Women will have had the right to vote in this country for 98 years and 80 days tomorrow, November 6, 2018. The process to get the vote was long and arduous, with a 30-year period of “doldrums” during which the movement made no progress at the federal level — but, with a strategy that was most recently repeated in the fight for gay marriage, it was action at the state level that drove the issue to the forefront. (It also helped that new states were coming into existence all over the West!)
The local maneuvering that resulted in states like New York having full suffrage could not have been accomplished without the work of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Susan B. Anthony was
- arrested for voting in Rochester, New York before suffrage happened there.
- a Quaker and fierce abolitionist.
[to the New York State Teachers Association] “Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister, or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- was married to the founder of the Republican party.
- “accidentally” had her last baby at 44 years old.
[On her marriage vows] “I obstinately refused to obey one with whom I supposed I was entering into an equal relation.”
Together with an ensemble of other women; churches and synagogues; abolitionist societies; and other stakeholders, the constitutional amendment conceived by Anthony and Stanton became the law of the land on August 18, 1920.
Am I doing some sort of passive-aggressive reminder to vote? No I am AGGRESSIVE-AGGRESSIVE! Don’t forget to vote!!
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