15. Centennial: New Zealand's Victory

Centennial by Becky Brown

Centennial recalls the 1993 celebration of New Zealand's honorable position as the first country to enfranchise all women in all elections.

 New Zealanders proudly displayed their voting rights

in a Washington parade, an image from the Library of Congress.

In 1993 Queen Elizabeth II created the New Zealand Suffrage Centennial medal to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passing of the Suffrage Bill on September 19, 1893. Each year September 19th is remembered as Suffrage Day or White Camellia Day because supporters of votes for women wore white camellias.

 New Zealanders have remembered  their suffrage

 leader with a Kate Sheppard variety of camellia.

Kate Sheppard (1847-1934) is also recalled on a stamp
and their paper money.

New Zealand sent marchers to England to show the way.

Centennial by Becky Brown

BlockBase #2899

September 2013 was the 120th anniversary of New Zealand's ground-breaking law. We were ready for the celebration with Centennial, a pattern given the name by the American magazine Hearth and Home about a hundred years ago.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block
The red measurements use the EQ 1/16" default instead of the 1/8" default.

A - Cut 4 squares 2-1/2" (2-1/2")

B - Cut 1 square 5-1/4". (5-3/16")

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

C - Cut 2 squares 3-1/4". (3-3/16")

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

D - Cut 4 rectangles 1-7/8" x 3-3/8" (1-15/16" x 3-5/16")

E - Cut 1 square 3-3/8" (3-5/16")

Cutting a 12" Finished Block

A - Cut 4 squares 3-1/2".

B - Cut 1 square 7 - 3/16"

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

C - Cut 2 squares 4-3/16". 

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

D - Cut 4 rectangles 2-5/8" x 4-3/4". 

E - Cut 1 square 4-3/4".

Centennial

By Dustin Cecil

New Zealand shows England's old fogies

 the future in this postcard from the

Artists' Suffrage League

Centennial

By Georgann Eglinski

Read more about Kate Sheppard here:

http://christchurchcitylibraries.com/Society/People/S/Sheppard-Kate/

Click here to see a native New Zealander's quilt in the Museum of New Zealand

http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/objectdetails.aspx?oid=862875

14. Bride's Knot: Invisible Women

Bride's Knot by Becky Brown

Barbara Leigh Bodichon was born in 1827 in Sussex, England, the "natural" child of Anne Longden, a milliner, and Benjamin Leigh Smith, son of a Member of Parliament. Although each was unmarried and together they became the parents of five children, Anne and Benjamin never married. In a class-driven society Benjamin's marriage to a milliner would have been social disaster ("milliner" was a common synonym for prostitute) but then again illegitimacy was worse.

The lecherous Prince of Wales visits a Milliner's shop by Gilray.

Barbara's brothers (and of course Barbara herself) were barred from England's best universities by their parent's choice. It may be that Anne and Benjamin were radical enough to see marriage as a form of indentured servitude, a view their eldest daughter shared.

Barbara Leigh Bodichon 1827-1891

Barbara was concerned enough about the marriage laws everyone took for granted that she published a pamphlet arguing against them in 1854:

"A woman of twenty-one becomes an independent human creature, capable of holding and administering property to any amount....But if she unites herself to a man, the law immediately steps in, and she finds herself legislated for, and her condition of life suddenly and entirely changed. Whatever age she may be of, she is again considered as an infant,—she is again under 'reasonable restraint,'—she loses her separate existence, and is merged in that of her husband....

The Queen was one of the few women

 in the English-speaking world

who retained her legal rights after marriage.

"She is absorbed, and can hold nothing of herself, she has no legal right to any property; not even her clothes, books, and household goods are her own, and any money which she earns can be robbed from her legally by her husband...."

When she married, a woman became a femme couvert, a woman covered (and made invisible) by her husband's rights to all her property.

Wedding photo about 1860

Any property she owned is now his to spend, save or squander.

Despite the laws she decried in A Brief Summary ... of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women, Barbara Leigh herself married Dr. Eugene Bodichon. Through her efforts English law changed in 1870. The Married Women's Property Act permitted women to maintain rights to their inheritance, wages, investments, real estate and personal property through marriage, widowhood, divorce and death.

Bride's Knot by Georgann Eglinski

We can remember the fight for The Married Women's Property Act with Bride's Knot, a pattern published in the American agricultural magazine The Orange Judd Farmer in  1913.

 BlockBase #1850

Bride's Knot by Becky Brown

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A Cut 4 squares 4". (4-1/16" if you use the 1/16th" default)

Cut each in half diagonally to make 2 triangles. You need 8 triangles.

B Cut 9 squares 2-1/8"

Cutting a 12" Finished Block

A Cut 4 squares 5-5/8".

Cut each in half diagonally to make 2 triangles. You need 8 triangles.

B Cut 9 squares 2-7/8"

Bride's Knot

By Dustin Cecil

 Barbara Leigh Bodichon,

 Landscape with Iris, detail

Read more about painter and feminist Barbara Leigh Bodichon here:

http://windling.typepad.com/blog/2011/12/barbara-leigh-smith-bodichon.html  

Read her pamphlet "A Brief Summary ... of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women" by clicking here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=_R5cAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false  

13. Everybody's Favorite: Universal Suffrage

Everybody's Favorite by Becky Brown

This block with an X in the center is a variation of one published in Hearth and Home magazine in the early 20th century. Everybody's Favorite is a good block to represent universal suffrage, the idea that in a democracy all adults have a right to vote and hold office.

