Goodreads asked Mary Volmer:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Mary Volmer I didn’t think I’d write any more about the nineteenth century after finishing Crown of Dust. But while researching that novel I kept coming across references to female reformers I’d never heard of, like Victoria Woodhull, Myra Bradwell, Eliza Farnham, Olympia Brown, Mary Livermore. These were outspoken, idealistic, sometime scandalous women, well known in their own time for living outside the private sphere assigned them, yet largely missing from textbook history.

Why? What became of well-known female reformers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Susan B. Anthony after the Civil War and through the end of the nineteenth century? Did they retire? What happened to the suffrage movement? Why a gap of more than fifty years after the passage of the fifteenth amendment before women won the vote?

Well, they didn’t retire. Some of those reformers fought their whole lives for rights they never enjoyed. They fought for their daughters’ rights, and for mine. The epigraph by Susan B. Anthony at the beginning of my novel says, “Our job is not to make young women grateful. It is to make them ungrateful so they keep going.” The funny thing is, after the first pulse of curiosity got me reading, it was a sense of gratitude to Stanton and company that motivated me to write. That and the parallels which emerged between their lives and times, and my own.

Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.” I love that quote and probably repeat it too often, but it’s true. Reliance, Illinois is set ten years after the Civil War, a time when the country, still divided, was mired in a world-wide economic depression, brought on by real estate over speculation and insurance and bank fraud. Familiar? Women were fighting for economic and political freedoms, not to mention the right to govern their bodies. The definition of marriage and rights within that institution was being challenged in the courts. New federal morality laws made it illegal to transport through the mail any items deemed “obscene” (a purposely ill-defined and flexible category into which contraceptives were also cast). Then you have the rise of Jim Crow and the start of a systematic oppression that continues in place of slavery today.

Everything I read about the time held a mirror to my own. Some days, I felt as though I were experiencing the weariness and stubborn hope of those nineteenth century women, first hand. It was this shock of recognition that made my story feel necessary.

I used to have a quote by Charles Baudelaire on my wall, which said something like: “How do I make you understand that in writing about myself it is of you I am writing?” I think the opposite is true for me. Whenever I am writing about someone else, even someone of another time, it is of myself and of my time I am writing.

(Answer excerpted from an interview with Shelf Unbound April/May 2016 https://issuu.com/shelfunbound/docs/s...)

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