We were reading Tessa Weinberg’s Missouri Independent article a few weeks ago about the eleven women members of the Missouri Senate who have put together a children’s book that tells the stories of the 36 women who have served and are serving in the Senate.  We thought, “I need get some copies of that book for my granddaughters.”

And then I’m going around office-to-office and have the authors sign them.  .

I have known all 36 of those women senators which says (a) I’m an old guy, or (b) women were late in arriving in the Senate. Actually, there is no “or” about it.  Both observations are true.

A few days ago, while looking for something else, I came across this article from the St. Louis Daily Evening Herald Newspaper and Commercial Advertiser of June 10, 1836.

EMIGRATION OF THE RIGHT SORT

The predominance of the female over the male sex, in the ancient commonwealth of Massachusetts, is very great. In some towns, according to the last census, the proportion is more than two to one, and the excess in the whole state is more than 14,000. Of course, there must of necessity be 14,000 old maids in Massachusetts, over and above the number that goes to offset the old bachelors, (the fools) which may perhaps account for half as many more. Twenty thousand old maids in the single commonwealth of Massachusetts! Now although we have no antipathy to an old maid (we have to an old bachelor though) having always found that much abused class sensible, good-natured, and conversible, yet it must be admitted that in this position, the woman can never manifest the higher qualities of her nature. It is as a wife, a mother, at the head of a family, presiding over the destinies of an infant and miniature commonwealth, that the woman shines forth in all the loveliness of those moral excellences of which she is capable.

Without this, the sphere of her usefulness is greatly circumscribed, and although we may confidently expect that she will not do much harm, neither can she do much good.  We are therefore glad to learn that a company of “industrious, capable and intelligent” young women are about to start from Northampton, Mass., for the valley of the West.  They are needed as school teachers, to fulfill the various mechanical employments which are the province of their sex, and above all, they are needed as the sweeteners of the toil and hardships of our young men who now, in great numbers, are laboring in unblessed loneliness over the vast domains of the west. These young women come out under the protection of a gentleman, and we do not hesitate, in the name of all that is pure and lovely, to promise them a hearty welcome from all classes of our fellow citizens.

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There are a lot of things to read into this article. Dismissing it as “quaint” might not be fair, though.  It’s part of our history, an understanding of the role of women in society—which was largely and quietly accepted on both sides of the gender line—an appreciation of a sort of the contribution women even in those un-emancipated times played in the home and the community—a comment on the loneliness of life on the frontier (1836 was the year that the Platte Purchase added the northwest corner to our state), and other issues.

It also is a commentary on the Missouri pioneer editor, a more colorful purveyor of that profession than we seem to have today.  I think many of these guys just had more fun in those days, whether it was in the gentle writing of this story or the more partisan pronouncements that were not uncommon in the columns of the time.

A little less than ninety years later, a woman’s place was in the House (of Representatives) in Missouri, and fifty years after that the Senate became a woman’s place, too.

These eleven senators did something important in putting together this book that the menfolk in the Senate might want to learn from.  These eleven women recognized they could do something good by forgetting about party politics, getting together over food and drink, and accomplishing something useful not for themselves but for those whose futures are far from determined.

Would that more people could do that in these times when fighting seems more important than accomplishing, when concerns about power supplant commitments to service. .

We hope that not too many years in the future a woman—perhaps one of these eleven or a young woman who reads their book—manifests “the higher qualities of her nature” by occupying the governor’s office.

As the title of the book says, “You can, too.”