Election Day Musings

As I walked into the Eagles Club on November 4, I was transported back in time more than fifty years to the days when I would ‘vote’ with my mom and dad at the Boy’s Club in Tonawanda, NY. As Yogi Berra has said, déjà vu all over again! The touch screens are a far cry from the levers of that day or punch card ballots with their potential for hanging chads, but the feel is the same. Whether pulling a heavy curtain to shelter our vote from prying eyes, or trying to remember where to insert the voter card into the desktop machine, we perform our yearly duty with thoughtfulness and reverence, and proudly sport the sticker: I Ohio (love) voting. Time to cue the patriotic music.

We the people of America, from all walks of life, from all sides of the track, come together to determine the leadership of our communities, our state, and our country in the days and years ahead. We bring our children in tow, not because we don’t have a babysitter, but because we want them to know this is what Americans do. We vote.

My most recent writing project (Eliza Duncan: An Imagined Memoir) included research into the suffrage movement in the 1800s. The battle to gain the vote for women began at the first women’s rights conference in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. Early suffrage leader Antoinette Brown Blackwell reflected on the process: “We fully believed, so soon as we saw that woman’s suffrage was right, everyone would soon see the same thing, and that in a year or two, at farthest, it would be granted.”

Her prediction proved naïve, for those working towards women’s suffrage were not successful in passing the nineteenth amendment until 1920, less than one hundred years ago. Unlike Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, early leaders of the effort, Mrs. Blackwell was the only one of the early suffragettes who lived to see that day. She was ninety-five.

Miss Anthony did vote in 1872, but was arrested for her effort and found guilty in a highly publicized trial. According to a current exhibit at the Massillon Museum, a former Massillon resident ran for president in 1872, although she would not have been allowed to vote for herself. Victoria Woodhull, a candidate of the Equal Rights Party, advocated the regulation of monopolies, an eight-hour workday, direct taxation, the abolition of the death penalty, and free love (including accessible divorce). The final days of her campaign were hindered by her incarceration on obscenity charges, for she had published an account of the alleged adulterous affair of prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher in her newspaper. It is unclear as to how many popular votes she received, but no electoral votes were recorded for her candidacy. Truth can be stranger than fiction.

The right to vote for women was highly contested for many years, as evidenced by the pronouncements of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. They worried that more voting women than voting men would place the government under petticoat rule, and the votes of married women would only double or annul their husbands’ votes. They also claimed that 90% of the women either did not want the vote or did not care.

It is this last statement that sends me to the ballot box every year. No matter how tired we are of political ads by the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, we bear witness that we care about our communities and the lives of those around us when we step into the voting booth. While the campaign process is far from perfect (and don’t get me started on the $3.7 billion spent on an estimated 2,969,370 ads for the House and Senate races), we have the right and privilege to vote, an opportunity my grandmother didn’t have until shortly before my mother was born.

Suffrage opponent John Boyle O’Reilly claimed “the success of the suffrage movement would injure women spiritually and intellectually, for they would be assuming a burden though they knew themselves unable to bear it.” I’m glad millions of American women proved him wrong on November 4.