Vote for women a step toward justice

Next Tuesday we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, women gaining the vote. Especially if we are white, we take universal suffrage for granted, that everyone can vote. No one alive today remembers when women did not have the vote, but for 131 years, from 1789 till August 18, 1920, women could not vote. That is more years denied the vote than having it.

Women have pushed men into the social evolution of our society. Into the 20th century – depending on where you lived, which state – women were considered property, without rights. They had to ask permission for everything and were granted nothing. In divorce men had the “right” to children as well as to bank accounts and assets. For generations women could not go to school and when “allowed” into college, were segregated into teaching and nursing.

Consider your mothers and grandmothers in the 1960s. If they went to college, they became teachers, nurses and librarians. It wasn’t till the 1970s and 1980s that they became lawyers, doctors and ministers in significant numbers.

How did this change? Women voiced their hope for equality and worked to change the mores and laws of society, fighting the status quo – the established order of the law, the courts, banks, corporations, churches, neighbors, friends and family, and their protectors, politicians and the police.

This is true: back in the day people would call you crazy if you advocated the vote and equality for women.

Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Smith organized a Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York in July 1848. There, for the first time in the United States, a resolution was proposed and passed that women “secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”

“Secure to themselves:” Women would spend the next 72 years fighting to win the vote. None of the 100 people who signed the Declaration of Sentiments lived to vote under the 19th amendment. Susan B. Anthony voted in 1872 – and was arrested. Other women voted. They all broke the law. Promoting women voting was advocating unlawful activity.

For two generations, as white women maneuvered and plotted toward the vote, working with southern politicians they negotiated voting rights for themselves, agreeing to leave Black women behind: no vote for them. This is true.

The largest single increase in civil rights in our history was granting almost half our citizens – white women – the vote with the ratification of the 19th amendment 100 years ago on Tuesday.

Suffrage, what a strange word. Countless have suffered in order that we can take voting for granted.

The long slow march of history. Looking back, it tends to have a hazy, rosy glow. We don’t recall the police on horses or with billy clubs knocking women down, the throwing of rotten eggs and tomatoes, the lies and smears, the dragging people out of social halls and the jailings and forced feedings. All true. Suffering for justice. We only remember that the good gals won.

Consider again those Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, a dozen other cities this spring and summer. We ask why are they rioting, why are they getting arrested, why can’t they protest peacefully.

But the road to justice is neither easy nor smooth. Elaine Weiss’ history, “The Woman’s Hour,” is sub-titled “the great fight to win the vote.” Women were not given the vote. They had to fight for it.

This generation now fights for their rights. It is a story as old as America, where nothing pertaining to justice is given to anybody.