I've Been Thinking about Suffrage Today
It’s difficult to ignore it. Our choice today at the polls might very well elect the first female president of the United States. I confess, that possibility makes this “woman of a certain age” a little teary.
However, a woman’s right to vote has been on my mind all year. My book research touched on it. Austinburg’s Betsey Cowles (pictured above) was in the forefront of Ohio’s suffrage movement. One story has her leading the first suffrage convention at the Congregational Church in Jefferson. A sign outside the church commemorates the event. (However, Seneca Falls, New York is more widely believed to have been the first suffrage convention.) Whichever is true, it’s undisputed that Cowles led Ohio’s suffrage convention from its beginning.
I think about my grandmother, who was born in 1897, and didn’t have a right to cast a vote until she was 23. Something we take for granted today was not a given for those whose lives have touched mine. In fact, for more than half our nation’s history, women had no voice, except in how they influenced their husbands and other men in their orbit.
So, on this election day, I think about them and how we stand on the shoulders of all of those extraordinary women who came before.