26. Idaho: The Iron Cage of the Law with Sharon McMahon
The Preamble
Sharon McMahon
4.9 • 15.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2021
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Sharon tells listeners about an incredible woman that is often left out of the history books: Rebecca Brown Mitchell of Idaho. Rebecca was known to have a “fire in her bones” that fueled her deep passion for education and justice. Rebecca’s story begins on the dirt-floor of an abandoned saloon in Idaho Falls. There, she taught the town’s children how to read and write, and she hosted weekly Sunday School. Flashing forward a few years, Rebecca established the town’s first school and church, became deeply involved in the Idaho State legislature and led a women’s rights movement within the state. Here is the story of how Rebecca Brown did it all and eventually gained Idaho women the right to vote nearly twenty years earlier than the rest of American women were granted the same right.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello friends! Welcome! So happy to have you along today. I have got just a fantastic story |
| 0:09.6 | for you. This is about a woman who changed Idaho history like in a big way. And yet you |
| 0:16.0 | probably don't know her name. You probably have never heard of her and yet her name deserves |
| 0:20.8 | to be in the history box. So let's dive into the story of Rebecca Brown Mitchell. I'm Sharon |
| 0:29.2 | McMan. And welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Like most of us? Like most of us listening today, |
| 0:40.5 | Rebecca was born. She was born in the 1830s in Illinois and she got married as a young woman, |
| 0:47.2 | like a 19-year-old woman. She married a farmer, had a couple of sons, and then her husband died, |
| 0:52.8 | leaving her a widow at a very young age to try to care for her two sons. The laws were such |
| 0:58.4 | in Illinois at the time that she was not allowed to keep any of her property. Not the property that |
| 1:07.1 | she brought into her marriage, not the property that her husband and her head purchased together. |
| 1:12.1 | Nothing. The law was not on her side. She was allowed to keep her Bible and everything else, |
| 1:20.0 | she was forced to purchase back from the state of Illinois. She said it was like she was a prisoner |
| 1:28.6 | in the iron cage of the law. And boy, is that a sentence that people around the country, |
| 1:38.0 | people around the world can relate to? I was a prisoner in the iron cage of the law. So eventually, |
| 1:45.8 | she remarried. She had another baby and then another baby, two more daughters. Her older daughter |
| 1:53.4 | died when she was five. And so she was left with one daughter and a very unhappy marriage. |
| 2:00.3 | She ended up leaving her second husband. And the reasons why she left her second husband, |
| 2:05.7 | not really well recorded. She doesn't talk about it much. All we know is that she was unhappy |
| 2:11.2 | for some reason. She decided, you know, what I've always wanted to do is teach. I've always wanted |
| 2:18.9 | to teach school. I've always wanted to teach Sunday school, elementary school. I've always wanted |
| 2:24.5 | to be a teacher. So she went back to college and became a teacher when she was at that time, |
| 2:31.7 | an older woman, like in her 30s, she became a teacher. |
... |
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