Author and historian Anne B. Gass will do a virtual presentation about her new novel, “We Demand: The Suffrage Road Trip.”

The novel is based on the true story of a 1915 road trip for the suffrage cause. It is about middle-aged Swedish immigrants, Ingeborg Kindstedt and Maria Kindberg, who visit San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition.

They plan to buy a car and have a leisurely drive back to their home in Rhode Island. On impulse, they volunteer to bring along two envoys heading to Washington, D.C., to demand votes for women from President Woodrow Wilson and Congress. Soon they are plunged into a difficult and dangerous journey that pushes them to the limits of their endurance.

The story unfolds through the eyes of unlikely suffrage heroes Ingeborg Kindstedt and Maria Kindberg, middle-aged Swedish immigrants who own the car, do all the driving, and fix what goes wrong. The roads are often bad, and the weather is worse. They lose their way in a trackless Nevada desert, get stuck in the mud in Kansas, among many other adventures. Will they arrive in DC at the appointed day and time?

The talk is accompanied by historic slides. The 1915 trip was featured in the PBS American Experience

Gass is an independent historian with a passion for sharing the history of women’s fight for voting and other rights. She lectures regularly on suffrage and women’s rights history at schools, colleges, museums, historical societies, and other venues, and is involved with women’s history groups/women's rights groups in Maine and nationally.