Having helped to "emancipate the slave," Abigail May Alcott wrote after the Civil War, women must "work out their own emancipation." In 1875, when she penned those words in a petition for female suffrage, Abigail had been active for forty-five years in the movements to abolish slavery and to allow women to vote. She knew that she, at seventy-four, would not live to vote, but her adult daughters might. None of her daughters survived long enough to see it, but in 1920, with the Nineteenth Amendment, women did work out their own emancipation, as Abigail May Alcott had hoped.
Eve LaPlante is the author, most recently, of the biography Marmee & Louisa and the editor of My Heart Is Boundless.