Voting, mom and apple pie

It is one week until Washington’s presidential primary election day. Five days from now, Sunday, March 8th, is International Women’s Day. Since 1987, first Congress then presidents have designated March as Women’s History Month.

Besides apple pie, what is more American than voting? Who is more loved than mom? Ain’t it great that women won the right to vote 100 years ago this August, when the 19th Amendment was adopted?

Who could be against mom? Or voting? One hundred years ago a lot of people were. Call them the usual suspects, the established order, the ruling class, the fearful and those against change and independence for all.

Writer Elaine Weiss discussed her book, “The Women’s Hour,” at Western Washington University last week. She tells the story of supporters, opponents and the press flocking to Nashville for the Tennessee legislature’s debate and decision on the Constitutional amendment in the summer of 1920.

Women in every community, if not in every family, reached out together, inviting others in. Families were divided then as we are now. Naysayers thought women having the vote would bring ruin to the nation. In every age some fear and battle change. Change is inevitable. Divisiveness and suffering is optional.

One hundred years later Weiss wants folks to know that it took 72 years of work by three generations of women to get to Tennessee’s vote. She used the active verb “fought.” The vote wasn’t “given” to women. They earned it, fighting the system, the status quo, advocating and educating their fellow citizens and legislators in Congress and in state after state.

They forced an intransigent system to change and they did it not only with letters and meetings and rallies and marches, but with the first White House picketing, arrests and hunger strikes. The power structure’s response was not its finest hour.

The Quaker Alice Paul, Swarthmore College educated, and others, were force-fed in prison, a tubed stuck down their throats against their wills.

In those pressing moments, suffragettes were harassed, mocked, pelted with rotten eggs and vegetables and, yes, arrested, called dissenters and radicals and un-American. They were proving in their cause, what Frederick Douglass said in 1857 about pro-slave forces: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Progress takes a long time to be created. The American ruling establishment does not concede an inch willingly. Weiss told her audience that the United States was the 27th country to provide the vote to women. Those who make the rules here have always been reluctant to change them, to add seats at the table, to expand the pie.

The only thing as American as apple pie is contesting entrenched power.

No advance is certain. None are pie in the sky. Each must be won one letter, march, rally and too many arrests at a time.

(Frederick Douglass: “This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”)

Voting is underway in the Washington presidential primary through 8 p.m. March 10. – ken stern