THE VOTE: A NOVEL A CONVERSATION WITH SYBIL DOWNING The Vote is about the critical months in 1918 that led up to the final passage of the Suffrage Amendment in the U.S. Senate. Why write about that now? Downing: With women in all parts of the world risking their lives for the right to vote, I can't think of a better time for the American story to be told. I grew up hearing stories of how my great grandfather had come to this country from Ireland as a boy, how he had learned the printing trade and "read the law" to become an attorney, how he and his wife and three children had come to Colorado Territory, how he became a Territorial Representative and went on to be the state's first Congressman and later a U.S. Senator and owner of the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Times. Hand-in-hand with his stories were those of my great grandmother—how she and four other women in the 1870s made an unsuccessful attempt to have women's suffrage included in Colorado's constitution, only to win their case twenty years later. Yet by the time I ran and was elected to local and then state office, not once but twice, I'd forgotten the details that make their stories. Then, shortly before 9/11, news of women's plight in the Middle East and Afghanistan reminded me again of how little I knew about the women in my own country—the women once known as suffragists. And I set out to discover their story. Did anything you learned surprise you? Downing: Wow! I guess! The women of the National Women's Party were thrown into prisons that crawled with cockroaches and rats without benefit of an attorney and with the tacit approval of the President of the United States. The cast was a rich mix: most young women—college graduates and factory workers, rich and poor, shop girls from big cities and small town housewives. They picketed and lobbied. They dodged rotten tomatoes and ignored threats. It's the going to prison piece that most people don't know, and their story had to be told. Any specifics? Downing: First, I'd never heard of the National Women's Party, and they were the ones who took off the white gloves and never said please. Unlike the National Woman's Suffrage Association, they fought on the same level as the Congressmen and Senators who had denied them the vote For one thing, they devised a card system to keep track of the men whose votes they were determined to get. Every piece of personal information—from name of wife, number and names of children, place of residence to shoe size and name of mistress if he had one appeared on those cards and was used when necessary. In short, the NWP played political hardball in an era when women were expected to know their place. How historically accurate is The Vote? Downing: The story is a work of fiction, but the history behind it is as accurate as I could get it. I spent two years on the research including searches in the Library of Congress and the Belmont House where NWP papers are archived. In fact, I arrived in Washington to start my research two days after 9/11. But that's a story of its own.