In light of the election that’s happening tomorrow and the fact that we have our first female presidential candidate from a major party, it’s important to remember how far women have come since 1920 when we finally won the right to vote, so let’s talk about the journey behind how we got that right. A Lady Gaga parody seems like the perfect place to start.
The beginning of the journey to women’s suffrage roughly starts around the time of the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote “The Declaration of Sentiments,” (1848) which became the agenda for activists for decades afterwards. It’s important to note that at this time women didn’t even have the right to their own property yet as men did, so the women in this convention were leagues ahead of their time.
In fact, feminists wouldn’t even marry the ones they loved because many laws in the mid-1800s said that husbands were the only ones that could sign contracts and be the only one in the marriage to own property. The only way women could own property and sign contracts on their own was if they were single, and didn’t have husband to figuratively sign away their legal rights to.
Despite these backwards laws women already had to fight against, suffragettes eventually (about 70 years later in the journey) got to vote in some states in the U.S. and Jeannette Rankins was the first woman to be elected to Congress in 1917.
And this was only a small amount of the full battle for equality, because this was in the U.S, and the U.S. was one of the last Western countries to allow women to exercise their undeniable right to vote that they were born with.
If you’ve seen the movie “Suffragette” that came out in 2015 or the new parody of Lady Gaga’s music video that’s been popping up all over the Internet, you’ll have an idea of what our British counterparts and our female activists back then had to deal with as punishment for fighting back against the government. Besides social stigma and the threat of your husband or the government taking your children from you, imprisonment was also an option to punish suffragettes for peacefully (or sometimes not peacefully) protesting.
Some suffragettes did fight while in prison though, and held hunger strikes that lead to brutal force-feedings, like the ones shown in “Suffragette” and the Bad Romance parody. Alice Paul, who is depicted in the parody video, was the leader of the National Women’s Party and was force-fed during her stay in jail for picketing the White House. This wasn’t the worst thing the government officials tried to do to her though. Besides discovering that prison staff would beat suffragettes while they were imprisoned (so much so a huge public outcry prompted the release or transfer of 25 suffragettes at one point), government officials also tried to discredit Alice Paul with the public and put her in solitary confinement in the mental ward of a prison.
One British suffragette, Emily Wilding Davison, was trampled after running in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Some say she wanted to be a martyr for the cause, but others and more technologically advanced research say that she was just trying to put the suffragette colors on a derby horse. Her death was mourned by suffragettes everywhere. Emily Wilding Davison’s funeral was attended by 6,000 women and the suffragettes had the world listening to them at last. “Suffragette” even shows footage of her funeral and all the women that came out to mourn Davison.
It’s no wonder then why stories of women crying after being able to vote for a female president have gone viral, or why stories like a 102-year-old woman who was born before women could even vote and now she can vote for Hillary Clinton has touched the hearts of many. We have gone a long way from fighting to vote and sometimes dying for that right to having a female presidential candidate.
So, while no one can tell you who to vote for, make sure to vote and let your voice be heard. Your ancestors have dealt with some seriously unethical laws and some of your them may have even fought against these laws as suffragettes, so make sure to honor their fight and be the engaged citizen they wanted you to have the chance to be.