Most of us reading this blog take ideas of democracy and equality for granted, but philosophies evolved as nations experimented in extending voting rights, ideas that continue to evolve. Most recently in the United States we have lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.

When considering history one must remember that people were bigoted, class-conscious, racist and sexist, and inclined to ethnic stereotyping as in this cartoon.

Cartoon in Puck by C.J. Taylor, 1889

The melting pot is full of ethnic stereotypes

with the Irish here ridiculed as impossible to assimilate.

Those we view as victims of these beliefs usually accepted their place in the great hierarchal scheme. Voting was based on race, class, age, gender and ethnicity with transients, native peoples, foreigners, servants, paupers, criminals and mental incompetents outside the eligibility requirements. (Some ineligibles remain ineligible.)

As concepts of democracy developed, voting was one more privilege (not a right) for the upper classes, particularly in the requirement that voters own property. Religious limitations were also considered fair. In the United Kingdom Catholics and Protestants such as Methodists and Presbyterians were denied the right to vote until 1793 and the right to be elected to Parliament until 1829. American states such as Georgia and South Carolina excluded non-Protestants.
 

With its 1777 constitution Vermont was an early egalitarian example, permitting voting by men who neither owned property nor paid taxes. By the 1820s universal male suffrage was the American standard although property requirements were not eliminated until the 1850s.

Demanding women's right to vote (rather than asking for the privilege) was part of the evolution of universal suffrage, one reason that legislation took so long to pass.

  

The original pattern Everybody's Favorite has different proportions---a little awkward at 8".

(BlockBase # 2112)

Everybody's Favorite by Georgann Eglinski

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 12 squares 2" x 2"

B - Cut 4 rectangles 2" x 2-1/2"

C - Cut 4 rectangles 2-5/8" x 3-1/8". You'll trim these later.

D - Cut 1 square 3-1/4".

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

E -  Cut 1 square 2-5/8"

Cutting a 12" Finished Block

A - Cut 12 squares 2-3/4" x 2-3/4"

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

C - Cut 4 rectangles 3-3/4" x 4-1/2". You'll trim these later.

D - Cut 1 square 4-1/4". Cut with 2 diagonal cuts to make 4 triangles. You need 4 triangles.
E -  Cut 1 square 3-3/4".

 

Everybody's Favorite by Becky Brown

The ideal of universal suffrage, France,

 1848, by Frederic Sorrieu.

Women seem to be missing from the picture (aside from the allegorical figure of France) as they remained for another century.

Read more about the evolution of universal suffrage in the U.S. in Alexander Keyssar's book The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States

La Suffrage Universel

Everybody's Favorite

By Dustin Cecil

12. Little Boy's Breeches: Dress Reform

Little Boy's Breeches

By Becky Brown

"Little Boy's Breeches" can remind us of the fight for dress reform. The pattern was given that name in the Kansas City Star by someone who saw a pair of pants in the corners.

Mid-19th century-women carried their own cages with them. Corsets, petticoats and cage crinolines or hoop skirts impeded any movement, exercise or work. Fashion was a pretty prison.

Elizabeth Smith Miller,

Portrait from the Seneca Falls Historical Society.

I've lightened it to show the dress.

It's hard to say if reformers actually wore gathered hems---

Turkish trousers.

In 1851 Elizabeth Smith Miller designed a costume she considered more rational, a short dress over trousers with a gathered hem. Also important---no confining corsets and expansive petticoats. Friends in the reform movement adopted this rational dress--- the bifurcated garment.

Lucy Stone often wore rational dress

 for lectures on the abolition of

slavery and women's rights.

Amelia Jenks Bloomer advocated trousers for women in her magazine The Lily, a position that invited ridicule and a rush of subscribers. Soon the Bloomer Costume became a stereotype and the name Bloomers was irrevocably attached to women's pants.

Amelia Bloomer in the early 1850s

Fashion plates romanticized the
realities of bloomer costume.

From The Lily 1852

An accurate depiction of Amelia Bloomer's outfit.

Opponents of change were incensed by women in pants. Hooligans saw reform dress as a call for rotten eggs and verbal abuse. By the end of the 1850s most public speakers had abandoned trousers as so distracting that their major message, whether abolition, temperance or votes for women, was forgotten.

A new confining fashion in the 1870s

As silhouettes changed through the 19th century, dress reform advocates continued to preach rationality while press and pulpit decried the idea of women in pants as unnatural.

It wasn't until the 20th century that women in pants became socially acceptable.

The Block

Little Boy's Breeches

By Becky Brown

Little Boy's Breeches

By Georgann Eglinski

Georgann, a rational woman herself,

appliqued those britches.

(BlockBase #2961)

I changed the proportions a bit.

Cutting an 8" Finished Block

A - Cut 4 squares 2-1/2"

B & C - Use the templates.
D - Cut 1 square 2-3/8"

Cutting a 12" Finished Block

A - Cut 4 squares 3-1/2"
B& C - Use the templates
D - Cut 1 square 3-5/16"

Here's how Becky pieced the block. Make four of those corner units.Add them to the center. Y Seams.

Little Boy's Breeches

By Dustin Cecil

Katherine Hepburn in the early 1940s

Read the National Park Service biography of Amelia Bloomer here:

http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/wori/shs4.htm