Monday, August 26, 2019

Humiliating--how we won the right to vote

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
 Public Domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10372994

They call it "Women's Equality Day," but that's a euphemism.

It wasn't the day women won equality--it was just the day US women finally won the right to vote. 

A 24-year-old boy in Tennessee voted yes--because his mama asked him to "be a good boy" and give her and all American women the right to participate in elections.  That was on August 18.  Eight days later, the 19th Amendment became law.

After attempts to delay it, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed it into law at his home on August 26, though he denied notable suffragists Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt's requests to film the signing. It was a quiet but hard-earned win for the women's rights movement.
These circumstances surrounding my right to vote are humiliating--and the fact that women had to work for this right from 1848 to 1920--72 years--is outrageous.  Aug. 26 was not even marked as a milestone until 1971 when Rep. Bella Abzug pressured Congress to honor women's suffrage.  

Actually, women still don't have equality in the US or anywhere else. 

Case in point, the defeat of a qualified woman presidential nominee by an unqualified fool whose campaign constantly highlighted his possession of the XY chromosome and the appendage that goes with it.

He hadn't even done a good job of managing his little tail, but he was given the US and its nuclear codes to manage.  The experienced diplomat and negotiator was sent home--she was female.

Thanks to the Electoral College, a system of weighing votes in southern states more heavily than votes in other states, we have a goofus in the White House.  Never mind that Hillary Rodham Clinton won 2.9 million more votes than he did.

Time Magazine explained:
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory... Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.

Then the celebrity joker rode into the White House in 2016 on the backs of slaves, women, immigrants, and others.  It has been a long three years, but women are patient.  We will dump him in 2020.


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