As the Democratic Convention opened on the virtual stage this week, ten-year-old Naya Snyder began to sing: “O say can you see . . .” As I listened to Naya and her fellow choir members, their last line seemed especially poignant as we celebrate the centennial of the passage of the nineteenth amendment, giving the vote to women. “The land of the free, and the home of the brave.” One hundred and thirty-four years after the Declaration of Independence gave birth to a new nation, because of the bravery of suffragettes, female citizens would no longer be kept from voting.
It was a long and hard-fought battle, but as suffragette Alice Paul quoted her Quaker mother: “When you put your hand to the plow, you can’t put it down until the end of the row.” This fight began with a gathering of three hundred people in 1848, when Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton convened the Seneca Falls Convention. The “suffrage” amendment was finally ratified when Tennessee approved it in 1920.
The story from Tennessee reminds us of the power of one voice. Harry Burns, only twenty-four, had planned to vote “no” on the amendment, but a message from his mother, Feb Burns, encouraged him to “be a good boy” and change his vote. He later explained: “I knew that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow . . .”
Here’s the actual text of the amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any other State on account of sex.” Unfortunately. many citizens were still kept from voting because of racially-biased poll taxes and literacy tests, and it was forty-five years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became law.
In this anniversary year, it would have been fitting – and fun – to re-enact the suffrage parades across the country, women dressed in white with colorful purple banners, demanding the vote. However, even before COVID-19, I had no desire to re-enact being chained to the White House fence, being arrested and imprisoned, or taking part in hunger strikes, and subsequently being force-fed (see the film Iron-Jawed Angels to learn more of their story).
The heroines of the movement have many Ohio connections. Sojourner Truth spoke to a suffrage convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851, famously saying, “And ain’t I a woman?” Ohio-born Victoria Woodhall ran for president in 1872. Toledo’s Pauline Steinam (Gloria’s grandmother) was the first Jewish woman to hold elected office in the US. In 1920, Ohio’s Harriet Taylor Upton became the first woman vice chair of the Republican National Committee.
The women who fought this battle had to be courageous. Writing in Smithsonian Magazine, Maria Speidel observed that these women took “pains not to hurt people, [as] they created mayhem by attacking property . . . and disrupting government meetings.” They caused nearly as much “good trouble” as Dean Winters brings mayhem to the Allstate commercials. One hundred years ago, the vote became theirs. And now, in 2020, the vote is ours. I think about their sacrifice every time I enter a voting booth.
Dr. Deleasa Randall Griffiths portrayed suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt at Ashland Chautauqua in 2015, and reflected on her role: “Hopefully people not only learn about the past, but also reflect or integrate into things that are going on right now . . . maybe we just get fueled by the fight that went on and the people who didn’t give up, maybe it helps us not give up.” She continued, “This work feels like I am passing a baton on to younger people who I hope would then carry this history on like a relay race . . .”
Remembering the history is a part of the work of preserving voting rights. Susan Anthony and Lucretia Mott have extended the baton through generations. Naya Snyder is carrying it as she lifts her voice in anthem, and soon, I will pass that same baton to the hands of the lovely Madelyn Simone, the delightful and determined Elizabeth Holiday, and the sweet Emma Belle Shade. In the words of Winifred Banks, “Well done, Sister Suffragette.”
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