Suzanne Stevenson was born Sarah Walker in Centralia, Missouri, one of five children of a local farmer and his wife. On reaching marrying age, she was courted by a farmer in a nearby town, one Wilford Hane, and eventually married him, moving to the nearby town of Henshaw. While the marriage went fine at first, it started to deteriorate when Hane’s farmland started yielding smaller and smaller crops (most likely due to soil exhaustion), forcing Wilford to compensate with fishing trips. His long absences led to instability in their relationship, which often led to violence on his part. Unlike most suffering from domestic violence in 1870s Missouri, Sarah Walker had the convenience to run into the infamous Mr. Victor Freestone, who spirited her away to the Francois Home of Helping in Louisiana, a shelter run by the Francois Foundation, devoted to those who needed escape from their situations, whether it was homelessness, marriage or some other misfortune.

After taking some time to recover from her situation, not wanting to return to Missouri, she became a long-term tenant at the Home of Helping, assisting other women who arrived bruised from their own marriages. Between 1876 and 1877, she took on the name Suzanne Stevenson, cutting off ties to her past, and began assisting the Francois Foundation staff with other tasks, learning how to read and write in order to better handle the logistics of supplies for the house. While her role in the organization remained an unofficial volunteer position due to the shaky legality of her new identity, the Foundation soon considered her an unbelievable asset to the organization. When the Foundation expanded into providing meals for the needy in 1881, she was there when the first soup kitchen opened. When it partnered with the state to found a hospital, she helped budget for bandages and beadpans. Outside of the Foundation, she was best known for her writings on married women’s rights in 1891. Louisiana had barely passed a bill allowing married women the right to own property, but it was vetoed by Governor Nicholls, leading her to write several invectives to public newspapers decrying his actions. The letters were circulated across the South and one of the phrases she coined, ‘do we not own what we sweat and bleed to make beautiful’, would become a rallying cry for suffragettes in the early 1900s. She would retire in 1919 using money collected and saved for her by the Foundation. Only on her deathbed in 1926 did she reveal her past and her connection to Henshaw, sparking a scandal given Tyce Francois’s strong ties to Victor Freestone. She never remarried and, while she had some close friends, stayed distant from people outside of her volunteer work.

Throughout her life as Suzanne, she refused to discuss her life as Sarah Hane, and never commented on the events that happened in Henshaw after she left. We only she was Sarah Hane because she asked to be buried under the name Sarah Walker. The reveal of her true identity sparked some scholarship on whether she may have some connection to The Protean Experiments, given Tyce Francois’s financial backing of both the infamous expedition and the Foundation. Modern scholars, however, often criticize said scholarship as clumsy attempts to bury the extensive career of an independent philanthropist and early feminist under the scandal of one man, or desperate and greedy attempts to track down where Freestone disappeared to and claim the reward for his capture. “Is it not enough that she clothed the poor and fed the hungry?” said Lucia Camino, professor of law at the University of North Louisiana when asked about the subject.