Alice Bentley: Crawford County's Champion for Women's Rights in the Downton Abbey Era

Among the many themes centered around the changing times in the popular PBS television series, Downton Abbey, women's growing independence has remained a constant, if not a central focus. Such independence was not a circumstance experienced within a vacuum behind the walls of Downton, but rather, life at Downton provides context to the growing freedoms gained by women of all classes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Among these many freedoms was the suffrage movement, a cause championed the Suffragettes. Suffragettes were members of women's organizations in the late 19th and early 20th century which advocated the extension of the "franchise", or the right to vote in public elections, to women. British suffragettes were mostly women from upper- and middle-class backgrounds, frustrated by their social and economic situation much like the Crawley women at Downton. 

Crawford County Estates in the Downton Abbey Era

Baldwin Reynolds Home & Estate

The "Downton" Era (1910s and 1920s) was a time or expansion of ideas, but for a tightening of funds in large manors, or, in the case in America, smaller landed estates. "The Terrace," as it was called in Meadville, was the undisputed millionaire's row of the city which, along with upper Chestnut Street and a few smaller neighborhoods interspersed throughout town, boasted the Huidekoper, Reynolds, Magaw, Boileau, and Shryock families.

Many of these homes were estates in their own right, the Reynolds family (of the Baldwin-Reynolds House) owned land adjoining Bentley Hall at Allegheny College down to French Creek and the Huidekoper family once claimed ownership of much of the upper Chestnut area, Grove Street being named after a large orchard and forest in that location connected to their properties.

Frenchtown's Crystal Chandelier

This chandelier hanging from the starry ceiling of the Saint Hippolytes church in Frenchtown, near Guys Mills, Pennsylvania‬ was donated around 1888 by Otthille and Lydie Bousson, two sisters from France who operated a shirt factory in New York City. The Bousson sisters amassed a fortune from producing high-quality shirts worn by the Astors, Vanderbilts, and even U.S. Grant. Eventually the two moved to the area, building a brick mansion between Frenchtown and Pettis, now aptly known as Bousson.