We vote: Today marks a watershed moment in women’s suffrage

We were sitting in a gym last night – the night before the election – watching a granddaughter send rocket volleyball serves over the net – just barely over the net, like a hair’s width. We yelled ourselves hoarse. The Panthers — and my granddaughter — won.

Forty years ago, I was on that court. I am a Title IX baby. Volleyball came to my high school when I was a junior and like other tomboys in my class, I took to it quickly. I’d never even held a volleyball when they handed me my uniform, but I dug in, and learned to bump and set, though my spikes were never much to talk about. I was operating at a deficit. No matter what natural ability I brought to the court, I was coming to the sport late. I played as hard as I could, ran as fast as I could in basketball and track, and when I graduated high school, I left ball, hoop and track baton behind.

{mosads}I don’t feel sorry for me. This is how the world works, isn’t it? One generation starts sprinting around a track, then passes the baton to the next one, and they run faster and harder and so on and so on and so on until we cross the finish line. For us older women, it’s like crackling open the bubbly and pouring it for someone else.

Today, an army of voters – most of them women – will wear white, purple and gold to the voting booth. They do so to honor the suffragists – not suffragettes, no diminutives for these women — who went before, who marched, politicked, and died before they got a chance to vote (legally). Despite restrictive laws that stun us today, these women climbed onto the track, and took off running.

Susan B. Anthony cast a vote in 1872 – nearly 50 years before it was legal. She was arrested and fined $100. At her trial, she said she could never pay the fine as she was $10,000 in debt from publishing her suffrage newspaper “The Revolution.”

Her co-editor, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, couldn’t vote, either, but she ran for Congress in 1866.

Isabella Beecher Hooker couldn’t vote, but she co-wrote (with her husband) a woman’s property law that took seven years to wind through the Connecticut legislature. She also testified, politicked, and wrote so many letters to the editor of her local paper that the editor stopped running them.

Naomi Anderson, an African American, couldn’t vote, but she wrote poetry and lectured, and joined the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which for a time was one of the most influential suffrage organizations in the country.

These women kept running, sometimes at the cost of family and friends. They hiked up their crinoline skirts, and they ran.

So today, we feel the slap of the baton, and we cheerfully, happily, maybe even tearfully take off. We vote for the women who by virtue of the timing of their birth, couldn’t. We vote as a coda to this bloody campaign that didn’t end fast enough.

Already, nearly a third of all eligible American voters voted early – that’s nearly 44 million, and the bulk of them are women and people of color.

We vote because – by God – we can. We drive to the polls in our Subarus, our BMWs, our beaters. We take the bus. We walk. We hitchhike. We hike up our crinoline, shake back our curls, and we walk into that voting booth, pull the curtain, and touch the face of Susan, Elizabeth, Isabella, Naomi, and the rest – mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers. We do what must be done, and we walk out of that booth and straight into history. We look at our daughters and our granddaughters and marvel at how this – this – is the new normal. 

We vote.

Campbell is a journalist, author and distinguished lecturer in journalism at the University of New Haven. She is the author of Dating Jesus: Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl and the upcoming Searching for The American Dream in Frog Hollow. Her work has appeared in the Hartford Courant, Connecticut Magazine, The New Haven Register and The Guardian. Follow her @campbellsl

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