On this day in ....... 1870 (140 years ago today), Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer was born near Woodstock, a small town northeast of Memphis, Tennessee. (photo credit) She grew up without much schooling, married at 18, and lost her husband when mental illness required his hospitalization. The stress led her to a "nervous collapse"; while recovering she began writing, and became a noted journalist of her time. She wrote: for the New Orleans Daily Picayune under the pseudonym Dorothy Dix, where she wrote about women's issues; for the New York Journal, where she covered Carrie Nation's temperance movement and became active in women's suffrage campaigns; and as a syndicated advice columnist based in New Orleans. She died in that city in 1951. Among her more notable quotes:
Men will say that in supporting their wives, in furnishing them with houses and food and clothes, they are giving the women as much money as they could ever hope to earn by any other profession. I grant it; but between the independent wage-earner and the one who is given his keep for his services is the difference between the free-born and the chattel.
(Prior November 18 posts are here, here, and here.)
