A New Year...a New Series

 

One of the regular questions I get

and I think ALL authors get is...

Where do you get your ideas.

So my advice to you is, you need to answer that question,

Not be impatient with it, because you get asked it over and over...but have an answer ready.

And the idea for the Wyoming Sunrise Series came from Women's Suffrage.

Did you all know that Wyoming was the first state in the Union to give women the right to vote?

That seems so odd to me. First of all because it was a heavily MALE state, full of frontier's men, cowboys and miners and just very few women. I read somewhere six adult men for every woman and almost no children.

Also, the legislature was all male.

Click Here for a video of my covers

So how did women get the right to vote in Wyoming?

I've done a lot of research and it's all mixed up with political appointments--the territorial governor was a Republican who was in favor of giving former slaves the right to vote, also the low number of total people--and 'people' meant adult voters--so they needed women to have enough voters...there were a lot of reasons...but bottom line...they did it.

Because women had the right to vote, Wyoming, which became a territory in n1869, wasn't allowed into the Union as a state until right before the turn of the century 30 years. And they were rejected multiple times because.....you can't come in with women voting.

And women's suffrage meant more than just voting. Yes, appointed office, also elected offices...women could run for those. There were property rights laws amended. As things were a woman with a job, and there were very few married women with jobs unless they worked alongside their husbands in a shop, but a woman with a job...her income was sent to her husband and considered his. The minute they married, her property became his. Any inheritance she received was automatically his.

Interestingly, two years after women were given the right to vote...and this included serving on juries, they stripped jury duty from women's right They believed women needed to be sheltered from such ugliness as a trial. Women would become coarse if they had to serve on juries. So suffrage wasn't an easy ruling and a woman's rights weren't that secure.

I also found it pretty funny that one of the women's suffragist's rallying cries was, "If women have the right to vote, there won't be any more wars."

Insert eyeroll, that's not working out.

Utah also gave women the right to vote but, when the Union said, "Nope, you can't become a state...not with women voters."

Utah stripped women of the right to vote and was allowed in right away.

Wyoming refused.

The part of their refusal that I loved was, when the 'behind the scenes' vote counting showed that THIS YEAR it was going to pass there was a riot in Washington D.C. PROTESTS against allowing it. One representative from Wyoming kept shouting the words from a telegram he’d received from the Wyoming legislature: “We will stay out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without our women.” 

Whoever it was who was shouting it, ended up having to climb a wall somewhere to escape the mob but even as he climbed, he kept yelling, over and over again, “We will stay out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without our women."

I think we all believe our generation invented hostility between political parties, protests and demonstrations and riots.

Nope.

Reading about this is just full of fascinating information. the next place to allow women the right to vote was New York City...they allowed women to vote in school board elections only.

Shaking my head.

Dakota Territory, it wasn't divided into North and South Dakota then, passed women's suffrage laws multiple times but it was with the understanding that the governor would veto it. So the legislators could look supportive of women voting and never have to actually allow it.

They tried to get the governor of Wyoming Territory to reverse himself on the issue by saying, we're going to give Indians the right to vote and black people. He just said, "Okay, let's do that."

One of my favorite parts of the research was discovering Esther Hobart Morris, only days after women's suffrage was passed, Esther was appointed to the job of Justice of the Peace in South Pass City in Wyoming. I've read since that three women were so appointed at the same time, but I haven't found the other two.

And I decided one of the heroines in my three-book series might as well be one of them. So pretty, delicate Nell, the town seamstress, a frustrating job since there were few women in town and she wants to sew pretty dresses!!! Gets to be a judge.

I had all my heroines play against type.

Book #1 Forged in Love has a woman blacksmith.

Book #2 Laws of Attraction has a woman justice of the peace

Book #3 Marshaling Her Heart (link and cover coming soon!) has a woman rancher...and yeah, I know, a feisty lady rancher is sort of my thing, in fact, I have to try and fight it or I'd make every heroine a feisty lady rancher!!! But I decided I could slip one in this series. 

It all comes back to 'where to you get your ideas.'

So as writers, Seekervillagers, tell me how you get your ideas.

Commenters will get their name in a drawing for a $25 Amazon Gift Card.

Let's talk inspiration.

Forged in Love

coming in February

When sparks begin to fly, can a friendship cast in iron be shaped into something more?

Mariah Stover is left for dead and with no memory when the Deadeye Gang robs the stagecoach she's riding in, killing both her father and brother. As she takes over her father's blacksmith shop and tries to move forward, she soon finds herself in jeopardy and wondering--does someone know she witnessed the robbery and is still alive?

Handsome and polished Clint Roberts escaped to western Wyoming, leaving his painful memories behind. Hoping for a fresh start, he opens a diner where he creates fine dishes, but is met with harsh resistance from the townsfolk, who prefer to stick to their old ways.

Clint and Mariah are drawn together by the trials they face in town, and Clint is determined to protect Mariah at all costs when danger descends upon her home. As threats pursue them from every side, will they survive to build a life forged in love?