An acquaintance of mine is leaving her abusive husband. Because he threatened to murder her, she doesn’t want him to know her new address. And because her voter registration — including her address — is considered public information in her state, she isn’t registering and she won’t be voting this year.
I think of her a lot as I see women celebrating the passage of the 19th Amendment this month, which prohibited states from denying voting rights on the basis of sex and gender.
Just in the past four weeks: Abby Johnson, an advocate for one-vote-per-household policies where “men would get the final say,” was given a primetime address at the Republican National Convention. The Postal Service rolled out Votes for Women stamps as its services were cut off at the neck by Louis Dejoy, a new organizational head who was politically appointed instead of hired for qualification or experience.
Social groups all over the country held public displays and celebrations honoring the right of women to vote while millions of people protested across the USA, demanding that we honor the right of Black people to live. And though this is somewhat smaller than the BLM movement, I once again found myself explaining to a fellow adult US citizen that Puerto Rico is part of the United States, Puerto Ricans are citizens, and yet Puerto Ricans living on the island do not have the right to vote in national elections. That includes nearly 1.7 million US women.
Please understand, the promise of the 19th Amendment feels a little empty right now.
The 19th rang hollow for many women in 1920, too. Women of color often point out that the 19th only gave white women the right to vote. They’re right to point that out, and it’s worth noting it didn’t achieve even that – white women who couldn’t read, couldn’t afford poll taxes, or had recently moved? Those white women weren’t able to vote in many states. Black people, Native American people, and Asian people in the United States were also not allowed to vote in plenty of states. Racist laws barred these ethnic groups specifically from voting, or poll taxes, residency laws, and literacy requirements targeted them, or election managers simply would not allow them to vote. All of those groups include women.
Until 1922, women who married non-citizens lost their own US citizenship, and with it, their right to vote. If we want to honor women’s history, we need to be honest about where we’ve failed so that we don’t repeat the most damning aspects of it.
And yes, it’s damning how many millions of women did not earn the right to vote in 1920.
Here’s the current history we’re living through: nearly 700,000 incarcerated and paroled women can’t vote, and because our justice system punishes certain groups more harshly at every turn, this disproportionately affects Black and Native women. Victims escaping stalking and domestic violence are not empowered to vote, and these victims are disproportionately women. In 2016, 65 percent of polling places in Michigan were not accessible for voters — including women voters — with disabilities.
Thousands of Native women go missing or are found murdered in the United States every year (#MMIW). I have no idea if these women want to vote and frankly it’s irrelevant to the more urgent issue: they deserve to be safe, at home, without fear. The right to vote matters, but these women have not gained the right to exist. In North Dakota, identification used to vote must have street addresses, and since many Native American reservations don’t demarcate homes with street addresses, thousands of Native American women are disenfranchised there.
This list could continue but the meaning is succinct: if all of these women cannot vote, women do not have suffrage.
And if women do not have suffrage, our monuments to the suffrage movement should reflect not just how far some women have come, but how far all of us have yet to go.
We should celebrate every milestone. We should also tell the truth when we talk about our successes. We still have so much work to do.
Becca Sonday is a Main Street Media Group board member.
Any views or opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.
