100th Anniversary of the Ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution

Etymology: Latin suffragium, "vote", "political support", and the right to vote.

“Suffragists knew that women were not a unified bloc, 

and they still aren’t”.

Ellen Carol DuBois, Professor Emeritus, University of California Los Angeles.

When I saw the above quote in a recent The Washington Post article, "What activists today can learn from the women’s suffrage movement", I felt a pain deep in the pit of my stomach – old scars from years of personal failures trying to organize women as a unified voting block – my only “success” being the admittedly minuscule role I played as President of the Texas Women’s Political Caucus when Ann Richards was elected Governor in 1990. There were so many other defeats for me, simply because even the strongest proponents of women placed friendship, political promises, party politics, and sometimes tiny qualification differences above their support to women (endorsing male candidates over equally and sometimes more qualified female candidates). I cannot tell you how many times I stood up in meetings and said women’s perspective matters, and been booed and out-voted – to the point that I, and my stomach, were perpetually angry and in pain. 

I still occasionally stand up and say gender matters, but for the most part I cowardly view the main battlefield from behind the tree of cynicism, with sadness and as little self-recrimination as I can muster. But enough of about me and my guilt.

Thanks to friend Tracey Firsching, for reminding me 2020 marks the 100^th anniversary of the ratification of the 19^thAmendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex. Technically the 100^thanniversary is August 17, 1920, when the Tennessee legislature approved the amendment, becoming the last of the necessary 36 states to secure ratification. 

Tracy also recommended Melinda Gates' book, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World, in which Gates, when overwhelmed with the immensity of the need (violence against women, educating girls, fair pay, equal rights, and more), says she took a step back to look at “intersecting lines”, saying, “as much as any insight we've gained in our work over the last twenty years, understanding the link between women's empowerment and the wealth and health of societies is crucial for humanity”.

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn reached the same conclusion in their exceptional 2010 book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,saying, as they traveled country to country interviewing leaders, they were only successful at gaining audiences when they pointed out that women accounted for more than half of the GNP.

As I looked into Gates’ book, I came across a number of articles talking about the approaching suffrage centenary, and other books about suffrage, including  The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote by Elaine Weiss, which is apparently a riveting account of the Tennessee battle to achieve the final state approval needed to ratify the 19^th Amendment – so riveting  in fact, that Steven Spielberg has purchased the rights for the movie. 

According to this recent, excellent article in The New Yorker, The Imperfect, Unfinished Work of Women's Suffrage, “the Tennessee battle included anti-arguments including, “women’s supposed emotional instability and intellectual deficiencies, the danger to society of anything that distracted them from their domestic duties as wives and mothers, and the threat to the moral order should they sully themselves with politics”. Some argued that most women did not even want the right to vote, others that the expanded electorate would be an expensive burden on municipalities. Still others raised the paradoxical objections that women would vote the way their husbands did, thus doubling their votes, or not vote the way their husbands did, thus cancelling them out, making the whole thing a waste of time”.

How could we be so unintelligent, so illogical? 

Why did the question of women voting ever even exist?

Why is equality even an issue?

Sadly, these are all rhetorical question.