The weekend before last Wayne and I headed to our local polling place to capitalize on the early voting system the city’s got set up. It’s nice. We enjoyed short lines, which spared us from the muss and fuss that’s sure to plague the polls next Tuesday.
I got to thinking how remarkable that was. Not so much about the convenience of early voting (which is pretty nice), but about voting period. It’s hard for me to fathom that it hasn’t even been 100 years that women have had the right to vote.
Grandma Wasn’t a Suffragette
Whenever I think of that, I think of my mom’s mom, or Gram as I liked to call her. She was born in 1903. She lived through the Suffrage Movement. One day we got to talking about it and she surprised me when I asked if she had been a suffragette.
“Who me?” she said, laughing. “Absolutely not. I felt it was only fair the men should have to do something and let us women have one less thing to worry about. Heaven knows we had enough concerns with having babies, raising them, and running a household.”
I was appalled. Not want the right to vote? Be perfectly content to leave it up to her husband? How absurd!
“So you’ve never voted?” I asked, feeling sorry for her. She’d never learned to drive a car either. My grandma was the most sheltered woman I knew! (I was around 16 at the time I was making all of these judgments.)
“Of course I’ve voted! I think the first time was after The Crash in ’29, though. I saw what a job men had done mucking up the world and figured my vote couldn’t do much more damage.”
After we had a good laugh, she said my grandpa had gone with her the day she cast her first vote.
“Did he vote in favor of women having the right to vote?” I asked, bringing the conversation back to the Suffrage Movement.
She shrugged.
“I don’t even know if he voted back then. We might have very well been in Mexico at that time. Heck, maybe that’s why I wasn’t a suffragette. I was down there then. But even if we hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been a suffragette.”
(That was the first I’d learned of her living in Mexico, which spun the conversation in a new direction. One about Pancho Villa and his Villistas that also captivated me, but that’s for another time.)
Back to the Future
As we drove away from the polling place, I had Gram on my mind. I asked Wayne, “Do you think you would have voted for a woman’s right to vote way back when?”
“If we were like how we are today? Absolutely.”
“What does that mean?”
“You would have been protesting in favor of it, I assume.” I nodded. I’d like to think I would have. “If I didn’t vote for it, you’d have been hard to live with.”
“But how would I know how you voted? You could have lied.”
“Again, if we were like how we are today, you’d know I was lying and it would make it worse. Besides, I think women should have the right to vote. I think it’s stupid there was ever a time they didn’t.”
Interesting. I never knew he felt that way. But I’m glad to know he does.
Courtney Mroch writes about animals great and small in Pets and the harmony and strife that encompasses married life in Marriage. For a full listing of her articles click here.
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