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Historical Society of Glastonbury, CT

“Daisy, Whitey, Minnie and Proxy, with one other, have been driven to be sold at the Auction Block, this Centennial year; a fine commentary on the doings of our Forefathers a hundred years ago,” Julia Smith wrote in 1876.

When Glastonbury tax officials unexpectedly raised the Smiths’ taxes and those of two widows—but no man’s—the outraged sisters refused to pay. The suffragists took up their cause when the town auctioned off Julia’s pet livestock, likening the Smith sisters to the revolutionaries who, 100 years earlier, had protested taxation without representation. Encouraged by the suffragists, Smith published her translation during the centennial celebration of the American Revolution to prove a woman was capable of doing “more than any man.”

This engraving served as frontispiece to a book on the bovine affair that Smith wrote in 1877.