Happy Voting Day! May today be the start of a new chapter for our country. Tonight, I’ll be launching The Latecomers at the White Hart Inn in Salisbury, CT. I’ll be reading from a chapter in which Sarah, one of my protagonists, attends a suffrage hearing in 1916 and reconsiders her views against it.
I was surprised to discover how many women in those days were against their own right to vote. I wrote an essay about it for Los Angeles Review of Books here.
(EXCERPT)
A Look Back on Women’s Suffrage Before the Midterms
One (sort of) silver lining of the last election was that it convinced millions that democracy isn’t a spectator sport. Formerly disinterested citizens are now making phone calls and knocking on doors, urging people to vote in the midterms, having realized that the biggest problem with our election system isn’t voter fraud, but rather voter no-show. In fact, if “No Show” had been a candidate in the last presidential election, it would have won in a landslide.
Over 230 million people were eligible to vote in 2016, but almost half didn’t, leaving more than 100 million votes on the table. Low turnout among minority groups has been attributed to the fact that this was the first election since 2013 when the Supreme Court ruled against section 5 the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby Country v. Holder case. The ruling meant that states with a history of voter discrimination no longer had to get federal permission to change their voting laws. This resulted in the closing of over 800 polling locations and stricter ID requirements across the country that disproportionately affected people of color.
Reflecting on the obstacles many eligible citizens in our country face when trying to vote, I thought about how thankful I was for the 19th amendment — the amendment that granted my right as a woman to vote. I went to high school in upstate New York where the suffrage movement got its start and learned about leading suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I knew how hard women had to fight to convince the men in power that they deserved the right to vote. What I didn’t know was that they also had to convince women.
Recently, while conducting research for a historical novel, I came across a 1915 diary of a 14-year-old girl named Harriet who grew up in Connecticut. She recorded a trip to Hartford with her parents to attend a hearing on women’s suffrage. To my surprise, she was skeptical of the cause:
