Elizabeth Wiling Powel could not vote. The 19th Amendment and Suffrage movements didn’t exist in a country not yet born. Powel was a politician’s wife. She was married to the Mayor of Philadelphia and a fixture of Philadelphia society. She was close to General Washington and his wife Martha. It was Powel who asked Ben Franklin the question that elicited the famous and oft-quoted answer from our most important founding elder, ‘’A Republic if you can keep it.’