Honor Women’s Equality Day

Not all that long ago, I watched a CNN reporter approach people on streets in some American city, stick a camera and microphone in their face, and ask blankly, “What do you think of women’s suffrage?”

The responses were, to say the least, disturbing.

Almost every interviewee responded with a single-minded attack on women “suffering”, apparently completely oblivious to the meaning of suffrage.

Because I can, and because I should, today’s post is written in celebration of women’s suffrage, and in thanks to those who fought the battle and won the vote for women in America. To contemplate how different our lives would be … not just women’s lives, but those of everyone of every age and both sexes … should the suffrage movement faltered is an exercise in gloomy expectations, frustrated dreams and arrested development. (Any idea of what life was like for older women before our agenda was allowed to be foisted on the world?)

It was the 26th of August, 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United Sates became law, guaranteeing women the right to vote in the upcoming elections of the year.

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” and “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

It didn’t come easy.

First introduced at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention in July of 1848, it was a state-by-state fight from that point on and took more than seventy years … and the hard work and dedication of many … to move from what many thought nothing more than blatant silliness, and others viewed as a Satan-inspired evil destined to throw the world into a vortex of doom, onto the law of the land.

Interestingly, but not at all surprising, the women who led this movement cut their teeth as abolitionists … and temperance advocates. Learning to organize against the slave trade taught them what could be accomplished by banding together and making a lot of noise, and I’m thinking that the temperance movement was more about women’s and children’s rights to not be abused by drunks than simply against the ingestion of a couple of beers while playing horseshoes.

By 1869, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had founded the National Woman Suffrage Association and Lucy Stone had set up the American Woman Suffrage Association, and the fight was on for real. In 1890, the groups merged after some years of disagreement over strategy, a joining that eventually resulted in what we now know as the League of Women Voters … an organization that would have no place in an America where women weren’t allowed to vote.

So, today everyone should take a moment to acknowledge the contributions of our foremothers, remember to take little for granted because every right has meant a fight, and learn the definition of suffrage.

Suffrage (from the Latin suffragium, meaning “vote”) is the civil right to vote, or the exercise of that right.

Just a little reminder, too, about how voting is a hard-won right that should be valued, embraced and something everyone should do.

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