LizzieMaine
Bartender
- Messages
- 33,732
- Location
- Where The Tourists Meet The Sea
If you have a primary source to support your allegation regarding cause of death, I'd like to see it.
I'm going by memory, from Fran Grace's exhaustive biography "Carry A. Nation: Retelling The Life," published by Indiana University Press in 2001. I don't have my copy at hand, but as I remember she was quite clear that Sumalsky himself criticised the newspaper accounts and insisted heart failure was the cause of death. Unless you've got a death certificate to show me, I'm not convinced by the newspapers, which as I say had a strong anti-temperance bias in 1911.
My point in mentioning her alongside Mother Jones was their place in feminist iconography. Nation was a firm believer in women's suffrage, workers' rights, and aid to the poor, as was Jones -- politically, they were part of the same continuum. Grace's biography does much to point out that Nation was far more than the stereotyped "religious fanatic" her opponents made her out to be. Prohibitionism was a militantly feminist cause at the turn of the century, and for the prominence she achieved Nation ought to be considered as much of a feminist icon as Jones is.