90 Years Ago Today

Today, August 18, is the 90th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which cast in constitutional stone the right of America’s women to vote. It only took forty five years from the time the 19th was introduced as legislation in Congress until it was finally ratified by the last holdout--my home state of Tennessee--on August 18, 1920. Think of that: forty five years for this amendment to finally be ratified. For many who lived at that time, forty five years was an entire lifetime or even more.

There’s a lot of written history about this event, and you can learn more about it here at Ourdocuments.gov , a web site run by the National Archives. This web site presents information about the 100 documents deemed by the ‘milestone’ documents in American history by the Archives.

I like dramatizations of history, and there is an excellent movie that was produced in 2994 by HBO starring Hilary Swank in the role of Alice Paul, a very noted suffragette of the period. The film is entitled “Iron Jawed Angels” and occasionally runs on HBO even now. It is available on Amazon in DVD form and probably on Netflix as well.

Swank is excellent in the film, which is an eye-opening depiction of the obstacles thrown up by insensitive and outright hostile and abusive use of government power against the women’s suffrage movement that women like Alice Paul overcame on the way to obtaining the right to vote.

Having seen the film and read up on the history of the 19th Amendment, I cannot help but be struck by the parallels between the suffrage movement and the gay rights movement of today. Just as those women of years ago were denied a most elemental right of a citizen which is the right to vote, now here in California, a misguided majority has been manipulated into voting for an unconstitutional and abusive use of government power in the form of Proposition 8.

It may or may not take the LGBT community forty five years to win the basic elemental right to marry, but I am convinced that ultimately they will prevail, because quite simply, right is on their side.

For now, the successful ratification of the 19th Amendment is proof that oppression of the legitimate rights of minority—rights the exercise of which cause no harm and hurt no one—by a narrow minded majority need not endure in America.