Here's Where It Gets Interesting - 26. Idaho: The Iron Cage of the Law with Sharon McMahon

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

In this episode, Sharon tells listeners about an incredible woman that is often left out of  the history books: Rebecca Brown Mitchell of Idaho. Rebecca was known to have a “fire in her bones” that fueled her deep passion for education and justice. Rebecca’s story begins on the dirt-floor of an abandoned saloon in Idaho Falls. There, she taught the town’s children how to read and write, and she hosted weekly Sunday School. Flashing forward a few years, Rebecca established the town’s first school and church, became deeply involved in the Idaho State legislature and led a women’s rights movement within the state. Here is the story of how Rebecca Brown did it all and eventually gained Idaho women the right to vote nearly twenty years earlier than the rest of American women were granted the same right. For more information on this episode including all resources and links discussed go to https://www.sharonmcmahon.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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you. This is about a woman who changed Idaho history, like in a big way. And yet you probably don't know her name. You probably have never heard of her. And yet her name deserves to be in the history books. So let's dive into the story of Rebecca Brown Mitchell. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Like most of us, like most of us listening today, Rebecca was born. She was born in the 1830s in Illinois, and she got married as a young woman, like a 19-year-old woman. She married a farmer, had a couple of sons, and then her husband died, leaving her a widow at a very young age to try to care for her two sons. The laws were such in Illinois at the time that she was not allowed to keep any of her property. Not the property that she brought into her marriage,

not the property that her husband and her had purchased together, nothing. The law was not on her side. She was allowed to keep her Bible and everything else she was forced to purchase back from the state of Illinois. She said it was like she was a prisoner in the iron cage of the law. And boy, is that a sentence that people around the country, people around the world can relate to. I was a prisoner in the iron cage of the law. So eventually she remarried. She had another baby and then another baby, two more daughters. Her older daughter died when she was five. And so she was left with one daughter and a very unhappy marriage. She ended up leaving her second husband. And the reasons why she left her second husband, not really well recorded. She

doesn't talk about it much. All we know is that she was unhappy for some reason. She decided, you know, what I've always wanted to do is teach. I've always wanted to teach school. I've always wanted to teach Sunday school, elementary school. I've always wanted to be a teacher. So she went back to college and became a teacher when she was, at that time, an older woman, like in her 30s, she became a teacher. After becoming a teacher, she started supporting herself by teaching school. And she also felt like, you know, I would like to expand these skills. I would like to also become like a missionary. I would like to teach in churches, not just in schools.

So she sought a method to be able to do that. She asked, you know, like, could I go to seminary? Could I become a missionary? And she experienced what she described as a lot of restrictions on her because she was a woman. This is what she said, I sought the path of duty and opportunity along the lines of the church, but was hedged out by public opinion and sex prejudice from active service into which the Lord called me. So she felt like she was supposed to follow this path, but societal conditions being what they were,

it was not acceptable for her to seek those opportunities where she lived. So she eventually finds someone to accept her in missionary training and decides that she is going to head west. She did not know where she was going. She did not have an end place in mind. So she ended up getting off the train where the train ended. Like there is no more train. You have no more opportunities. The train ends in what is now known as Idaho Falls. But at the time, it was Eagle Rock, Idaho. And by this point, it's 1882, okay? She is now, do the math, 52 years old.

52 years old. And she is deciding, listen, it is not too late for me. It is not too late for me to It is not too late for me to do what I feel I am supposed to do. She had a 15 year old daughter, her youngest daughter, Leona, that she brought with her. Her sons were grown and she felt like they're grown, they're married, they're settled. I can now go do what I need to do. So she gets off the train in Eagle Rock and it is like a desert. There's sand everywhere. The sand is like covering her shoes. And she begins walking around town with her daughter, looking for a place to live. She knocks on so many doors and she said people were very friendly to her, but nobody had any room. She said there were lots of saloons, but no schools and no churches.

She even says in her memoir that the nearest church was over 400 miles away in Ogden, Utah, and that there was nothing, not one church between Ogden and Butte, Montana. But she did find an empty saloon, which was like a shanty. And by shanty, I mean just like hastily slapped up boards, dirt floor, no real construction. They said, this is where you can stay. This is what we have available. And she was like, okay, great. I will take it. And she and her daughter moved into this old saloon and spread a blanket on the dirt floor and started sleeping there. Very quickly, I'm talking within a week. I don't mean quickly like in three years. I mean quickly within a week, she began teaching school. She opened a school for any child who wanted to come. They could come to her shanty with a dirt floor as a 52-year-old

woman. And they sat on boxes because they had no equipment, literally nothing. They sat on boxes. She accepted children of any age. She also started a Sunday school, accepted children of any age to come to the Sunday school. And within about a month, her 15-year-old daughter, Leona, had gotten very sick. Her daughter was not feeling well. She was hungry. And Rebecca gave the very last of her money to her daughter so her daughter could go get something to eat. You know when you're sick, you only want to eat certain foods? Her daughter was like, oh, I just really need a pickle. I'm feeling so sick. So she went down to the store and got a pickle.

