If you’re like me, by now you’re wishing this election campaign was over, or better yet had never started in the first place.  We all have opinions and theories, disappointments, predictions and concerns around any election, but this one is different.  It would be easy to become so frustrated and confused that we consider skipping the whole thing.   But at the end of the day, the important, the crucial thing is to JUST DO IT,  in the familiar words of the Nike slogan.  Important for all of us, but especially for any of us  who have felt the pain of having our voices ignored or discounted,  in other words, for most women at some point in their lives.   Even now.   And it’s not so long ago that women’s voices were not only ignored, they were suppressed.
To put it in  perspective:
Freed male slaves were  granted the vote in 1845.*   The Nineteenth Amendment  granted women the right to  vote in 1920.
And here’s another shocker:   In 1923, the National Women’s Party proposed a Constitutional amendment, eventually known as the Equal Rights Amendment to  prohibit all discrimination on the basis of sex.
It  has Never Been Ratified.  Â
The women’s suffrage movement in America began in New York  in 1848,  led by well-known early pioneers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  We owe them a huge debt of gratitude for their enormous sacrifices and their perseverance to achieve for us a right we often take for granted, if we think about it at all.
However, there is another compelling and little known tale of struggle and dedication to suffrage in Mississippi. By 1820, a  growing number of southern women in Mississippi  had mobilized to improve social and educational conditions for women and children and the National American Woman Suffrage Association was formed.  In 1890,  The Mississippi Constitutional Convention seriously considered granting women the right to vote.  Sadly, the proposal died in committee by a single vote.
But it was not over.
In the 1890s the Mississippi Woman Suffrage Association,  under the leadership of Nellie Nugget Somerville,  began efforts to gain the vote in Mississippi.  The fledgling movement floundered in spite of heroic  efforts by the suffragists.  Facing fierce opposition by the legislators,  by the 1900s they had almost given up.  In 1906, Belle Kearney,  a compelling professional speaker,  breathed life into the nearly moribund movement and gradually the suffragists regained momentum. However, they could not win  over the
necessary majority of state legislators,  and the state suffrage campaign of 1914 failed.  Legislators declared that woman suffrage was “not in the best interest of Mississippi women, that women should remain ‘queen of the home and hearthstone.'”
But it was not over.
In 1918, a state suffrage amendment was once again introduced and received a tie vote, insufficient to  meet the required two-thirds majority.  In 1919  a resolution was introduced to reject the amendment as “unwarranted, unnecessary and dangerous interference with state’s rights.”  The rejection resolution was approved by a vote of 106 to 25.  At this point, many of the suffragists left the movement in despair.
But it was not over.
By now the Nineteenth Amendment  had been ratified by 35 states and some Mississippi senators felt the state must do likewise for the sake of the Democratic Party.  The bill was recalled, amended to read “ratify” rather than “reject” and the bill passed the Senate.
But it was not over
The House  rejection was swift and decisive. As one legislator put it, he would rather “die and go to hell” than vote for it.  The amendment went down  90 to 23.
But it was not over.
By 1920, Mississippi was only one of two states in the nation that had not ratified the Nineteenth Amendment.  However,  as a federal law, it superseded the state law and provided women the vote. Ironically, two years later, Mississippi’s two leading suffragists, Somerville and Kearney, were elected to the state legislature, surviving the battles and winning the war.
The State of Mississippi finally ratified the Nineteenth Amendment  with no opposition on March 22, 1984. Neither  Kearney nor Somerville lived to see the ratification.
But it was over at last.
So, just in case you were thinking about giving Election Day a pass this time, please take a minute to remember the struggles of our Foremothers on our behalf.
Go Vote.
Just Do It!
____________
*The bill was ratified, but not enforced until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Source:   Marjorie Julian Spruill and Jesse Spruill Wheeler, Mississippi Women and the  Woman Suffrage Amendment, Mississippi History Now, Mississippi Historical Society 200-2015.   http://bit.ly/2fvviLw
generous, greedy,  intellectually gifted and psychotic, industrious, and lazy; like people everywhere.  With one major exception: We needed each other.  No one had to tell us that.   We knew it by birth;  we were a poor farming community; if we were to survive, it meant cooperation.  It meant community.  In our case, a community formed around a church.
triggers a  rotation of members to supply food and housekeeping.   Extra rows are planted in  gardens for needy members.  The list goes on.  And this is why such a photo could never have been, never will be,  taken in that community.
One of the many benefits to me of this blog is the opportunity it provides me to  celebrate  the successes of fellow southern women writers.  I am delighted to  showcase  Sally Whitney’s  latest book, Surface and Shadow, just released today.
night, taking the “red-eye” cross country, wearing sequined jeans, images-3getting a tattoo, signing up to run a 10K or any other kind of “K”, or tottering around in shoes with spiky 4″ heels. And I’m OK with all of that.
intake of breath at my reflection under the harsh lights of the beautyimages-1 shop, or (please, God, no), when someone called me “cute?” No matter. It’s true. Things have changed, they have really changed. And while I haven’t experienced substantial losses, yet, praise God, a thousand “little sailings” unnoticeable at the time, have manifested in sea changes in my life over the years. Life was never, after all, endless journeys to far horizons, but a voyage through tributaries, narrowing to one. I am at that tributary.
In a wheelchair beside the nurses’ station, a tiny old woman sits, eyes closed, lips parted, hands folded in her lap. Her head droops to one side. Ragged wisps of white hair stray across her forehead. Her nightgown is rumpled, one slipper has dropped to the floor exposing a pale bare foot.  She could be asleep, perhaps even comatose.  Visitors pass, a nurse rushes by and jostles her wheelchair but offers no apology.  No one notices.  It’s  as if she’s invisible.
lead, resisting  his owner’s attempts to move forward.  The visitor tugs at the lead, averting her eyes from the woman in the wheelchair.  But the little dog is determined.  He sits  down by the woman’s wheelchair as if he has reached his destination.   After a few seconds, the woman opens her eyes and raises her head.  A smile spreads slowly across her weathered face at the sight of the little dog.  Her watery eyes twinkle. A soft voice breaks the silence.  It has a characteristic honeyed lilt, a pattern of speech once cultivated in finishing schools for proper southern ladies.