One of the many wonderful rabbit holes I went down while writing my forthcoming book on Ursula Parrott involved Madge Tyrone, Ursula's older half-sister, who was a pioneering movie actress, screenwriter, editor, and feminist activist in the teens and twenties. She was fascinating, but I could only include a small slice of her story in my book. The Women Film Pioneers Project just published my profile of Tyrone. I especially loved the story of the "lapboard ladies" who in 1915 "took to the elevated trains and the subway carrying placards announcing that 'Woman Suffrage is Coming' and that 'One Million Women of this State Want the Vote.' ... According to a reporter, one passerby proclaimed, 'We’re with you, sister'” to the sign-yielding suffragists, while a naysayer asserted that 'women’s laps were made for holding babies, not lapboards.'"
Comments