Audio By Carbonatix
Melanie Crowder was inspired to turn her research about women’s suffrage into a historical young-adult novel when she learned about Clara Lemlich, who’s best known for standing up at a mass factory workers’ meeting in New York in 1909 and motioning to strike: Lemlich was a labor activist before she was a suffragist. “I think I decided to write the book when I found out that Clara had wanted to be a doctor,” Crowder explains. “I was in grad school at the time working on my MSA, and I was looking for all of these pictures of suffragists.
“You look at Clara in the history books, and she is usually a single line,” Crowder continues. “She went up on stage and got every-body excited and committed to strike, and that’s usually all that you hear. But when I was doing my research, I discovered that she had these aspirations to be a doctor, and she actually had an offer of patronage as a poor immigrant: A wealthy family offered to sponsor her. She could have had her own personal dream come true, but she turned it down to continue the labor fight. That was the moment when I really got chills. All of us owe such a debt of gratitude to people like her, who gave up everything so that we could have a better life.”
Crowder will sign Audacity, a fictional account based on Lemlich’s life, tonight at 7 p.m. at the Tattered Cover, 2526 East Colfax Avenue. Visit tatteredcover.com or call 303-322-7727.
Mon., Jan. 12, 7 p.m., 2015
