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Lillian Nordica: Farmington Diva

Lillian Nordica after concert in Australia, 1913

Lillian Nordica after concert in Australia, 1913

Item 17267 info
Nordica Memorial Association

Lillian Nordica also used her position as a well-loved opera diva to comment on a contentious public issue: woman suffrage.

She was indignant on learning of a woman in Texas who left her drunken husband and earned by hard work $1,500 which he then claimed and was awarded according to the law of the time.

In 1911, she gave two concerts in San Francisco. While there, she spoke from an open street car in support of an upcoming vote on the women's suffrage amendment to the state constitution.

Among other things, she said suffrage would not bring prohibition, as many feared (and she was right, prohibition became law before women got the vote), and that she would resent a law that forbade her "a glass of wine and a piece of pie." When she landed in Sydney on July 21, 1913, newspaper reporters wanted to know about her suffrage views and her friendship with the British Royal family.