Dave Wood

I’m a very big fan of Ken Burns’s documentary style and subject matter that spreads its wings from the Civil War all the way to Major League Baseball and many of the events in between, like Burns’s episodes on the feminist movement beginning in the 19^th century, which is still making the news in the 21st.

I was especially interested in the feminist story because of my late and still beloved cousin Miss Elsie Wood (1893-1972), who began as a clerk for our hometown judge Ole Eggum and made it all the way from her small town to become a prominent lawyer toiling in the corridors of power in Madison and Washington D.C. She worked alongside the likes of “Fighting Bob,” Robert Jr. and Phillip LaFollette, Governor and Senator James Blaine in Washington, and was a collaborator with Alice Paul, the fire eating president of the National Women’s Party.

She spent many years as Wisconsin Revisor of Statutes and edited the Wisconsin Blue Book and continued with crusading for women’s rights until her death in the 1970s when I became more closely acquainted with the career of this spirited maiden lady. My grandpa, her uncle, described her as “the only member of our family who really MADE it.”

Last month I was reminded of Elsie when our River Falls neighbor Lori Lee Weber invited us to a program in New Richmond, where she provided music for a reader’s theatre production of “Oh, Dear, What Can The Matter Be? Women Are Wanting to Vote!” a brainchild of the League of Women Voters of the St. Croix Valley, which demonstrates that women’s rights are very much alive here in western Wisconsin, despite the recent efforts of SAVE, a program designed to potentially take away the voting rights of millions of voters, should the Senate pass the measure, which the House has already done.

So off we drove to New Richmond. There was one seat empty, which I ceded to Ruth out of male gallantry, and the show went on written by League member Vicki Harmon, who collected 19^th century lyrics set to well-known music, accompanied by Lori’s and Neil Johnson’s vocals and Lori’s banjo. There follows a sample:

GOING TO THE POLLS BY JULIA NELSON (COMIN’ THROUGH THE RYE)

To tax one who’s not represented/Is tyranny—tell if you can/ Why women should not have the ballot?/ She’s taxed just the same as a man/ King George, you remember, denied us/The ballot, but gave us the tea/ And we, Without asking a question/ Just dumped it into the sea.

DEAR WHAT CAN THE MATTER BE? (1793) 1884 LYRICS.MAY WHEELER

Women have husband, they are protected/ Women have sons by whom they are directed./ Women have fathers so they’re not neglected/ Why are they wanting to vote?

HALLELUJAH BY MAY WHEELER (LATE 19^th C.) (to the tune of JOHN BROWN’S BODY)

Our hearts have felt the glory of the coming of the time,/ When law and right and love and might shall make our land sublime/When mount and hill and rock and rill with freedom’s fight will shine/ that truth was marching on. They saw it in the shadows of that old New England bay. / They heard it in the breezes of that cold December Bay,/ They sent it with the echoes to Britannia far away,/ That Truth was marching on.

I hope that up there in Elsie’s Baptist heaven she heard these new voices in faraway western Wisconsin sing those tunes of glory she once sang. Then Cousin Elsie’s truth will also go marching on.