From the year my daughter was born, I carried her with me into the voting booth, so she could enjoy that honor with me and so she could understand how important to me it was to vote.
Many people are ignorant of the history of the movement and of the laws regarding women when Elizabeth CAdy Stanton and Susan B. Anthony began their lifelong strungle.
Women had no legal status and no legal protection. We could not go to college, or sign a contract, inherit property, or enter any profession. If we managed to find some work and earn a wage, a husband was legally able to take our wage. We had no right to our children or our home. And without the vote we had no way to make any change in this situation. Women couldn't speak in public either.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony found the courage to go against the custom of the day and create a movement of other women with the courage to flout the conventions and gather, speak, sign petitions, march, make protests and create organizations.
The first one was the Seneca Falls Convention in July 1848 where a women's bill of rights was put forward and a group consensus formed around it.
Through innumerable struggles, the old leaders sallied forth, and new leaders picked up the standard and carried it forward into the next century when in 1920, the right to vote was finally won by half of the citizens of the United States.
This year is the 100th Anniversary of the significant event and that's why I watched this documentary again. I watched in almost every year. When it was shown on channel 12 as part of The American Experience, I watched it. I owned the double vas cassette when it first came out.
And next I will find and watch the documentary about our own New Jersey heroine, Alice Paul. There are two movies, as I recall, one a documentary and one a historical fiction. Also today, in the mail, arrived my book of Suffrage postcards which I plan to send to my friends, and a set of buttons, and a flag and purple lights. I will wear purple in March to celebrate as well. Earlier this year, I read two new excellent books on the movement, one of which dealt with lesser known activists.
I have a self portrait from when I was in college in a masters program, and behind and around my portrait I painted the words to Elizabeth Cady Stanton's speech, "The Solitude of Self."
A summary paragraph:
"The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities -- for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear -- is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life."
"In that solemn solitude of self, that links us with the immeasurable and the eternal, each soul lives alone forever."
Happy Trails, and Happy 100th Anniversary of the Suffrage Amendment #19!
wrightj45@yahoo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment