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father always stopped and talked with him when he went by his house. One day my father said to him, “Well, Joe, what do you think about this idea of women voting? What do you think about that?” He was always asking him things because he always had wise remarks.

Joe said, “Well, Fred, as I see it, Jake Francis up here (the town fool whom everybody knew) can vote. I don't know why your daughter, Frances, shouldn't vote. She's a smart girl.”

My father came home splitting with laughter. I was as good as Jake Francis. This was the way that the common man was figuring. He saw smart women all around and they couldn't vote, but the town fool could vote everywhere all over the United States. I think that was the climate of that kind of thinking.

Lucy Stone was a heroine by that time. She was one of the early suffragettes. She, along with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others of that group, while they had invented the suffrage idea, had been among its first pioneers in this country. They had, of course, devoted their lives to it, along with Lucretia Mott, that wonderful Quaker who had done so much in prison reform. The feminist ideas, of course, were springing up everywhere in England - the idea that women had some rights, that women should be allowed