So, we’re coming up on another presidential election. Once again, I’ll be submitting a vote for the next POTUS that won’t even matter at all. See, I don’t believe that “every vote counts” shit; at least I don’t believe it as far as actually determining the outcome of the presidential election is concerned. Every president, since I was old enough to vote, was announced before the polls even closed where I live. Clearly, my vote was not a consideration.
But, I vote anyway.
I vote, because I want my children to see me voting.
In 2020, my daughter will be 18. I want her to vote like it’s a reflex. I want her to vote, because it’s her right. I would like to say that it’s her birthright, but that would not be completely true, would it? A voice in the decisions that govern our actions as citizens of the world is largely accepted as an inalienable right, sure. But some people had to fight like Hell to secure it. That all people are considered equally valuable is something that large portions of the population take for granted. But for women, and people of color, and in particular, women of color, there is, still today, a different reality.
But, I vote anyway.
I vote, because it’s 2016 and United States government is still very much a boy’s club, and I think that the women, in particular Susan B. Anthony, who fought to restore women’s inalienable right to equal input into that government would be horrified to find out we’ve moved forward so little.
Just days before her death in 1906, Anthony gave her final speech on the subject of women’s suffrage at her birthday celebration in Washington DC. It was during this speech that she told spectators that “Failure is impossible”, which became the unofficial motto of the movement.
In the years leading to that final birthday zinger, Susan B. Anthony said all sorts of bad ass things:
On Her Rights and the Judicial System
When found guilty at the end of the trial she was subjected to after attempting to cast a ballot in the 1872 presidential election, Justice Ward Hunt asked if Anthony had anything to say. I imagine that was a move the judge regretted. In one of her most memorable speeches, she protested what she called an outrage upon her citizen’s rights. While the judge repeatedly told her to be seated, she refused, saying:
… you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored.
On Marriage
Anthony never married. When journalists asked her why, this was her utterly perfect response:
I never found the man who was necessary to my happiness. I was very well as I was.
On Social Activism
Anthony was no stranger to enemies. She knew that to effect change, one could not afford to be timid and accommodating. Early in her career, she said,
Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.
She was, and she did.
Vision
Anthony began her pursuit of social equality at the age of seventeen, by collecting anti-slavery petitions. She worked towards the abolition of slavery even before she became the organizational force behind the suffrage movement, and she remained passionate about both.
She did not, however, allow her passion to cloud her judgment. There were several instances when her two main interests were in conflict. What I find to be the most amazing trait Anthony possessed was her ability to stay focused on the bigger picture, even when it seemed to derail forward momentum in her own time.
I find two such situations particularly interesting. First, when an amendment that would both provide citizenship for black people and introduce, for the first time, the word ‘male’ into the constitution, Anthony was opposed. She was a strong champion for black Americans, but she knew that this amendment would link that freedom to a reduction in the status of women of all colors and make things that much less equal for women. Second, when the Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution was proposed, which would prohibit voting discrimination based on race, Anthony was again in opposition. The amendment would, in effect, promote voting equality for men while continuing to disenfranchise women. She was adamant that all minority groups be enfranchised together.
I have read extensively about Susan B. Anthony (though most of this information is from the Wikipedia page and my memory, which is iffy at best) and I believe those two decisions to have been incredibly difficult for her, and only possible because she was able to stay focused on the bigger picture. Which is freaking difficult to do.
And here we are, in 2016, and I don’t like my presidential options in this election. Not at all. But this election isn’t a hundred years from now. It’s temporary. And I don’t intend to give up my hope for a better tomorrow in the next four years. I am trying really hard to keep my focus on the bigger picture.
So, I vote anyway.
Opposition to Women’s Suffrage Following Anthony’s Death
Thirteen years after Susan B. Anthony died, Women’s Suffrage was facing strong opposition in the southern states. According to Chief Justice Walter Clark,
The serious opposition to [woman suffrage] has been financed by the Whiskey Interests and the Cotton Mill owners of New England and the South. The former feared the suppression of the whiskey traffic and the latter the suppression of the exploitation of child labor, and of the competition of insufficiently paid labor of women in their mills. — From Anti-Suffrage Movements in the USA South, February 2012
If you break that comment down, it basically says that the men who controlled the booze were afraid of prohibition, which Women’s Suffrage heavily promoted (and to be fair, I don’t think Prohibition was at all helpful, because, moonshine bootleggers and bathtub gin), and the men who controlled the cotton were afraid that if women had the right to vote, they’d lose their access to cheap labor.
So, that’s nice.
In the South, the anti-suffrage movement (largely women) was financed by powerful special interest groups like Big Business and Agriculture, made up mostly of men who viewed women with equal rights as a dangerous, negative force. Historian Elna Green described that this belief stemmed from fear that
suffragists would make good on their promises to vote in various reform measures, and, in effect, change their world — Elna Green, 1997
What this tells me is that a hundred years ago, old white guys were scared that acknowledging an equal playing field for both women and people of color would introduce competition that would force changes to their white-washed patriarchy.
And what everything around me tells me is that this attitude has remained pervasive to this day, and that, to me, is unacceptable. So, even though I hate this election and everything it represents,
I vote anyway.
In Closing
I believe that Susan B. Anthony would have been disappointed in some of the directions the movement took after her death. Suffrage became a platform for some truly ugly stuff, like promoting continued white supremacy. Because, in ‘Murica, sometimes the right outcomes come from the wrong motives. We got our amendment, but Anthony’s fight for equal treatment for all genders and races is far from over.
Susan B. Anthony dedicated her entire life to promoting equal rights for women, and though women’s voting rights weren’t recognized during her lifetime on a national level, I was still born into a society that affords me the right to vote, and she had a large part in realizing that opportunity for me.
Anthony was proud of the progress the suffrage movement made in her lifetime, but she was also concerned about the future. She worried that future generations of women would take for granted the effort that had been put forth to afford them the liberties that would then seem inherent (as they should have been). In 1894, she stated,
We shall someday be heeded, and when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everybody will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people think that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses always were hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon today has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.
Well, I, for one, do not intend to let that little handful of women down.
That’s why, even in an election I don’t really believe in, from a state that won’t be considered,
I Vote Anyway.
Note: Vote on Tuesday, November 8th, no matter who you are.
