As Election Day approaches, there are the usual jokes about repealing the 19th Amendment (granting women the right to vote) because women are foolish, overly emotional, say and do stupid things, and film themselves doing said stupid things. While I’m happily willing to laugh at anything and everything foolish that the federal government does, as well as the people making the jokes, I do not find the jokes about repealing the 19th Amendment funny at all. My usual response is, “Great, as long as we also repeal the 26th Amendment (lowering the voting age to 18) and the 15th Amendment (which granted black men the right to vote).” That usually stops the conversation, mainly because people have to go look up which amendment is which. I’ve taught the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; I know which one is which.
Why don’t I find jokes about revoking women’s right to vote, or anyone’s right to vote, funny? Because it’s a little too serious to joke about. I’ll be honest and say that I think the voting age should be returned to 21, but raising the voting age is entirely different from repealing voting rights. Simply because a small group of people in a specific demographic do and say foolish things, that doesn’t mean the rest of said demographic thinks the same way. Because there are some very foolish, very coddled 18-year-olds who don’t know what to do with themselves, that doesn’t mean that every other 18-year-old out there thinks the same. This line of thought can be applied to any demographic.
Related: Dolly Parton, and the Column I Almost Didn’t Write
Also, the right to vote is intensely personal to me. As I have mentioned in another article, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, was 25 before she could legally vote. She was married and had a child, my mother, before she could vote. She was the wife of a soldier who had already been through World War I and came back in one piece. She was educated. My grandmother had a college degree in a time when most women didn’t finish high school. My grandmother was born in 1895 and knew Civil War veterans as a child, but because she wasn’t a man, she wasn’t allowed to vote until her mid-twenties. What were you doing at the age of 25?
The quote that’s the title of this article comes from Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, the second president of the United States, and mother of John Quincy Adams, who became the sixth president of the U.S. In a letter dated March 31, 1776, Abigail tells her husband to “Remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” As far back as the beginning of the U.S., women have advocated for freedoms that men take for granted. For just as long, women have been ignored.
Even when the 19th Amendment passed, it was a very near thing. It was only because a delegate in Tennessee switched his vote from No to Yes that the amendment was ratified. Supposedly, he had a letter in his coat from his mother stating “Yes for suffrage.” What would have happened if that delegate had not changed his vote? Fortunately, we don’t know. No woman in my family has ever taken the right to vote for granted. To each of us, it has been made plain what was done in our name so that we could have a freedom only enjoyed by men before 1920.
Related: 250 Years of Fighting for Liberty
My mother encountered similar obstacles when my father died in 1978. In much of the country, women were still considered to be second-class citizens. It wasn’t until 1974, with the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, that women could apply for credit or a loan in their own names. When creditors called the house looking for my father after he died, they were reluctant to speak to my mother, understandable to a degree, but she was all they had. When she moved credit cards in both their names into her name only, there was always a problem. And those problems continued long after my father’s passing. Up to and including the time she told someone from MasterCard in 1983 that they couldn’t talk to my father because, quoting my mother “he’s been dead since 1978”. The long pause was quite satisfying. None of this covers finding a job when you haven’t been in the workforce for fifteen years, as was my mother’s case (and all of this long before the Internet).
So when some young thing, who has had zero opposition in her entire life and has never had to work for anything, wails and complains about having to get up early to go to their thankless job or moans that they’re being oppressed because they can’t find the perfect job the first week out of college, I take a very dim view of such complaints. All of those women protesting the cause du jour because they don’t need to work or because mom and dad are still supporting them? I laugh. A lot of them have no idea of the sacrifices that were made so they could be foolish. The ones who do know don’t care.
This isn’t a Democrat or Republican thing either. My mother, after going to law school as a single parent, went to work for the county attorney, who was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat when the party was still Democrat. He had no problem hiring her or another woman in their late 50s. They were his secret weapons. No one expected Grandma to cut you off at the knees in court. She campaigned for him. She had me campaign for him. She voted for him, and she was a staunch Republican. At the time, political parties didn’t matter that much to him. He just needed people who were intelligent, sharp, and willing to work for the county.
One of my mother’s dearest friends from college was a huge Democrat and a huge liberal. But again, this was back when being either didn’t mean you were insane. She came from wealth, but she didn’t lord it over anyone, especially my mother, who was the daughter of an Army officer and a conservative. That my mother voted Republican didn’t bother her at all. She would’ve been thrilled had my mother voted Democrat, but knew that wasn’t going to happen. My mom thought the same. I grew up with the idea of “it’s not the party, it’s the ideas in the party.”
Aunt Sissy, as I knew her, protested all kinds of injustices in and around where we lived in Houston. She protested substandard housing, the wars the U.S. was involved in at the time, and George H.W. Bush, in the mud outside of The Houstonian where he stayed when he came to town on presidential business. As a teenager, I asked my mom one time, “Are you going to have to bail Aunt Sissy out of jail?” My mom laughed and laughed. No, she never had to bail Aunt Sissy out of jail. Those two women were diametrically opposed in upbringing, wealth, and political views, but their views never got in the way of their friendship. My mother passed on before Sissy did and honestly, I’m rather glad she did. I don’t know what she would have thought of this whole new world of “You don’t think like me, so you need to die.”
Young women in this country are blessed to have as much freedom as they do, and yet a large portion of them take that freedom for granted. They figure they can say and do whatever they want and nothing bad will happen to them. They’re partially right. When something bad eventually happens, they’re shocked and upset. Not all young women, of course, but enough to concern people like me. What I hope for is that when reality finally catches up to them (and it will), they will discover how much they’ve taken for granted and finally grow up.