And that was it. That was the end of Rebecca's money. So she wrote a letter that was going to go to somebody back home asking for money, saying like, money went a lot faster than I thought it would. I have not found anyone to pay me for anything yet. Can you send some money? But she knew, of course, that it was going to take a while for that letter to get anywhere and get back to her with some money. So later that day, a knock on the door. Same day. It was a man whose child was attending her school. And he said, hey, I'm here to pay my son's tuition. She said, Well, tuition isn't due yet. He's only been in school for three weeks. And he said, Yeah, I'm here to

pay the tuition. And she says in her memoir that she was so choked with emotion. She said, Mr. Reardon, why did you do this? Did you know that I had spent my last cent? Why did you compay your tuition before it was due? And he was like, I don't know. She felt like that was her sign that she was doing what she was supposed to be doing, that it was the hand of providence who had literally knocked on her door and gave her the money to continue when she had none left.

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good. The shanty was freezing. It was dirt floors. She eventually worked her way up into a more comfortable place to live, but she continued to teach school and teach Sunday school out of her own house, which was very modest. Eventually, she raised enough money, worked within the community to open a church and to open a school. This is a single woman in her 50s who is responsible for all the education, learning how to read and write, and also the spiritual education of the entire community, just on her own shoulders. So in 1886, this is four years after she arrived, a woman came to town. And this woman was the head of the WCTU. And if you are a history buff, you already know what that acronym stands for. That acronym stands for the Women's Christian

Temperance Union. And this was the organization that worked strongly for a variety of things that were for the betterment of women in society. One of them, they believed, was temperance, meaning not drinking, not having access to alcohol. It was this organization and others like it that called for the constitutional amendment to ban the manufacture, sale, transportation of alcohol in the United States. Very closely mixed up with the women's temperance movement is also the women's suffrage movement, being given the right to vote. Those two are so inextricably linked, there is no way to tease them out from one another. They were the same group of people working for women's suffrage and also temperance. The WCTU comes to town and Rebecca says,

I'll be the chapter president. And within short order, she begins to ascend in the ranks of the WCTU. She travels around the country. She gets training. She gives speeches. Apparently, she was a great speaker. She worked her way up until she was the president of the WCTU for the entire state of Idaho. And Idaho had just become a state. It became a state in 1890. So because she has risen to this position of prominence within the state as the head of the WCTU, she began working closely with the legislature of the brand new state of Idaho. And she had two ideas that she was like right out of the gate. Here is what needs to happen. The first one was the state needed to raise the age of consent and they needed to raise the age of consent for girls from 10 to 18. I mean, who can

argue with that now? We're like, of course, 10. That's ridiculous. So the fact that the age of consent was raised almost immediately after Idaho became a state, you have Rebecca Brown Mitchell to thank for that. And the second thing that she wanted to do was she wanted to have a constitutional amendment in the state of Idaho, allowing women the right to vote. So they begin this big push to have voters approve this constitutional amendment so that women would have the right to vote. They hired children to stand outside the polling places with signs that said, vote for your mothers. This is why she felt like it was important for women to vote. This is from her memoir. Justice and truth are fixed eternal principles. And thus, step by step, a whole humanity is now being lifted by the law of righteousness and truth

out of the deepest degradation and moved upward. But as yet, there is not a nation in all the world that gives to the daughter the same moral, legal, educational, and parental rights that the son claims for himself and keeps. She said when she was a young woman, even before she married, she said that when she realized how many restrictions there really were on women. She said it was like a fire had been shut up in her bones and permeated her whole being and gave her this vision that if I would be willing to endure hardship, the citizenship for women might be won. I feel like this is a great lesson for all of us. She did not sit at home and think to herself, woe is me, what an unfair position I have been granted and now I will just lay down and cry. No, she felt like if I would be willing to endure hardship, significant change could occur.

