6. Aunt Eliza's Star: Child Custody

Aunt Eliza's Star

by Becky Brown

When Eliza Custis married at the age of 19 her step-grandfather George Washington wrote a letter giving her permission to "taste the sweets of Matrimony...If Mr. [Thomas] Law is the man of your choice...[and] after a careful examination of your heart you cannot be happy without him...." Washington sent fervent wishes that she'd be as happy as she could ever imagine.

Eliza's portrait by Gilbert Stuart
 the year she married, 1796

As Martha Washington's eldest granddaughter, Eliza was an American princess, heir to a fortune, bride of the richest man in Washington. Law, about 40, was a recent English immigrant with a mysterious past in India. He also brought two boys to the marriage, illegitimate sons whose mother(s) were never identified. Eliza soon gave birth to their half-sister, another Eliza.

The Law House still stands in Washington

Visitors to Washington City often described visiting the Laws in their new mansion, one of the most impressive buildings in the capitol city. Law was what we'd call a real estate developer. Some of us might also call him obsessive and a bit manic as we read about his leaping from project to project.

Thomas Law as a young man

In 1802 Eliza lost her grandmother Martha Washington. That year her husband sailed for England to secure investors for a new enthusiasm, a canal system. He was gone for over a year. Rosalie Calvert noted, "I am quite intime with Mrs. Law, truly a woman who has no equal. Her husband still has not returned."

In late 1803 Law was back in Washington with another boy in tow. In 1804 Eliza moved out and went to stay with Rosalie, who gossiped about her, "Since childhood Mrs. L demonstrated a violent and romantic disposition....After rejecting some brilliant offers, she married Mr. L...against the wishes of all her relatives. Never were two people less suited to live together, but during the life of her grandmother Mrs. Washington, to whom she was most attached, they restrained themselves in order to spare her pain."

All Washington discussed the Law's marriage. In her new biography Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte author Charlene M. Boyer Lewis quotes a letter from Catherine Harper who wrote her husband that "the cause of Mrs Laws separation from her husband was owing to him keeping publickly a mistress & still does so."

The Laws remain together on the sign

 describing their historic home

Eliza knew that she could not take her 7-year-old daughter with her. Children, like a woman's inheritance, remained with the man after a separation or divorce. She wrote a friend ten years later, "You saw the misery I endured when she was taken from me. I fear'd then it was separation forever. Mr. L. never intended to restore her [to me] & I have suffered more than I can express from his enmity, to gratify which he has prevented my staying near her."

Eliza lost her fortune too. Five years later friend Rosalie wrote, "She should have received a considerable sum which General Washington left her [but] still hasn't been paid." Her grandfather, who worried more about Law than he admitted, secured a prenuptial agreement that Law pay her an annual annuity if the marriage broke down. Law rarely paid.

In punishing his wife by forbidding her to see her daughter Law was following social and legal tradition on both sides of the Atlantic. His brother Lord Ellenborough, chief justice of the King's Bench, set British precedent for the male's sole right to custody in an 1804 case, returning a child to a violent man because the father "is entitled by law to the custody of his child."

Eliza managed to visit her daughter while she was at boarding school and was lucky enough to establish a relationship with her as an adult for a few years before the younger Eliza died in childbirth at 25.

 

Child custody rights were a basic demand in women's rights platforms but progress was slow. Divorce and custody rights were a state-by-state issue. In 1818 a New Yorker obtained custody of her three children but only because her ex-husband wanted to place them in a Shaker religious community. In 1839 English law permitted women to obtain custody of young children and in 1873 the right was extended to children of all ages. A New York law passed in 1860 gave women joint custody over children, a first step in rights that were not obtained until the 20th century.

Aunt Eliza's Star

by Georgann Eglinksi

 Aunt Eliza's Star

 BlockBase # 2830

The Ladies Art Company gave this classic pattern the name about 1890. It's a block that goes back to Eliza Custis's grandmother's time. We can use it to recall the rights of child custody and to remember so many women like Eliza Custis who had to choose between their children and their right to be free of a failed marriage.

Aunt Eliza's Star

By Dustin Cecil

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

Becky is an advocate of the 1/16" mark on the ruler. She is right---it makes the blocks more accurate-- so I am also going to set my BlockBase default to "Round to 1/16th inches" and add those measurements in red next to the 1/8" measurements. YOU CAN CHOOSE (That IS the theme here).

A - Cut 4 squares 3-1/8" (3-3/16")

B -  Cut 3 squares 3-7/8" (3-7/8")

Cut each with 2 diagonal cuts to make 4 triangles. You need 12 triangles.

C - Cut 1 square 4-1/4" (4-1/4")

Make 4 units of A's and B

Then add more triangles B to the sides of 2 units

Add square C between two of those units

Aunt Eliza's Star

By Becky Brown

Cutting a 12" block

A - Cut 4 squares 4-1/2"

B -  Cut 3 squares 5-1/4"

   Cut each with 2 diagonal cuts to make 4 triangles. You need 12 triangles.

C - Cut 1 square 6-1/8" 

See more about Eliza's bridal house here:

http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=20430

Read a preview of Rosalie Stier Calvert's letters and all the Washington gossip in Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert By Margaret Law Callcott

Her snipiest discussion of the Law divorce is on page 111.

http://books.google.com/books?id=m9rxARyL5hcC&dq=rosalie+stier+calvert&source=gbs_navlinks_s

And see a preview of Charlene M. Boyer Lewis's Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press), which discusses the Law's divorce and others on page 135.
http://books.google.com/books?id=5zqsHXq9-ZgC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

5. New Jersey: Suffrage Pioneer

New Jersey

By Becky Brown

In the United States the right to vote could be determined by an individual state if the federal government did not address the issue. When the New Jersey Constitution was first adopted in 1776 the document defined a voter as a propertied adult resident of the state.

