Believe it or not, March marks a year since our lives changed drastically. At the beginning of March 2020, COVID-19 spread throughout the world, requiring individuals to forgo their usual routines and adapt to a new lifestyle. Now, a year later, we are living our lives very differently.
Not only are we more conscious of our surroundings, but we are more hygienic. For example, if you go to a store or a gym, you will see employees or trainers sanitizing equipment and merchandise every few minutes. We spend more time washing our hands and taking care of ourselves than we ever did before.
“I forgot my mask!” is a common phrase you catch yourself saying, and traveling out of the country or state is an all-too-real distant dream. With all the isolated time we have been given during the pandemic, we have learned how to slow down, organize our homes and closets way too many times, bake banana bread, and enjoy the outdoors.
With all these new hobbies we have acquired, all we want to do is to continue living our lives the way we did a year ago, but it is not that simple.
University of Michigan senior, Donna Neuman, longs for an in person graduation ceremony more than anything. “I really just want a graduation and nothing else right now is important to me. My friends and I have turned a lot of negatives into positives; for example, instead of going out with friends we hang in together. Those things are replaceable, but graduating is not.”
Our lives have changed in many more ways than one. As we sit and reflect on the one-year anniversary of COVID-19, it is hard to believe that it has only been a year.
When I think about the timeline it almost feels like a century. Masks are a part of our uniform and getting tested for COVID is the new trend.
Since it is risky for older adults with health restrictions to spend time with their younger loved ones, we have utilized FaceTime or Zoom to still get our personal family time.
Fortunately, the vaccine has been distributed to many essential workers, and soon to the rest of the world.
With the new year, all we can hope for is to say goodbye to COVID-19 and hello to living. By March 2022, I hope for good health, love, and for our lives to be more adventurous and spent with the ones we love most.
The 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed in 1920. It declared that: “The right of citizens of theUnited States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the UnitedStates or by any State on account of sex.”
It was a long struggle for women to gain those voting rights.
History Highlights
In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and other women’s rights advocates helped organize the First Women’s Rights Convention, also known as the Seneca Falls Convention, in Seneca Falls, NY. Modeled after the Declaration of Independence, they wrote a Declaration of Sentiments that began:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed… The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world…”
And from there, the Declaration of Sentiments enumerated a list of critical ways in which women lacked equality with men, including owning property, access to education and career opportunities, family rights, and political representation.
Susan B. Anthony, the woman that most of us associate with women gaining the right to vote, met Stanton in 1851. They worked together in both the abolition and suffrage movements. When the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised African-American men, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony abandoned the AERA, which supported universal suffrage, to found the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869, saying black men should not receive the vote before white women. In response, African-American suffragist.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and others joined the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which supported suffrage for women and for black men. Tensions between African-American and white suffragists persisted, even after the NWSA and AWSA merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890.
Both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony died in the
early 1900s, well before the 19th amendment was ratifi ed. It was
largely due to Carrie Chapman Catt, who became involved with
the suffragette movement in the 1880s, and served as president of
NAWSA from 1900-1904, and 1915-1920, that the 19th amendment
became law.
Suffrage was a key national issue soon after the turn of the century,
and while the 1916 Republican and Democratic conventions
supported women gaining the right to vote, they advocated that each
state should decide what that would encompass, not the federal
government. This meant that the scope of women’s right to vote
could vary depending on where you lived. NAWSA then put increased
effort behind adopting a national amendment, and it is Catt, the
president of the organization at the time, who was a driving force in
getting the amendment passed.
World War I also helped the women’s suffrage movement. With men drafted into service, women were called on to work in traditionally male jobs. In September 1918, President Woodrow Wilson addressed the Senate, advocating for women’s right to vote saying, “We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”
The proposed 19th amendment received the necessary two-thirds majority vote in the U.S. House of Representatives in May 1919 and the Senate in June 1919. It then went to the states for ratification. While some states had already granted partial or complete voting rights to women, at least three-fourths of the states (at that time there were 48 states, so at least 36) had to ratify the amendment for it to be added to the Constitution. Tennessee became the 36th state, and the amendment granting women the right to vote became part of the Constitution in August of 1920.
