. She was able to cast her vote after the Nineteenth Amendment became law.
In Steve Berry’s “Deeds Not Words,” the Dictograph machine did, in fact, revolutionize how conversations could be recorded. The incident on the bus with Margaret is taken from an actual court case that was reported in the newspapers of the time. The Flatiron Building exists and continues, to this day, to be an architectural marvel. The Men’s League of Women’s Suffrage existed and worked hard to convince other men that women deserved the right to vote. The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage was headquartered in New York, just not on East Thirty-Fourth Street.
In Katherine J. Chen’s story, the character of Siobhán is fictional, along with the other members of Alva Vanderbilt Belmont’s impressive and varied household, the exception being the larger-than-life character of Mrs. Belmont herself. The scene where immigrant workers are invited to talk at an event hosted by Mrs. Belmont is inspired by a real-life occasion co-organized by Anne Morgan (daughter of John Pierpont Morgan), which took place at the Colony Club, an exclusive women’s social club on Madison Avenue.
Christina Baker Kline’s story “The Runaway,” about a girl slated to board a so-called orphan train who ends up instead in the women’s suffrage parade, is fictional, though the trains were real. For seventy-five years, between 1854 and 1929, they carried more than 250,000 orphaned, abandoned, and runaway children from the East Coast to the Midwest in a labor program. Kline’s novel Orphan Train is about this little-known but significant piece of American history.
In Jamie Ford’s story “Boundless, We Ride,” the characters Mabel Lee and Paul Soong were rivals in real life. As a student leader, Lee tirelessly pushed for co-ed education, and in 1922 became the first female PhD at Columbia University, graduating with a degree in economics. As a Chinese woman, she was still unable to vote until 1943.
In “American Womanhood” Dolen Perkins-Valdez fictionalizes Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s day on October 15, 1915. Black women suffragists were conspicuously absent from the New York City parade, so this piece glimpses the work Wells-Barnett was doing in Chicago at the time. She’d founded the Alpha Suffrage Club, and its mobilization of black women voters was helping to shape municipal elections. The story also includes a flashback to the Washington, DC, parade held on March 3, 1913, in which black women suffragists were present. Parade organizers, led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, insisted that black women march at the back of the procession, but Ida refused. Ida’s confrontation with the Illinois delegation was captured by a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and this story re-creates that scene from the reporter’s account.
In Alyson Richman’s “A Woman in Movement,” the story of Ida Sedgwick Proper, a painter who used her ties to the New York City artistic world to solicit work for The Woman Voter, is based on fact. Proper also organized a suffrage poster contest in New York to support the Nineteenth Amendment, with a generous fifty-dollar prize that helped draw entries from the most talented artists from around the city.
In Chris Bohjalian’s story “Just Politics,” the unnamed Armenian writer from Constantinople who visits Ani in Adana after the massacre is based on Zabel Yessayan. Yessayan journeyed to Adana in 1909 after the slaughter, and her book In the Ruins chronicles what she saw there.
The character of Alva Belmont in Fiona Davis’s story was a real person. Belmont was a prominent socialite and active supporter of the suffrage movement.