Mary Cook

How fitting that I just finished Secret Suffragette by Barbara Mitchelhill on July 3, the 100th anniversary of the Missouri Senate’s approval of women’s right to vote. Set in England around 1913, the story tells of twelve-year old Daisy who is drawn to the women’s movement because of her dream to someday be a nurse like Florence Nightingale. This book is the best type of historical fiction. The depictions of poverty in which Daisy and her family live, the long hours her parents must work in factories, the lack of opportunities for women and the resulting conflict within families vividly re-create the milieu of the time. The heroine, brave and loving Daisy, is refreshing. With none of the super powers of current young heroines, she is nonetheless able to aid her family and her community. While Daisy is somewhat younger than the typical young adult heroine, the book nonetheless meets the criteria for that genre. Our heroine finds herself in a changing world full of conflict. The group to which Daisy is drawn is not a quiet group of women wearing white dresses and carrying banners. The motto of the Women’s Social and Political Union had become “deeds, not words” and they were not averse to breaking windows nor scuffling with police. Daisy finds herself in large crowds of women being arrested, jeered at, and pelted with spoiled food. This violence is present in her own family as her father forces her mother to leave home when she becomes part of the suffragette movement. So Daisy must look for help outside her family and finds it with a local family who ultimately helps to bring her own family back together. Mitchelhill is deft at character development. The reader is drawn to Daisy’s little sister Lily, who strives to do her best but is confused by the changes in family dynamics. Daisy’s mother is devoted to her family but also dedicated to what is right and loses her job when she comes to the aid of a fellow worker. While the father initially is loving, the pressures of being a man in front of his co-workers and neighbors turn him into a bully. Can he redeem himself? As a 10 year old girl, I would have loved this book, just as I loved Ann of Green Gables and Little Women. Secret Suffragette tells today's young girls about the hard-fought victories upon which modern democracy is based.