For women in the 19th Century, marriage and family was their destiny. Their lives were confined to a small and private sphere. They could toil, but they couldn’t vote; they could work their land, but often couldn’t own it. They were laced into corsets, surrounded by a piece of clothing called a cage.
The end of the first half of the 19th century was marked by several woman’s rights conventions. The Declaration of Sentiments of 1848 clearly describes the limits placed on women in public life before that time https://www.thoughtco.com/seneca-falls-declaration-of-sentiments-3530487
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Born 1859 in Indiana, Maria was both a product of her times but also a woman ready to embrace a more liberal viewpoint about womanhood. Her family moved from Indiana to Kansas where Susan B Antony declared to 12 women, 45 men, and a few boys at an 1867 address in Manhattan, Kansas that "Any man who voted against female suffrage was a blockhead."
The year of Maria’s birth, Women’s rights were being included in discussions of Wyandotte Constitution: https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/clarina-nichols/12156 This was the first of several steps that would eventually give women full voting rights and the right to own property. One year later in 1860, Kansas was admitted as the 34th state in the Union. Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861. At the same time, Southern states continued to secede. A month later, Civil War broke out in the USA. Most suffragists then focused on the war effort, and suffrage activity became minimal.
As a young woman, Maria and many other women in America were asking for "more" than servitude to any man. From a refined family with a strong mother, Maria and her sisters were each highly educated and rather head strong. They all wanted “better” for women.
As she approached her 21st birthday, “love” however led Maria to marry a Civil War veteran (Union Side) and to life as a farmer’s wife. Their first child was born to her at the age of 22. She had a total of 8 children. The couple moved from Kansas to Missouri. Maria’s sisters remained in Kansas and constantly talked about female suffrage.
When her youngest child was just 2 years old, Maria lost her husband (George Washington Brim) to complications from an old injury that he had suffered in the Civil War. That made her solely responsible for raising the large family and to make sure that each child received a good start in life.
Although she may not have used birth control as a young married (as some progressive women of her era were starting to secretly do), she had a special bond with the father of her children. He never considered her his property. When talking to others, she glowed about how he thought of her an equal partner in the marriage. Heartbroken over the loss of her marital companion (who was also her best friend), she still stood strong. In her later years she would fondly talk about her unique and special relationship with her beloved spouse.
Coming from a well-to-do family, dating back to before the Revolutionary War, Maria had been raised under the concept of the Republican Motherhood Republican motherhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_motherhood
An highly educated woman herself, Maria felt a duty that all of her children (both sexes) receive a proper education. Even when faced with widowhood and hard times, she did her best to still make this possible. She later admitted that things would have been easier for her had she accepted the proposal of marriage from a friend of her departed husband. However, she instead decided to go alone rather than marry a man she didn’t love. She also wanted no part of any man who would not allow her the same freedoms as her first & only husband had done. The father of her children had agreed with her that women should have equal rights to men. He was atypical of men of his era.
Upon his passing, Maria moved from the city to the farm that her husband had leased in Missouri shortly before his untimely death. She took on the hard job of farming (without a husband) in order to put her oldest son through college. Her younger sons helped. Once the oldest son had graduated, he left home to seek his own fortune. So, she sold off the livestock & the farm implements (her inheritance from her husband) and moved move back to the city where her children had been born. Maria then took a job outside the home in order to put her other sons through college, while also supporting the youngest children. The children helped her out in between going to school themselves. She was able to earn enough money for the family to own their house.
Although not offered the same opportunities of men, the second half of the 19th Century was more accepting of women working out-of-the-home when forced to do so. Strumpet and harlot were no longer immediate labels for any woman out in public without a man. Upon moving back to the city, she received another proposal of marriage, but again turned it down. Having full say over her children and being able to own property, she considered the man too restrictive in his views about womanhood. Over the years, she had closely been taking in the accomplishments of the progressive women in both Kansas and Missouri & actions that enabled female empowerment.
Maria later credited the idea that a woman was a man’s equal for giving her the courage to continue to face life without relying on a man to take care of her.
