Today is the 90th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, also known as Women's Equality Day. You probably (hopefully?) know that the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote (okay, theoretically…this was many years before the passage of the Voting Rights Act so in reality we are probably talking about white women who were married to white men who owned property who got the right to vote but let's celebrate anyway, okay?).
But how much to you really know about women's suffrage and the struggle to get the 19th Amendment passed? Here is a video that should help. Watch carefully. There will be a quiz. No really. There will be a quiz.
Okay, now for the quiz. Go to 9 Questions About 90 Years of Suffrage on the MS. magazine blog. Get ready because it is hard. I got a 4 our of 9 which was rated as "just passed" but I am pretty embarrassed.
How much do you know about women's suffrage in the U.S.? How did you do on the quiz? What do you teach your kids about the right to vote in the U.S. – particularly who got it when?
Eight out of nine for your old man. I got the color of the roses wrong.
Another fascinating fact about the 1920 election is that the votes of women enabled Socialist candidate for president to tally over a million votes in a presidential campaign run from his jail cell. He had been convicted for his views opposing US entry into WWI. He was pardoned by the winner of that election, Warren Harding, who did little else worthy of mention in his short tenure as CEO of America, Inc.
Twitter: Jakearyehmarcus
So embarrassed about my score.
And, yes, Eugene V. Debs, a candidate for whom my grandfather went to jail for protesting at the Cooper Union rally.
When you have a relative who went to jail for protesting our entry into WWI, you have no reason to be embarrassed about not knowing some the minutiae that the editors at MS have deemed important.
For example, they didn’t ask one of my favorite trivia questions, describe the categories of Americans who were granted the vote in John Brown’s 1857 draft Constitution?
Answer: everybody over 18 years of age. EVERYBODY!
On the somewhat nuttier side, John Brown also had a clause in his Constitution that encouraged courtesy and politeness toward the fairer sex. I take that clause to be evidence that men have always been pigs, and it bothered John Brown so much that he thought the document that established democracy and freedom all of America’s disenfranchised folks, out to make good manners towards female members of the community a Constitutional value. (I doubt that there was a private right of action.)