1880 representation of the 18th-century New Jersey

"Petticoat Electorate" in Harper's Weekly

How many women, blacks and non-citizens took advantage of this freedom at the polls is not recorded but by 1802 the Trenton True American described the percentage of woman voters as "alarming."  In 1807 politicians using the excuse of voter fraud prevention narrowed the franchise to free, white males over 21 years of age.

Campaigning for a renewed franchise

on the Jersey Shore in 1915

By the early 20th century suffragists reached a consensus that a national law, a Constitutional Amendment, was necessary to ensure that states could not give and take voting rights on political whims. New Jersey was the 29th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, the Woman's Suffrage Amendment, in 1920.

The 19th Amendment: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

  

Alice Paul of Moorestown, New Jersey became a leading suffragist, effectively using newspaper publicity to win the fight for the 19th Amendment. After each state ratified the Amendment she invited reporters to watch her stitch another star on her Suffrage Flag. The law required ratification by 35 states. Here she totes up 22 in late 1919.

New Jersey by

Georgann Eglinski

New Jersey by

Dustin Cecil

  

New Jersey

 Adapted from BlockBase #2952

In the early 20th century Hearth and Home magazine asked readers for blocks named for their home states. The nine-patch submitted for New Jersey here is adjusted for an 8" block but retains the X which can symbolize the vote New Jersey "gave" to women and then took away.

Cutting: 8" Finished Block 

A - Cut 2 squares 4" 

 Cut each in half diagonally to make 2 triangles. You need 4 triangles.

B Cut 4 rectangles 2-1/4" x 3-1/8".

C - Cut 2 rectangles 1-1/8" x 3-5/8".

D - Cut 2 squares 3-7/8".

Cut each with 2 diagonal cuts to make 4 triangles. You need 8 triangles.

E - Cut 1 square 3".

Cut  with 2 diagonal cuts to make 4 triangles. You need 4 triangles.

 

F - Cut 1 rectangle 1-1/8" x 7-3/8".

New Jersey

by Becky Brown

How-To

For a 12" block I made the proportions a little different (tough to get a block divisible by 5 into 12").

A - Cut 2 squares 5-5/8".

 Cut each in half diagonally to make 2 triangles. You need 4 triangles.

B Cut 4 rectangles 2-7/8" x 4-1/8".

C - Cut 2 rectangles 2-3/16" x 4-3/4".

D - Cut 2 squares 4-3/16".

Cut each with 2 diagonal cuts to make 4 triangles. You need 8 triangles.

E - Cut 1 square 3-5/8".

Cut  with 2 diagonal cuts to make 4 triangles. You need 4 triangles.

F - Cut 1 rectangle 2-3/16" x 10-11/16".

Another romanticized look at New Jersey's

 female voters.

Read Irwin N. Gertzog's paper "Female Suffrage in New Jersey 1790-1807" by clicking here:

http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/fast_facts/resources/documents/FemaleSuffrageNJ.pdf

And Rosemarie Zagarri's blog post "On Voter Fraud and the Petticoat Electors of New Jersey" here:

http://www.common-place.org/pasley/?p=792

New Jersey: Pioneer in women's suffrage.

4. Kansas Sunflower: Yellow and Gold

Kansas Sunflower

by Becky Brown

American women's groups chose an identifying palette based on yellow or gold.

Historians trace the emphasis on yellow gold to the Kansas sunflower, a reminder of the pioneering suffrage campaigns beginning with Territorial constitutional conventions in 1859.

Editor Clarina Nichols came to Kansas from Vermont

 and led the first suffrage campaign in the territory in 1859

Former Governor James Denver recalled that first Kansas "universal suffrage" proposal.

 "Every man, woman and child, every horse, every cow, everything that had life in it, should have the right to vote in Kansas. Well, that was only an illustration of the wildness of the times."

 Not a supporter, Denver was given to hyperbole. The 1859 campaign failed.

Felt banner from the early 20th century

Undaunted, Kansas women tried an 1867 suffrage referendum in which Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone and other women's rights leaders toured the new state in vain. In 1887 suffrage campaigners revived the campaign, this time with a yellow ribbon as a symbol.

Topeka voters in 1916

It took decades but Kansas became the seventh state to enfranchise women---a century ago---in 1912. We are celebrating the Centennial of Kansas Women's Suffrage on November 5th this year (2012).

This Crazy Quilt once belonged to Lucy Browne Johnston of Topeka. It features many gold ribbons from women's organizations. At top right is one from the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association (K.E.S.A.). See more of this quilt at the website Kansas Memory here

http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/224721

Inspired by the Kansas colors of 1887, national organizations adopted a color ranging from butter yellow to cheddar.

Becky is fussy-cutting flowers for the centers

of her purple, green and white version.

 

You can see why every suffrage quilt must have a sunflower. This one with nine points comes from Carrie Hall, a life-long Kansan, who included a Kansas Sunflower in her 1935 index to quilt patterns The Romance of the Patchwork Quilt in America.

Dustin is using dots and woven geometrics.

Georgann pieced the sunflower and then appliqued it to the background. There are 8 points in her sunflower.

Kansas Sunflower

BlockBase #3448

Cutting:

I've added a template page for an 8" block here and a 12" block below. You can piece the whole block or applique the sunflower to an 8-1/2" background.

Here's a how-to on piecing the block:

If you have BlockBase print templates for #3448 at 8 inches.

The Kansas Suffrage Reveille was a monthly newspaper published by the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association (KESA) from 1896 to 1900. The Kansas State Historical Society prides itself on an excellent newspaper collection. You can read issues on line by clicking here.
http://www.kansasmemory.org/item/220498
There maybe an online archive of regional suffrage newspapers in your local historical society.