Esther Morris was instrumental in the fight for women’s suffrage in Wyoming. An unverified story about Morris hosting a tea party in order to press the issue among influential men in Wyoming is the launching point for this captivating fictionalized account of Morris’s accomplishments. The story opens in 1820, with six-year-old Esther watching her mother making tea. “I could do that,” Esther says. It’s a refrain repeated with variations throughout the rest of the story. Esther learns to sew a fine seam at age eight, opens her own dress shop as a young woman, and becomes a midwife when she moves to Wyoming (“I can do that.”). She opposes a throng who tried to stop abolitionist meetings (“You can’t do that.”). She reads a proclamation encouraging all men 21 and older to vote (“It’s time I did that.”). And she becomes the first woman judge in the country after her local justice of the peace resigns in opposition to women’s suffrage (“ 'Mama, you could do that,’ said her sons.”). Linda Arms White’s playful text is perfectly matched by Nancy Carpenter’s illustrations, which include a repeated teapot motif on the endpapers. An author’s note provides additional information about Esther Morris. (Ages 5–8)

Full of humor and spunk – just like Esther!

 

“I could do that,” says six-year-old Esther as she watches her mother making tea. Start her own business at the age of nineteen? Why, she could do that, too. But one thing Esther and other women could NOT do was vote. Only men could do that.

With lively text and humorous illustrations as full of spirit as Esther herself, this striking picture book biography shows how one girl’s gumption propels her through a life filled with challenges until, in 1869, she wins the vote for women in Wyoming Territory – the first time ever in the United States!

 

I Could Do That! is a 2006 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.