Mary Church Terrel
Three million African-American women south of the Mason-Dixon line remained disfranchised after the passage of the amendment. Election officials regularly obstructed access to the ballot box. In 1926, a group of women attempting to register in Birmingham, Alabama were beaten by officials. Incidents such as this, threats of violence and job losses, and legalized.
prejudicial practices blocked women of color from voting. Not until the Twenty-fourth Amendment was adopted in 1962, were Congress and the states prohibited from making voting conditional on poll or other taxes, paving the way to more reforms with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Harriet Purvis
Native Americans were granted citizenship by an Act of Congress in 1924, but state policies prohibited them from voting. In 1948, a suit brought by World War II veteran Miguel Trujillo resulted in Native Americans gaining the right to vote in New Mexico and Arizona, but some states continued to bar them from voting until 1957. Poll taxes and literacy tests kept Latina women from voting. In Puerto Rico, for example, women did not receive the right to vote until 1929, but was limited to literate women until 1935. Further, the 1975 extensions of the Voting Rights Act included requiring bilingual ballots and voting materials in certain regions, making it easier for Latina women to vote. National immigration laws prevented Asians from gaining citizenship until 1952.
Once they gained the right to vote, women did not immediately go out and vote in large numbers. In the 1920 election, women voted at two-thirds the rate of men, and turnout varied greatly state-by-state. Only starting in 1960 did women vote at the same percentage as men; in every presidential election after that, women have had greater voter turnout than men.
Catt’s Other Legacy
In addition to women’s suffrage, Catt was instrumental in founding the League of Women Voters in 1920. As their website states, “For 100 years we have been a nonpartisan, activist, grassroots organization that believes voters should play a critical role in democracy.” A national organization open to all, the League got its official start in Florida in 1939 and today has 29 chapters in the state, including in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties.
The League offers much in the way of voter information and advocacy. As Monica Elliott, President of the League of Women Voters of Broward County says, “When people realize that just about everything in their life is controlled by a government official and that they have the opportunity to elect (or not) these offi cials, people start to think about voting differently.For the shock factor, once people see how close the elections were in Florida and how
many registered voters did not vote in 2016 and 2018, they perk up and vow to either vote themselves or make sure that all their friends, family, and colleagues get out and vote.” For more information on the League of Women Voters of Broward County, go to https://lwvbroward.org/
Remembering the 2000 Election
While those are recent examples of how much voting counts, you may recall the Bush versus Gore presidential election of 2000. The nation’s focus was on Florida. Whichever candidate won Florida’s 25 electoral (The state has gained 4 electoral votes for the 2020 election for a total of 29.) votes would go over the 270 electoral vote threshold to win the election. Florida’s vote was so close, it had to be counted and recounted. Ultimately, it was decided that Bush won by 537 votes out of approximately six million cast in Florida. Five hundred and thirty-seven votes!
Of course, it’s your right to vote or not, but it is no exaggeration to say that your vote matters.
By Ellen Marsden
Of course Florida ratified the 19th amendment – in 1969
I love newspapers.com. Searchable stories from over 18,000 newspapers, from the 1700s to the present day. And it’s not like history books, written decades or centuries after an event. It’s like looking at yesterday. It was where I discovered my paternal grandfather was indicted for attempted
murder, pleaded out, and paid a $465 fine. But that’s another story. Trust me.
So anyway, I was researching women’s suffrage for Ellen Marsden’s suffrage article, and came across an August 19th, 1920 front page of The Miami News. The 19th amendment had been ratified the day before with Tennessee becoming the necessary 36th state to make it law.
Next to the article on the amendment’s passage was a chart listing states that had ratified the amendment and states that had rejected it. The requisite 36 states were in the ratification column. Eight states, reminiscent of the Confederacy, had rejected the amendment: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Louisiana.
All of these states eventually, perhaps begrudgingly, ratified the amendment, Mississippi being the last in 1984.
At first glance, I thought Florida was absent from the chart. But I had overlooked a section listing states that had not voted either way yet: Connecticut, North Carolina, Vermont, and — you guessed it — Florida. Connecticut jumped on the bandwagon a month after the amendment passed, ratifying it in September 1920. Vermont yielded a few months later in February 1921.
But good old Florida held out until May 13, 1969, just a couple of months before man walked on the moon. These are two sides of a very strange coin.
In its defense, however, Florida wasn’t the last to yield to women’s suffrage. That honor goes to North Carolina, which dug in its heels and didn’t ratify the amendment until 1971.
