Commemorative Poem: The Working Woman
Elisabeth Emma Guilbault
Five Days
Her father was a voyageur who died
before she knew his face. Her mother carried her
from Quebec to Chicago, three years old,
wrapped in the language she would lose.
At seventeen she sold dry goods. At twenty
she married. At twenty-four she fled—
divorced on a Thursday, married on a Tuesday,
five days to cross the Indiana line
with a three-year-old and a need to survive.
Do not judge her. You do not know
what it meant to be alone in 1907,
a woman with a child and no protection,
no law on her side, no safety net but marriage.
That marriage failed. She worked. She sued.
She lost in the Supreme Court. She kept going.
Saleslady in dry goods. Saleslady in drugs.
Saleslady in ladies' dresses. Always selling,
always standing, always providing.
And always beside her: the boy she raised alone,
sixty-three years of shared addresses,
Chicago to Miami, mother and son,
the one thing in her life that never broke.
She died at eighty-seven, having outlived
two husbands, one lawsuit, and the son
who was her constant. What she left behind:
the proof that she survived. That she kept working.
That five days was not the end of her story.
Every Ancestor Deserves to Be Remembered
Commemorative poems like this one distill a lifetime into something timeless—designed to be framed, read aloud, or treasured for generations.