So on election day, this is what she said, a deep anxiety was upon us. And she said she stood as near to the polls as possible, speaking to voters as they went in to vote. She said, Mr. A, won't you vote for the amendment? And the man said, it's not my ticket. It's not my ticket. And he pushed her aside. She said to another man, you'll vote for the amendment, won't you? And he said, I don't know, Mrs. Mitchell, I don't understand it. And she said, do you understand the rest of the ballot? Well, then why can't you understand this? And he said, I don't understand it. And she said, do you understand the rest of the ballot? Well, then why can't you understand this? And he said, I don't know, Mrs. Mitchell, I just don't understand. And he went in and voted. She said, some men said to her face, women have too many

rights now. She said, some other people said things that were cruel and hard to bear and cut deeper than the cold wind. And so when the ballots were counted, she and the other women of her community that had worked so hard across the entire state of Idaho to get this constitutional amendment passed, when they saw that they had won. It was the sweetest possible victory. So do you think all of the men of the state were like, oh yeah, great idea. So happy about that. Of course not. Was a lawsuit filed? Yes. Did it eventually have to go to the Idaho Supreme Court to determine whether or not this constitutional amendment had been legally passed? It did. And did justice eventually prevail? Yes, she had worked for so long and the amendment finally passed. Women had the right to vote. Idaho was one of the very first states to grant women the right of suffrage. There are a few other states that came before, but Idaho was decades before the constitutional amendment to the United States Constitution. After she is successful in these

endeavors, and after her daughter is married off, and after her school has been established, and after her church has been established, she then found a new opportunity that she felt like, this is what I am meant to do. And she applied for the position of chaplain of the Idaho legislature. A lot of people ask, why do our legislatures have chaplains when we are supposed to have separation of church and state? Why do we have chaplains that say prayers before things like the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate, etc.? That does not represent to most people a breach of the barrier between church and state because being a member of the legislature is voluntary and there's no obligation to pray along with anybody or to espouse the same belief system.

But nevertheless, most legislatures have a chaplain and so does the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. They have chaplains. So she applied for this job to be a chaplain of the Idaho legislature. She said that one man was like, I've never heard of such a thing. And her response was, well, why not Idaho do the unheard of thing and set the example for other states? And I just love that. So then why don't you do the unheard of thing? I've never heard of such a thing. Great. Let's do it. Let's do the unheard of thing and set an example for other states. She was selected as the chaplain of the Idaho legislature. And the society was still very constrained by gender rules. Even though women had been given the right to vote after she won the chaplaincy of the Idaho

legislature, she said, women were astonished at the boldness of my forward movement in obtaining the position of chaplain. But when they saw that I could feel it all right, they rejoiced with me in victory. Letters of congratulations poured in upon me from all over the United States. She was an inspiration to people all over the country. As worn as I was with the long battle for citizenship, I was cheered by the honor given me in my old age. And I love this part. She said, the cheers of men were forgotten. The haughty looks of women who had all the rights they wanted faded away as a cloud before the sun. Not for myself did I care so much, for I had learned to labor and wait, but for womanhood was the victory dear to my heart. She says, history will record that work done for humanity.

The helpless and unprotected legally or otherwise pays a dividend far greater than any other investment. Even though the recipients may not at the time appreciate the sacrifice and labor which it cost. I mean, can we get that on some t-shirts or something? History will record that work done for humanity. The helpless, the unprotected, legally or otherwise, pay a dividend far greater than any other investment. And is it because everybody will appreciate you? No. Even though the recipients may not at the time appreciate the sacrifice and labor which it cost, I would argue that the recipients today, they don't appreciate the labor and sacrifice that it cost people who went before us. This is an old woman. And I mean that in the kindest way possible.

She identifies herself as an old woman. This is an old woman who has suffered severe heartache. She's lost a child. She's lost a husband. She had an unhappy marriage. She moved to a place she had never been before. lived in a shanty with a dirt floor, and started Idaho Falls' first church, first school, was very instrumental. One biographer says that the fact that women obtained the right of suffrage in Idaho when

it did was 90% her doing. Do not tell me that one person can't make a difference. Think about what those educated children could then go and do in their communities because she was willing to have kids come to her house, sit on some boxes on the dirt floor and teach them. She also had like a little reading room in the basement of her church. And that reading room was later donated to the library. It became part of the Idaho Falls Public Library. And shortly after she died in 1908, they received funding from the Carnegie Library Association to make it into this big, beautiful library. That library is now part of the Museum of Idaho. This is one woman who decided that she would not be limited by the iron cage of the law that she found herself in as a young widow. One woman who said, yeah, listen, I understand that I looks from uppity women, defied societal expectations,

and helped Idaho women receive the right to vote over two decades before other women around the United States had the same right. Well, Rebecca Brown Mitchell, thank you for your service, my friend, and you are not forgotten. Your legacy lives on. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend?

All of those things help podcasters out so much. I cannot wait to have another mind blown moment with you next episode. Thanks again for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast.