Elizabeth Lyle Saxon
| Elizabeth Lyle Saxon | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
Elizabeth Lyle December 2, 1832 Greenville, Tennessee |
| Died | March 14, 1915 (aged 82) Memphis, Tennessee |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Women's Suffrage Movement |
| Notable work | A Southern Woman's War Time Reminiscences |
Elizabeth Lyle Saxon (1832–1915) was a writer and a late 19th and early 20th century advocate of women's rights. She reached national recognition as one of the key pioneer suffragettes of the South, making numerous appeals to the federal government to recognize women's right to vote.
Elizabeth Lyle Saxon was born December 2, 1832, to Andrew J. Lyle and Clarissa N. Crutchfield in Greenville, Tennessee. When Saxon was only two years old, her mother died, leaving her father to raise her alone. Saxon very much looked up to her father and described herself as being like him. He passed on to her a love of literature and nature, and "hatred of oppression". In her youth, Saxon was formally tutored by writer Caroline Lee Hentz in Tuskegee, Alabama. Saxon began writing at the age of 12 under the pen name Annott Lyle and later published stories in the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier; the Columbia, South Carolina, Banner; and the Philadelphia Courier. At the age of 16, she married South Carolinian Lydell A. Saxon and together they had four children who survived to adulthood.
In 1855, Saxon and her family spent the winters in Wetumpka, Alabama and summers in New York City, where her husband traveled for business. In 1860, tensions between the North and the South were growing, and Saxon traveled to Savannah, where she noted a buzz in anticipation of the American Civil War. Saxon's husband had strong Union sentiments which made him unpopular, and he returned to New York while Saxon remained in Memphis with their two children. On a 1861 trip to New Orleans just before the start of the war, Saxon had a dream of her father's death, and she fell into despair when she could not contact him in Arkansas, where he had traveled with her brothers. She returned to Alabama just as the war began.Alabama seceded on January 11, 1861, a day that Saxon described as the saddest in her life. She and her husband were unionists, and she hated slavery, but she remained in Alabama, describing herself as "Southern in every vein and fibre of being." As the war progressed, Saxon became a "Southern Mother", working day and night for suffering soldiers.
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