Let’s Tell the Story: One Hundred Years of Women’s Suffrage

09 Jan Let’s Tell the Story: One Hundred Years of Women’s Suffrage

100 Years

It’s January 1920.

The clock is ticking.

Will women finally get to vote on November 2 in the 1920 Presidential Election?

Thirty-six is the magic number.

Three-fourths of the Forty-eight states must ratify

before

The Nineteenth Amendment becomes law.

Will they do it in time?

Will they grant women the right to vote after all these years?

So many have worked for it!

So many have given their lives to it!

So many times they’ve been denied!

Will it finally happen this time?

I hope you’ll follow my blog from now to November, as I chronicle the events that led to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, giving women in the US the right to vote in a presidential election for the first time.

• We’ll celebrate the anniversary dates of each state that ratified the amendment.
• We’ll retell the stories of suffragists like Alice Paul, who gave her life to the cause of women’s suffrage.
• And we won’t forget the men who were also heroes–like Harry Burn, who listened to his mother and broke the tie in the Tennessee Legislature to ratify the 19th Amendment.
• We’ll turn to fiction, like In the Fullness of Time, to see how it was for those women like Hattie Barton and Alice Barton Rivers who fought so bravely for suffrage and who suffered so many disappointments and defeats at the hands of the white male power structure that dominated the social and political order.
• We’ll toast and cheer in August when Tennessee takes us over the top.
• We’ll shout with joy on November 2 when we remember that one hundred years ago on that very day, women in the US voted for the first time in a presidential election.
• Fittingly, on the very next day, we women, alongside other Americans, will have the privilege to exercise our right to vote in the 2020 election.

Come along as we re-tell the story and re-live the events in the struggle for women’s equality.