KINGWOOD — On June 11, the community will have the opportunity to learn about and celebrate the notable women of Preston County.
Beginning at 2 p.m. with a historic marker dedication at 302 Tunnelton St., Kingwood, where famous actress and suffragette Izetta Jewel Brown lived after marrying William G. Brown Jr. Brown Jr. was the son of William G. Brown, a Congressman who voted against seceding from the Union, and helped found West Virginia.
Izetta moved from California to Washington, D.C., where she continued to act and met Brown Jr. — who was smitten after seeing her in a play, Hopkins said.
“She was very active in suffrage and she was the person who handled that or who sort of spearheaded it for West Virginia back in 1920,” said Virginia Jackson Hopkins, a McGrew Society member.
After the ceremony on Saturday, participants will march to the McGrew House with suffrage ribbons and signs for a program on the suffrage movement, Hopkins said.
The event was planned for 2020, which was the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, but a week prior COVID-19 hit.
There are old articles, pictures of famous suffragettes, and a display of famous female Prestonians.
One of them is Harriet Jones, a Terra Alta native and the first woman in the state to become a licensed physician.
“She started Hopemont, started Weston state hospital, said we gotta do something to separate the girls who are getting in trouble. She started Salem, she started an orphanage. I mean, pretty, pretty instrumental. She did all sorts of things,” Hopkins said.
Hopkins is herself a trailblazer. She was the first female prosecutor to try a jury trial in Preston County.
She has always been a fan of women’s history and said as a woman, she’s impressed with what Izetta did.
“I’m a woman, and saw how some of these things, you don’t realize it’s not just a vote,” Hopkins said.
At the time, men controlled the money, Hopkins said. An independently wealthy woman’s money became her husband’s when she married. If she left, she did so without their children.
The men also made the laws about things such as the age of consent and child labor. Even after women won the right to vote, there were still unjust laws.
“There was a 1960, and that’s not really that long ago when we think about time, a case where the 60-some-year-old landlord had been sexually assaulting this 9-year-old,” Hopkins said. “Got prosecuted, he was convicted, and the Supreme Court overturned it saying she didn’t prove she was a previous chaste character. So you have this little promiscuous 9-year-old, please. But that’s what the law was.”
The women being celebrated on Saturday are ones who saw a problem and did something about it — a philosophy Hopkins hopes people take away from the event.
“That’s what I would hope — that anyone who sees the problem and thinks something should be done, realizes, why don’t you do it?” Hopkins said. “I had a judge once at some of the child abuse programs we were attending, and he said, ‘I don’t want to hear anyone saying that’s not my job, because if it’s needing to be done and it’s not being done, it’s your job.’ And I mean, that’s what we need to do. Because if you just, say, only do the minimum, then you won’t worry about change where there’s inequality.”
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