Nevertheless, She Persisted

As I read Jennifer Chiaverini’s “The Women’s March: A Novel of the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession,” I repeated the words of the writer of Ecclesiastes: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, there is nothing new under the sun.” In the United States of America, who should be able to vote? In 1870, the fifteenth amendment prohibited restrictions of voting based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. In 1913, the issue was voting rights for women.In 1965, despite the previous amendments, voting rights for all people but especially for people of color were at risk. Now, in 2022, as debate for a federal standard of protection for voting rights is at stake, there remains “nothing new under the sun.”

 

One of the themes in Chiaverini’s book revolves around the dilemma faced by suffragists of the day: should they attempt to work in the states to change the laws surrounding access to the voting booth for women, or should there be a national response to the concerns of the day? Sound familiar? Similar discussions began long before the constitution was written, and continue to this day. Should the right to vote and to access those voting rights depend on whether we live in a free or slave state, a state that rejects or accepts women’s suffrage, or a blue or red state? Where is the line between states’ rights and the protection of rights for all Americans? 

 

Those opposed to suffrage for women little more than a hundred years ago had many excuses as to why the fairer sex shouldn’t be able to vote. But ultimately, limiting access to voting, both historically and in the present day, seems to have one goal: to keep power in fewer hands. I, for one, am grateful that the heroines of “The Women’s March” persisted. Seems like that kind of persistence may be needed just as much today as it was when women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1913.