Finding Dorothy

by Elizabeth Letts

There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home, or Heaven. That word is Liberty. —Matilda Joslyn Gage

I tried my damndest to believe in the rainbow that I tried to get over and I couldn’t. —Judy Garland

“Mr. Crouse believes that I’m not raising your sister to be ladylike,” she told Julia. “For the record, let it be known that this is true. Too much control can stunt a girl, sap her of courage, and render her weak.”

A diploma for a woman seemed even more impossible than a crow getting a fair shake in the world.

It wasn’t enough to push open the doors. You had to change minds.

From where she sat, people often preferred made-up stories to real answers. Hadn’t she spent her whole life around her mother’s suffragist friends, women who always had their eyes set one hundred years in the future, imagining the welfare of their daughters’ daughters’ daughters while they sometimes seemed too busy to pay attention to the flesh-and-blood girls who stood before them?

It was disheartening to think that with all of the things that had changed for women, including education and the vote—privileges her mother had fought for but never seen come to pass—some perceptions had still not changed for girls, like the simple fact that the growth of one’s own body could be seen as an act of treason.

“But what need have you of a diploma—isn’t it possible to learn in any setting, and does the possession of a testimonial bearing a signature and seal make a man (or a woman, I should say) any better equipped with common sense?”

“Oh, Kansas isn’t the state of Kansas,” Maud said. “Kansas is just the place you’re stuck in, wherever that might be.”

It is hard to imagine a greater right than the right to the health of your own body.

“Until one is ill, it is hard to fully understand the plight of the invalid,”

I didn’t understand that you can’t always just ‘stay strong,’ that sometimes the conditions we are fighting are greater than our individual abilities.