Tuesday, September 1, 1925 Elizabeth left for China!
On this day, she wrote her first letter home… and just 101 years later, you can enjoy the start to her adventures —
Shirley M. Marshall
I’m Shirley Marshall: author, researcher and traveler. After a career in non-profit leadership, I decided to follow my passion for history into a new career as a writer.
My books focus on individuals living through changing times. These eye-witness stories are placed into a broader context, which creates a more complete picture. First-hand accounts allow us to explore larger social and economic issues. Do the writers embrace change, fight for it? Do they fear it, struggling to keep the old way? Or do they just ignore changes, sit out the fight? These choices are fundamental to our shared story, our history.
As Angeles Peon, survivor of the Spanish Civil War, said: “What are we without memories?” As a society, when we forget our history we lose the truth of our world. Or as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot liked to say: “Old sins cast long shadows.”
My first three books are connected, each featuring the wonderful writings of Elizabeth Kalb Green. She was a suffragist, then an ‘auto-camper’ for a year in a Model T, and finally she was a reporter from China during their civil war in the 1920s. Her letters are a unique opportunity to explore major issues of the early 20th Century.
“The universe is a sort of book, whose first page one has read when one has seen only one’s own country.”
Attributed to Fougeret De Monbron, 1753
Elizabeth with Kozo Fujita [University of Iowa] and his sister Yoshi in Japan, en route to China, 1925
books
A Radical Suffragist, 2024, The History Press.
Elizabeth worked and lived at the National Woman’s Party Headquarters in DC from 1918 – 1921. Her letters from the first five months reveal a young woman excited, scared and stepping up to the challenge of her “first Grand Adventure.”
California Cruising with Elizabeth, 2025, Rearview Publishing
Elizabeth recounts the year she spent car camping across California in 1922/23. With a Model T named “Junior,” she and her mother spent three months among the redwoods and then six months in the desert outside Palm Springs. Her friendship with the local Agua Caliente people allowed her to use suffrage skills for a new cause.
What Wonderful Fire, 2026, Rearview Publishing
This is the last book in the Elizabeth series. In 1925, with China beset by civil war, she sailed happily for Peking. Elizabeth spent a year reporting back home on people and events. Her letters combine personal and political, as she gets to know poets, rickshaw drivers, Chinese politicians, foreign envoys — and fiery student activists.
Thanks to the AAUW of VA for a wonderful time sharing suffrage history at the 2026 Women’s Equality Day celebration!
Sampling of letters 
Preparing for first Demonstration 
Elizabeth, c. 1920 
Stopped and Detained at the Senate Office Buliding 
Elizabeth, behind the pole on the right, in borrowed white dress 
Big Basin Redwood Park, Lin Yun chopping wood 
Canyon camping, outside Palm Springs CA 
Big Basin, light through the woods 
Elizabeth’s first drive in her Model T 
Looking toward Mt. San Jacinto 
“Kwanyin” or Guanyin in the redwood forest
