Hats Off to the Petticoat

I voted yesterday, and nobody dragged me off in handcuffs. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting in a Presidential election. Four years later, Virginia Louisa Minor unsuccessfully sued a Missouri registrar for refusing to register her to vote. By the time I cast my first vote for President in 1976, voting rights for citizens like me were secure. The Nineteenth Amendment had been ratified for five years in my home state, although women had been voting there since federal law prevailed.

Columnist Rose Wilder Lane voted for Woodrow Wilson in 1916. Lucky for her, she was living in liberal San Francisco at the time. Last week, politicians in Kuwait decided that it might be time for women to vote. “We will support the right to vote,” said Naser al-Sane, who has changed his opinion, it seems. We may think that countries denying women the right to vote are backward, but we shouldn’t forget that they’re a little like we were once— hesitant to admit that women should participate in government.

Nobody knows the name of the first woman to cast a vote in the United States. From 1776-1807, women in New Jersey enjoyed voting, losing suffrage only when New Jersey revoked this right following the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that shifted voting policy practices from the Union to the States. President John Adams, despite his wife’s entreaty to “remember the ladies,” vowed in 1776 that he would fight the “despotism of the petticoat” on behalf of men.

President Adams won the fight. The Union abdicated its interest in women’s rights and turned them over to the States. Between 1776 and 1807, when attitudes towards women were being shaped by our forefathers, women lost the right to vote in New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. In 1870, Utah would defy the national trend and grant suffrage to women, who would enjoy the vote for seventeen years, lose it, and then regain it in 1895. In 1896, Idaho admitted women to the voting booths. A few other states followed.

The United States is not alone in taking its time. In 1918, following a revolution, women in Russia were granted suffrage. That same year, the United Kingdom allowed women 30 and over, like men at 21, to vote. Ten years later, rights were equalized. And, no, that didn’t mean men would have to wait until they were 30.

We have our neighbor Tennessee to thank for affirming women’s voting rights in the United States, as Tennessee fulfilled the 36-state quota when, unlike South Carolina and Virginia, it ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Shortly thereafter, Marie Ruoff Byrum of Missouri, who voted in a local election to replace an alderman, became the first woman to cast a vote under universal suffrage.

In 1950, while women in the United States were getting comfortable with the idea that their rights seemed secure, Canada granted full suffrage to women. Two years later, Virginia symbolically ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, although southwest Virginians such as Senator Elbert Lee Trinkle of Wytheville had campaigned for woman suffrage long before. In 1963, the Islamic republic of Iran gave women the vote.

Does it matter who won yesterday? Sure it does. Right now, I want to celebrate the fact that so many of us got out and into the voting booths all over the country. In 1984, Mississippi became the last state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Until ten years ago, women of color in South Africa couldn’t vote. Today in Saudi Arabia, a woman is watching our election news on CNN and feeling hopeful.

Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 3 November 2004, p. A6. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2004.