Thinking about Elections

VOTER RIGHTS have a lot in common with home maintenance: the work is never done; it’s continuous. Once you’ve got something fixed, then you have to maintain it. Or new problems arise. Supreme Court decisions have been chipping away at voter rights for years. It’s deeply troubling, but we’ve been here before, multiple times.

After the Civil war it took 60 years of continuous struggle for women to get the right to vote. The struggle involved everyday people from all walks of life in communities across the country doing what they could with their own two hands to advance women’s rights. It’s the story of the Toledo Woman Suffrage Association that took up the cause for women to be permitted to get a library card. (Yes, library cards!!) It’s about early 19th century attorney Timothy Walker decrying legal restrictions on married women and writing that requiring women to pay taxes but excluding them from voting was the definition of political slavery. It’s about the New York Giants suffrage benefit game in 1915, and vaudeville singers actively supporting a woman’s right to vote.

These are crucial but forgotten stories. They are important for us today because they inspire and remind us that we can all play a part. Like the people in the stories, I will do what I can do with my two hands to continue to fight for fair election systems and voter rights..

Each story is a 5-minute podcast written by Katherine Durack and put together by the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati. The series “The Genius of Liberty,” named after one of the first periodicals published by a woman, advocated for women’s access to education, equal pay for equal work, and voting rights for women.

https://www.mercantilelibrary.com/blog/2019/10/09/the-genius-of-liberty-podcast