Boise, Idaho
                       Aug 15th 1887

  Alice B. Stockham M.D.

       Dear Madam: 
                  I should not wish to
  exhibit my books or drawings as
  "woman's work", as they are
  not put in the market on
  that basis; nor should I care
  to contribute towards the cam-
  paign for municipal suffrage, not
  being entirely in sympathy with
  it as a means towards the
  progress of woman.
        Yours very Respectfully
              Mary Hallock Foote

"The Irrigating Ditch"
The Century Magazine, June 1889
Courtesy of  Boise State University Western Writers Series

Mary Hallock Foote was the author of 12 novels and numerous  magazine articles that she illustrated herself.   She came to Idaho in 1884, joining her husband Arthur Foote, an engineer who designed irrigation works in the Boise valley.  Her works  portray the American West from a woman's point of view, though politically she was not always in sympathy with feminist aims, as this letter illustrates.  Her reminiscences were published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West by the Huntington Library (California) in 1972; her life story was fictionalized by Wallace Stegner in his novel, Angle of Repose (1971).