A century ago, farm girl crusaded for women’s rights

Rather than discuss weddings, deaths, church events and visitors, as most community writers did, she often used her forum to argue passionately that women should have the right to vote:

“… I still believe in woman suffrage, and I will be one of the first to cast a vote if Old North Carolina were ever to let her daughters vote,” she wrote.

“I can’t see at all why a woman should neglect her household duties to go to the polls too for a few hours to vote. If her husband was a gentleman he would go along with her, help her with the kids if that is all the plea they have.”

Gypsy, the pen name under which she wrote, was bombarded with critics, who often wrote their barbs under pen names, a common practice at the time. Gypsy’s responses were fast and fierce:

“Farmer Democrat … you said it was not woman’s hand that held the goose quill pen and declared this nation a free and independent nation. No, of course not. Why should they write what is untrue? They knew they were in bondage. They knew that they had to stay at home, did not get to say a word about anything outside the four walls of their home.

“Banty, I think your name rather suits you. Nothing else except a little game chicken who knows what they are doing would say they had rather see a drunken man going about cursing, shooting and threatening than to see a Christian lady quietly voting. You are as little in sense as a banty chicken is in size.”

Hannah turned 21 – legal voting age – in 1920, the year U.S. women won the right to vote. Because her sister married a college professor, she was given the opportunity to go to business school in Charlotte, becoming a secretary before marrying and having a family.

Though she lived in Charlotte, her heart remained in the mountains, according to her son, Dick White, who was interviewed in 1998. Hannah Dotson White lived to be 96.

“Women and girls of the Old North State, let your voices rise and echo and re-echo in and among the valleys and hills of old North Carolina with the words ‘woman suffrage!’ … Before you know it you will be talking toward the polls and will have cast in your vote, returned home with the most whole being for your thinking that some of the evils of the world are being blotted out ad burned to ashes by your help.”