Celebrating the Vote

I've done it in booths at a New York City public school, and the 92nd Street Y. I've done it on a small, enclosed counter in DC. But you never forget the first time you voted.

My first time at the polls was not particularly spectacular — it was an off-year for elections, so I voted on a referendum. Since then I have voted every year except twice. Once was on another off-year — I was in grad school for public administration and had to finish a statistics assignment. And for the other, I’d just become a DC resident, too late to vote in the special election that year.

In case it’s not obvious, voting is important to me, and I’m kind of a dork about it. And when I consider the hard fight for women’s suffrage, I feel that the best way to honor the women who fought hard for that right is to responsibly exercise it.

So it’s disheartening to hear women say that they don’t really pay attention to politics or take the time to vote. And as a DC resident whose interests are determined by the legislators of other states, it’s hard to watch anyone take for granted their right to vote.

Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think everyone should vote just because she or he has the right to do so. Across the board, with the right to vote comes the responsibility to be an educated voter. (Although perhaps this is a mark of equality: are women now fully recognized as just plain old flawed and flaky humans who get lazy about civics? As Dorothy Sayers so eloquently wrote, “Even critics must remember that women are human beings and obliged to think and behave as such.”)

But I also don’t think that women like Alice Paul, the founder of the National Women’s Party who practiced civil disobedience in front of Woodrow Wilson’s White House, facing beatings and imprisonment, did that so that women — or anyone, really — could take their civic duty for granted. And I don’t think that women like Frances Willard, the president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a devout Christian and feminist who taught that women were morally obligated to use all of their reason and intellect in service of God and humanity, would have let someone off the hook because politics just wasn’t her “thing.”

And as women of faith — many of whom make up a primary audience of this publication — when we responsibly exercise our rights to vote, we’re standing on the shoulders of some powerful sisters. Among the members of the Antislavery Convention of American Women, the first independent women’s political organization in America, many were Quakers, including Lucretia Mott and Angelina and Sarah Grimké. Quaker women organized the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, the first women’s rights gathering in the world that was actually organized by women. Three years later, at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, Sojourner Truth, a convert to Seventh Day Adventism, delivered her famous “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech, becoming one of the first prominent women of color in the women’s rights movement.

The women of my generation find ourselves in a privileged position these days compared to our forebears. In this country, most women alive today didn’t grow up in a world in which they were disenfranchised. In my generation (sidenote: is Gen Y still a thing? Or did we get subsumed by millennials?), women grew up being told that we could be anything we wanted to be and that we could and should go to college and beyond. We might experience micro-aggressions, discrimination, or harassment, but we have recourse.

And it’s hard to believe that in fairly recent human history, women were not regarded as being made in God’s image. Yes, I know Christians still have all sorts of perspectives on gender roles and equality. But we’ve come a long way, baby, from Tertullian, who taught that women were “the devil’s gateway”. (Sounds like a great band name, though.)

It’s hard to believe, whatever your political persuasion, that in a mere 13 months we may see our first female presidential candidate on the ballot of one of our two major political parties. Alice Paul, Frances Willard, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, the Grimké sisters, and so many others longed for the right to vote, period. What an honor to be able cast our votes in that election.

It would be easy, and extremely human, to rest on our laurels at this point. But what a gift to be alive at a time when women have unprecedented access to education, opportunity, and influence. What a gift to be born in the age of smart phones and the Internet, through which we can easily inform ourselves about candidates and issues of the day. And what gifts to have the Spirit, scripture, and prayer at our disposal as we weigh and consider pressing issues of justice and peace.

Sisters, let’s use these gifts to honor God and humanity. As a popular song during the women’s suffrage movement urged:

“Daughters of freedom, arise in your might!
March to the watchwords Justice and Right!
Why will you slumber? Wake, O wake! 
Lo! On your legions light doth break!”