The Women's Vote
1963 March on Washington by USIA photographer, National Archives via Pingnews.
By Summer Myatt
On January 21st, 2017, I felt unbelievable. Brushing confidently through the subway turnstile at Grand Central Station, my eyes focused, angry, my guts trembling with rage and overwhelming excitement, I was on fire. Months prior, I sat helplessly, tears silently trudging down my cheeks, on the futon in my tiny Brooklyn apartment, watching on television what I was sure to be the end of the world. It wasn’t, but it was surely the end of democracy in America. I had voted, contributing proudly to the candidate who won the popular vote, but it hadn’t helped.
My mother threatened to cancel Thanksgiving dinner because of the horrible, heated debate my politically-divided family was perpetuating in our group text. Everything was crumbling and I felt defeated. It was a catastrophic train wreck we had seen coming from a hundred miles away, and we hadn’t stopped it. But on that brisk, sunny day in January, I could do something about it. I could put my body on the street with 400,000 other women and demand to be seen, counted, heard in my furious dissent.
Civil rights march on Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress.
But that was far from the first time women ever marched for something. Women marched for their right to vote in the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C. In 1917, Black women were on the front lines of the Silent Parade down Fifth Avenue to protest violence, lynchings, and racial discrimination. The Women’s Strike for Equality in 1970 demanded reproductive health care, equal opportunity in the workforce, and free childcare. 100,000 women marched for the Equal Rights Amendment, which would provide for the legal equality of the sexes and prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, to be ratified in 1978. The 1992 March for Women’s Lives fought for women’s reproductive rights. For every right white men were born with, women and minorities have had to fight. I wish we could stop fighting.
But in reality, that’s when we suffer the most drastically—when we feel so apathetic and beaten down that we stop yelling about it, stop trying to elbow our way into a better, safer place in society. That’s the president’s insidious strategy: to crush our spirits into submission.
During that fateful November of 2016, the other side thought we were overreacting. Right-leaning news outlets called us snowflakes and said we had been coddled too long, too soft to exist in a tough world. Everything we were so destroyed over was hypothetical so far—he hadn’t even done anything yet. Maybe for a little bit, I let myself believe it wouldn’t be as bad as we thought. And it’s not; it’s horrific far, far beyond what I could have ever imagined.
Women’s Strike, NYC, 1970. Photo courtesy of AP
Last month, women detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Georgia underwent gynecological examinations and procedures, including hysterectomies, without their consent. With the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, women’s rights are once again in jeopardy. The current administration has been vocal in their threats to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark case protecting a woman’s right to choose. Last month, six months after her death, the officer who murdered Breonna Taylor was charged with the wanton endangerment of Taylor’s neighbors, who are all very much alive today. Still, nobody has been charged for Taylor’s death, the cause of outrage and protesting across the country.
The everlasting march towards equality has always been grueling, terrible, and thankless, but standing still is what will kill us. In the face of misogyny, racism, and inequality, we have to keep screaming. Amongst perseverance, determination, and a fierce, undying willingness to fight, perhaps your most useful weapon now is your vote.
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