Two more of her sons graduated from college. However, the 4th insisted upon going to work in the mines immediately after high school graduation because he wanted to marry. Tragically, he was killed at a young age in a mining accident. Maria’s 4 daughters all finished high school, which was not commonplace for women of the day and place. Despite their mother’s encouragement, these daughters felt that college (a very rare event for any woman of the day) was out of their reach and instead got married. Societal pressure of the day??? Although Maria very much wanted as much for her daughters as her sons, she allowed all of her children the freedom to live their own lives as adults.
Later, Maria turned to her granddaughters to encourage them that there was nothing that a woman couldn’t do.
In 1912, Maria moved to Kansas City, Kansas with her 3 youngest children. The newly organized western territories and states had been the ideal battlegrounds for women's rights in America. Although Missouri saw some early wins for female equality, Kansas women in general were ahead of them. In 1912, eight years before the ratification of the national woman suffrage amendment (the US Constitution’s 19th Amendment), Kansas became the eighth state to extend voting rights to women.
Maria first voted in Kansas in 1912. She was then also among the 1st women to vote in 1920 when all women were given a national right to cast a ballot. Being able to vote said to her that women – not just men – had the ability (and a responsibility) to help shape America.
Coming from a patriotic family that went back to America’s beginnings, Maria then insisted that her daughters and granddaughters – not just her sons of legal age - also vote and continue to always vote in US and State and even local elections. Men and women were equal. She said that they both should do their part in helping shape the country they called home. This was passed on to the generations of women to follow her.
Maria may not have been famous. But she is a woman to be remembered and to be respected on this International Woman’s Day. She was my great, great grandmother.
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Groundbreaking, Influential, Missouri Women of Maria’s Day
1870
The first woman, Lemma Barkeloo, enrolled with the Supreme Court of Missouri. This made her the first female lawyer in Missouri. She was also the very first female trial lawyer in the entire United States & the first woman to try a case in Federal Court, all in the same year.
1871
Phoebe W Cousins of St Louise became Missouri’s first female law school graduate. In 1887, she was later appointed the Nations first US Marshal.
1873
Susan Elizabeth Blow opened the first public kindergarten in the United States at the Des Peres School.
1890
Annie White Baxter was elected County Clerk of Jasper Count and became the first woman to hold any elected office in Missouri. Annie was also the very first female Clerk in the United States.
However, nearby Kansas was 30 years ahead of Missouri in elevating a woman to an elected, political position. Susanna Madora Salter was voted mayor of Argonia, Kansas in 1860. This Kansan was the very first woman elected to serve as a mayor in the United States AND one of the first women to serve in any political office in the entire United States.
1920
Marie Ruoff Byrum was the first woman voter in Missouri. In fact, she was the first woman in the country to vote after the passage of the 19th Amendment.
Meanwhile back in 1887: Nearly 35 years before the first woman in Missouri ever was allowed to vote, Kansan women had the right to vote in municipal elections. Interestingly, that Kansan voting milestone actually came 27 years AFTER Sussanna Salter had been elected - by men - as mayor of a Kansas town. Women were holding public offices before they were allowed to vote in the elections…
Although Missouri women could not vote until 1920, my female ancestors in Kansas all had the right to vote since 1912.
My great, great grandmother proudly cast her vote in the Kansas early US elections, as she also did in the election of 1920 when full suffrage rights were granted to all women in the USA. After finally being allowed to vote, she voted (for nearly 40 years) in every election up until the time of her death at 90. She considered voting as a woman's hard earned, civic duty. She said that her beloved, late husband (a very strong patriot) would have been proud of her. Her belief was that all Americans (both sexes) should take the time to know who and what they are voting for, and then vote.
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History (and those who contribute to it) is fascinating when you think about how it has taken to where we are today. We must never take for granted what those, who came before us, have given us to improve our lives. Sadly, some modern women’s rights are now being slowly stripped away. Will there someday be a time when American society reverts back to the early 1800’s or even before? Food for thought on this International Woman’s Day.
As a descendant to Maria, all I can say to women is to vote (because you can).
Vote as if your life, the rights as a woman & your future all depend on it. We are in changing times that can either take American women forward or back. States, like Missouri (once home to Maria), are now turning the clock back for women. Politicians, in far too many US States, have recently stripped modern women of their basic human right to control their own bodies. Women everywhere (not just in those states currently effected) need to vote to defend female human rights. This is the second decade of the Twenty-first Century, not the Nineteenth Century. We need to move forward, not backwards.
