A Curse Dark as Gold (review)

Eleven-year-old Violet Mayhew is furious when she discovers that her mother has been intercepting Violet's letters from her older sister, Chloe; Chloe was kicked out of their house three years ago for her radical ideas about socialism and women's suffrage, and she used her hope-chest money to buy a Model T instead of those indispensable items a proper girl needs to set up housekeeping. In her anger, Violet runs away to join her sister in New York. Bedraggled and lost in the big city, she is befriended by a ten-year-old black girl named Myrtle; together, they track Violet's sister from the New York settlement house where she had been working, to Washington, to Nashville, where the vote to ratify the Susan B. Anthony Amendment is throwing the Tennessee legislature into a tizzy. The frankly unbelievable plot of two preteen girls finding each other on the streets of New York City, riding the rails to Washington under the direction of yet another intrepid preteen soul, this one a veteran hobo, and ending up playing an important role in the fortunes of women's suffrage turns laughably implausible when Violet hops into her sister's Model T and Mr. Toads it through the streets of 1920 Nashville to bring back an escaping politician. That said, this is a well-paced and comprehensive history lesson about the fight for women's right to vote. Violet and Myrtle manage to meet all the key players in the battle between the Suffs and the Antis, and they learn all of the idealist rhetoric that surrounded the movement: When women got the right to vote, war, child labor, and racism would end, the prohibition of alcohol would spread all over the world, and corruption would become a thing of the past. Of course. This is contrived indeed, but it's an energetic read for those who like their history with a side of peppy American Girls'–style feminism and sentiment. Historical notes with pictures and a timeline of voting rights in America are included.