The Hope Chest (26 page)

Voting in America:
A Time Line

E
IGHTEENTH CENTURY
: M
OST OF THE COLONIES
have some form of elected government. Only property owners can vote. In some colonies voting is restricted based on race, sex, and religion, but the most important qualification is wealth.

1776:
The Declaration of Independence, written by slave owner Thomas Jefferson, states that “all men are created equal.”

1777:
Women lose the right to vote in New York.

1780:
Women lose the right to vote in Massachusetts.

1784:
Women lose the right to vote in New Hampshire.

1787:
The U.S. Constitution is ratified. It gives each state the right to determine the qualifications for voting. Most states restrict voting to male property holders over age twenty-one; some states bar free African Americans from voting.

1801:
Residents of Washington, D.C., lose the right to vote.

1807:
Women lose the right to vote in New Jersey, the last state to allow women to vote.

1848:
The Women's Rights Convention takes place in Seneca Falls, New York.

1856:
North Carolina gets rid of the wealth requirement for voting—the last state to do so.

1867:
The Fourteenth Amendment makes African Americans citizens but defines voters as “male.”

1870:
The Fifteenth Amendment gives African American males the right to vote.

1878:
Congress rejects the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.

1880s:
A series of laws known as the Chinese Exclusion Act deny Chinese Americans citizenship.

1887:
The Dawes General Allotment Act states that Native Americans can vote only if they resign from their tribes.

1898:
U.S. Supreme Court rules that U.S.-born children of immigrants are citizens.

1920:
The Nineteenth Amendment gives women the right to vote.

1924:
The Indian Citizenship Act makes Native Americans citizens, with the right to vote.

1943:
The Chinese Exclusion Act is repealed; Chinese Americans gain the right to vote.

1946:
Filipinos gain the right to become U.S. citizens and to vote.

Three suffragists casting votes in New York City, 1917

1952:
The McCarran-Walter Act gives first-generation Japanese Americans the right to become U.S. citizens and to vote.

1961:
The Twenty-third Amendment gives residents of Washington, D.C., the right to vote in presidential elections only.

1964:
The Twenty-fourth Amendment eliminates poll taxes, which had been used to restrict voting in the South.

1965:
The Voting Rights Act eliminates so-called literacy tests, which had been used to keep African Americans from voting in some Southern states, and gives the federal government power to oversee voter registration and fair elections in some areas.

1971:
The Twenty-sixth Amendment lowers the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen nationwide.

1973:
The Home Rule Act gives residents of Washington, D.C., the right to elect a mayor and city council.

1974:
The Supreme Court rules that states may deny felons the right to vote.

1978:
Congress passes the D.C. Voting Rights Amendment, which would have given Washington, D.C., residents representation in Congress. Only sixteen states ratified it.

Acknowledgments

N
ASHVILLE
, T
ENNESSEE, IS A REMARKABLE CITY IN
many ways. One way is that if you walk around downtown with a notebook, total strangers will come up and offer to answer your questions. Consequently, I owe thanks to many Nashvilleans whose names I do not know.

In addition, I would like to thank the Nashville Room staff at the Nashville Public Library; Janann Sherman and the late Carol Lynn Yellin, authors of
The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage
, much of whose research I have used, with Dr. Sherman's permission; David Andrews, the concierge at the
Hermitage Hotel (which does not have the same owners as it did in 1920, and
certainly
not the same policies); Alison Oswald, Susan Strange, and Kay Peterson at the Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, for instruction in the lost art of sending telegrams; Jennifer Spencer at the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum for information about Cameron House; Donna Melton, Rose A. Simon, Paul Odom, and the staff at Gramley Library, Salem College; Aaron, Jennifer, and Deborah Schwabach for reading and suggestions; and my editor, Lisa Findlay, whose idea this book was.

About the Author

K
AREN
S
CHWABACH HAS BEEN VOTING SINCE
1984. She grew up in upstate New York and graduated from Antioch College and the State University of New York at Albany. She spent many years in Alaska, where she taught English as a Second Language in the remote Yup'ik (Inuit) village of Chefornak, on the Bering Sea coast. She currently lives in upstate New York.
The Hope Chest
is her second novel.

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Photographs: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-119710], p. 263; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-79502], p. 265; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-126995], p. 266; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-19918], p. 267; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-U9-10364-37], p. 268; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-75334], p. 271.

Text copyright © 2008 by Karen Schwabach

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House Children's Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Visit us on the Web!
www.randomhouse.com/kids

Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
www.randomhouse.com/teachers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schwabach, Karen

The Hope Chest / Karen Schwabach. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: When eleven-year-old Violet runs away from home in 1920 and takes the train to New York City to find her older sister who is a suffragist, she falls in with people her parents would call “the wrong sort,” and ends up in Nashville, Tennessee, where “Suffs” and “Antis” are gathered, awaiting the crucial vote on the nineteenth amendment.

eISBN: 978-0-307-49594-5

1. Women—Suffrage—Juvenile fiction. [1. United States—History—1913–1921—Juvenile fiction. 2. Women—Suffrage—Fiction. 3. United States—History—1913–1921—Fiction. 4. Sisters—Fiction. 5. Women's rights—Fiction. 6. Tennessee—History—20th century—Fiction.]

I. Title.

PZ7.S3988Ho 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2006036692

v3.0