Laura Madeline Wiseman

Queen of the Platform Laura Madeline Wiseman

Queen of the Platform: These poems are based on the life of Laura Wiseman's great-great-great-grandmother, the nineteenth century lecturer, suffragist, and poet, Matilda Fletcher Wiseman (1842-1909) and the men in her life: her brother, George W. Felts (1843-1921), a civil war solider who was later charged with murder, her first husband, John A. Fletcher (1837-1875), a school teacher and a lawyer, and her second husband, William Albert Wiseman (1850-1911), a minister who became her agent. The fifth of fourteen children from abolitionist parents, who had fled the South, Matilda was born in Winnebago County, Illinois, and raised on a farm in Durand. Like her seven brothers who served in the Civil War, Matilda chose the public sphere. After the death of her only child, Matilda joined the lecture circuit. She spoke to support herself and her first husband, until his death. He died of tuberculosis, a disease he contracted during his service to the Union. Eleven years later, she remarried a Methodist minister, my great-great-great-grandfather. On the stage she spoke among other lecturers of her time, such as Susan B. Anthony.