Our story has its quiet beginning at a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Susan B. Anthony attended, and it was here her legacy began. This convention launched the suffrage movement. This novel is based on actual events in history, although it is written as creative fiction. There are two parts to this Victorian Romance, Women's Rights, and State's Rights.
It gets underway after the convention in the summer of 1860 with four young women, known throughout the reading as the four musketeers, who are all single and graduate from the Hampton Women's College in Virginia. It follows their courtship with handsome men from all walks of life, Colonel Richard 'Dick' Jackson, Reverend Russell James Keiner, Brett Meyer, and an Italian opera star, Carlos Orsi. The lead character in the novel is Dianne Jenkins, who is portrayed as man-hater... but is she really!
The rights usually enjoyed by women were often taken away when she married. As a matter of fact, a woman gave up so many civil and property rights upon walking across that threshold that she was said to be entering a state of "civil death." One such woman who would not stand for this inequality was Dianne Jenkins. She loves Reverend Russell Keiner with all her heart but hates him with all her mind. Her moving speech as Magna Cum Laude at Hampton's College describes her feeling toward inequality while not pulling any punches.
Married women were not allowed to make contracts, devise their last will and testament, or take part in other legal transactions. Women, once married, were not in control of the wages they earned.
In our story, Dianne Jenkins is an outspoken woman. She disliked the fact that women were expected once they married to do the maintenance of the family from sewing a pair of socks to doing the laundry to cooking the meals and, of course, bearing as many children as she could until it killed her. Because the laws were written by men, a married woman was supposed to remain home and take care of the cooking, cleaning, and getting pregnant every time she hung her husband's pants on the clothes' line.
As the first of this two-volume novel unfolds, we find our four women standing beside their fathers while our country splits, and they fight for the glory of the 'Star-Spangled Banner' in State's Rights. Or, do they take up arms with the Confederacy? At the same time, one of our women fights not to be controlled by a man she so dearly loves. The problem is that she loves him and desires him with her heart, but something from her past keeps her mind from letting him into her heart!
Some quotes from women during this story:
"The best protection any woman can have is courage." - Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony
"There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth." - Susan B. Anthony
"I never doubted that equal rights were the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me, there's nothing complicated about ordinary equality." - Alice Paul
