Maine Women Magazine: A Leader From The Past
Florence Brooks Whitehouse. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress
This Portland woman was instrumental in Maine ratifying women’s right to vote in 1919
Anne Gass remembers her aunt, Priscilla Whitehouse Rand, telling her about the three boxes full of papers she’d found in the family’s camp in East Raymond. The boxes belonged to her Aunt Priscilla’s grandmother, Florence Brooks Whitehouse. Gass knew only vaguely that Whitehouse, her great-grandmother, had been a part of the Maine suffrage movement. But her aunt had stayed with Whitehouse often when she was a child attending Waynflete and remembered her well. She knew the papers might be important. “Someone has to go through these boxes,” her aunt told Gass.