Columns & Opinions

The women’s rights movement spread across the West in the late 1800s. The right for women to vote was the top issue, but there was much opposition to it. The debate in Texas was no exception. Women winning the right to vote in Texas was the result of many years of hard work by individuals as well as such organizations as the Texas Equal Suffrage Association. For many years, there had been quiet calls for women to gain the vote and have rights guaranteed. Abigail Adams wrote a famous letter to her husband John Adams at the Continental Congress in 1776, imploring him to “remember the ladies” as Congress considered independence from Great Britain and weighed the defense of the liberties of men. Women actually received the right to vote first in New Jersey in 1776, but it was an oversight. The state’s new constitution gave the right to vote to any resident who owned property and did not specify men only. Some women met the property-owning requirement but saw their right to vote stripped away in 1806. The Seneca Falls Convention, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, called for all women to be given equal rights with men, but it took decades to overcome political obstacles and social conventions that kept women out of the election process. Women would not be able to vote anywhere in the nation until the Wyoming Territory gave women the vote in 1869.

Cass County Judge Travis Ransom

Dr. Alfred Kellett vas a colorful and dynamic physician- surgeon who served the people of Doddridge for twenty-seven years out of at least forty-five years of medical practice. He was born near Ravenden Springs, Arkansas, 23 March, 1868. He was already in medical practice when he married Johnnie Elizabeth Kellett (a distant cousin) 12 January, 1898, at Hardy, Arkansas.