The Smith Sisters
Sisters Abigail Smith and Julia Smith contributed to the fight for women’s rights in 1870’s. Growing up in Glastonbury, Connecticut, Abigail and Julia had supported anti-slavery actions. From distributing anti-slavery newspapers to letting William Lloyd Garrison speak for abolition of slavery in their yard, the sisters were in the fight for equality. Once slavery was abolished in 1865, the sisters found themselves in a different fight for equality: women’s rights.
In Glastonbury in 1870, the tax collector informed the sisters that their taxes had raised $100 in value. The sisters had investigated and discovred that none of their male neighbors had had their property taxes raised. Instead, the town decided to collect taxes from single female landowners. Abigail and Julia at first refused to pay their taxes and argued that they should have a right to vote on decisions that affected them. The town's men refused to listen to them and proceeded to make the sisters pay their taxes. The sisters wanted to make installment payments on their tax bills like male landowners could do, but the town leaders told the sisters they had to pay in full.
When the sisters refused to pay the unfair taxes imposed upon them, the town proceeded to take seven of their cows as payment for the taxes. The town would keep the cows for a week and if the sisters didn’t pay their full taxes the cows would be auctioned. The sisters refused to pay the taxes but when the cows were being auctioned Abigail and Julia were the only ones who bid on the cows, and the cows were returned to them. This kept up for several years, with the sisters refusing to pay the unfair taxes and their cows being auctioned, only to return to Abigail and Julia. This story drew national attention and made the sisters "living martyrs to the cause of women’s suffrage and government corruption.”