FOR ALL THE WOMEN WHO CAME BEFORE

This is my mother sometime in the 1920s (the hair gives the decade away). She was a high school graduate, which in the Irish-American community of that time was a signal accomplishment (my father, her husband, was a seventh grade drop out, he had to go to work to help support his Irish immigrant family), the youngest secretary ever in the New Jersey chapter of the Daughters of The Grand Old Army (if I'm getting this correctly, she had grand uncles who served in the Union Army during The Civil War, her father's clan, the Dempseys, came over before that war)...she was among the youngest of the generation that fought for women's suffrage and among the pioneer women voters in the first decade of suffrage (she was only fifteen when women got the vote so didn't get to vote in that presidential election). She was tough (could spit through her teeth and whistle for a cab louder than any man) and sweet (look at those eyes and that dimple) and loving. She left us over half a century ago, and I still miss her...